Most of us, happily, do not need to think about surviving combat. Because the remaining chapters of this book explore episodes of lethal confrontation, therefore, we should pause to condition our thinking. We do not yet know which Judaeans fought Roman soldiers or why. Whatever we decide about that, some Judaeans plainly did fight Rome, and legions were unleashed against them. Our research questions will be sharper, and our imagining of scenarios more plausible, if we take time to think about the nature of this kind of warfare in the Roman period.

Rome's legions have acquired the mystique of an unstoppable machine driven by a cool, purely military discipline, whereas Jewish-Judaean rebels appear in film (Ben-Hur, Life of Brian) as motivated by wide-eyed religious-nationalist fervour. On both sides, we easily forget the human conditions that affected both and their largely shared values. Obviously, they were in very different situations, one side boasting a well-armed professional force of empire and the other lacking even a standing army. But the alternation of guerrilla and siege warfare created by this situation brought challenges for both. Even if Rome's ultimate victory was not in serious doubt, we can only hope to grasp the hard choices their commanders faced if we lay aside “the glory that was Rome” and think more realistically. Helmet shapes, armour, and ammunition are certainly part of the story, but they need not detain us here. Countless academic and popular books as well as websites and even re-enactment clubs devoted to the Roman army are readily accessible. Nor should we assume that strategy and tactics, the hobby of our pipe-smoking forebears in their drawing rooms, are the most important considerations for understanding this war. Because the Judaeans lacked a trained army, our conflict does not compare with the great battles of the Roman Republic at Cannae, Cynoscephalae, or Carrhae. In those cases military historians can diagram opposed columns, using symbols and colours to mark unit types and arrows to trace their movements. That is all exciting from the distance of two millennia. A conflict such as ours, which saw no such set-piece confrontations, invites different questions.

After a preliminary sketch of the Roman army, highlighting some relatively neglected aspects, this chapter asks about the extent to which Judaeans could have looked to the Parthian empire as a guarantor or balance against Rome.