On the Destruction of Jerusalem 5.2–5.10

How have you been deceived, city, by your own peoples, among whom you once seemed blessed? How have you been conquered by your own arms, and your own hands turned against you, you who used to conquer without arms and strike the enemy without any battle, when angels fought for you, and the waves of the sea, the openings of the earth, and the crashings of the sky campaigned for you? Rise up now, Moses, and see your nation and the inheritance of the people entrusted to you perishing by their own hands. Look on that people of God, for whom the sea lay open as a path when they walked, for whom heaven supplied food when they were hungry, now shut in without a sea, besieged without a Pharaoh, starving without barrenness of the land. Rise up, Aaron, priest of the Almighty, who, when on account of an offense against almighty God death was devouring very many of the people, stood between the living and the dead, and death stood still, and by the barrier of your body the plague stopped and could not pass over to infect the living. Rouse yourself too, Joshua son of Nun, who leveled the impregnable walls of Jericho as the priests sounded the trumpet, and see the people to whom you subjected foreigners now themselves subjected and crushed. Rouse yourself, David, who used to drive out the troubling spirit by the sweetness of the lyre, and see how fury rules and has blotted out all the sweetness of your psalms from the minds of desperate men, and each of the leaders offers the whole people to death so as to wring liberty from them, as you used to offer yourself to death for the people. Rouse yourself, Elisha, who led the enemy into Samaria and made him a friend; through you the crash of chariots, the sound of horsemen and the sound of a mighty army resounded in the camp of Syria: the enemy fled, the Jew escaped the siege. Where now are those merits, where now those works of the saints? No wonder if they have lost the works of the prophets who denied the Lord of the prophets; and therefore, Judea, your arms are turned against you, and your prayers profit you nothing, because your faith accomplishes nothing; therefore your people has become hostile to you, because your faithlessness has been turned against you. What remedy is sought, when the author of the remedy is not reconciled? What did you think would happen, when with your own hands you crucified your Savior, when with your own hands you extinguished your life, when with your own voices you drove out your advocate, with your own testimonies killed your helper? Only that you would lay hands on yourself as well. You have what you asked for: you snatched from yourself the guardian of peace; you asked that the judge of life be killed and that Barabbas be granted to you, “who had been thrown into prison for a sedition made in the city and for murder” (Luke 23:19, 25). Therefore salvation has departed from you, peace has gone, quiet has ceased; sedition has been given you, destruction has been given you. Recognize that today Barabbas lives for you, Jesus is dead. Therefore sedition reigns in you, peace is buried, so that you perish more cruelly at the hands of your own than if you perished at the hands of strangers. What so great evil has the Roman brought on you by his arms, wretched city, as your own people have? That you should fight with the Romans was your own people's doing: the Romans wanted peace, you declared war. What reason was there to provoke the stronger? Hard it is indeed that a Gentile entered the temple against the sacred law; but you were no longer the temple of God, you were no longer the city of God, nor could you be, because you were a tomb of the dead, and especially of the dead whom you yourself had killed, not those whom the enemy had struck down. For how could you be a dwelling of life, when you were a habitation of death, a lodging of crimes, a cave of robbers? Ananus and Jesus, chiefs of the priests, lay in you unburied; and those who not long before were clothed in priestly robes, who had been revered even by foreigners, lay as disfigured corpses, food for birds, devoured by dogs, their torn limbs scattered through the whole city, so that the very appearance of ancient holiness seemed to lament such an insult to the sacred name and the disfigurement of an office once so splendid. But you yourself made the beginning of this outrage, you who killed the prophets in your very bosom, who stoned the saints of the Lord. Zechariah lay lifeless before the temple; he lay unburied: so this blood washes him. And what was the cause of Ananus's death except that he rebuked your people for not rising in defense of the temple, because he protested at liberty betrayed, courage deserted, the remains of the ancient rites trampled, the altars defiled? He declared that a people that now felt nothing must be left to the use of senseless idols and marble statues. For many animals are wont to repay in turn, or seek vengeance, to feel an injury, to be roused by a goad, to avoid blows; whoever then is not roused, and does not know how to avoid what harms him, is like things without feeling. And in truth, where is that liberty of yours, for the love of which you once judged that you must not yield to the Egyptians, nor the Philistines, nor the Assyrians, and later not the Medes? Where is that faith of the Maccabees, which once in a few routed the Babylonians, put the Persians to flight, struck down Demetrius, and at last in little children and women overcame the arms, swords and fires of Antiochus, and chose to die for the observance of the law of their fathers rather than obey the king's commands? Where is that most beautiful devotion of the fathers in all their sufferings, by which they offered themselves to death not for their children, not for their wives, more than for the temple of God? Formerly the priestly rod of Aaron flowered, though cut from its woodland root; now faith is withered, piety is buried, and all emulation of virtue is gone. No wonder if the people has departed from God and follows the wicked spirit of contradiction, and is divided against itself. For how could he keep his peace who rejected the peace of God? The peace of God is Christ, “who has made both one.” Rightly then, out of one people many have become set against themselves, because when divided they would not follow Jesus who unites, but united they followed the spirit of fury that divides. So you were paying, Jerusalem, the wage of your faithlessness, when with your own hands you destroyed your own defenses, when with your own swords you pierced your own entrails, so that the enemy pitied and you killed, he spared and you raged. For you saw that God was fighting against you and acting on the side of the Romans, so that you inflicted voluntary betrayal on yourself. And therefore the Romans preferred to be spectators rather than slayers, lest, while your entrails were boiling among themselves, they be thought to lay a hand of contagion rather than of courage. To these punishments of abominable slaughter was added the monstrousness of impious cruelty, that they denied burial to all who had been killed, whether in the temple or around the streets of the city; nor did anyone have leisure to bury, while they were busy with war among themselves, and the care of striking rather than of burying held everyone. So by a kind of fury the duties of piety had died, the ministries of impiety grew savage, and nothing had perished more in such calamities than mercy, which alone is wont to relieve miseries and console afflictions. For those who had lost their own did not dare to bury them for fear, since grave terror came upon them from the leaders of the opposing faction; and those who had killed others took care that no one should snatch them away for burial. So everyone had to fear lest what they wished to give another they should take for themselves, or, what is worse, that the use of a tomb they had provided for others they should not obtain themselves. In the temple itself, then, instead of sweet-smelling ointments, instead of fragrant incense, instead of the scents of various flowers, there was the heavy stench of unburied corpses, which the rain had dissolved, the flame had burned, the sun had heated; all the limbs of the slain citizens reeked with a dreadful odor: here the rot of decomposing entrails, there the reek of the burned filled all the senses and mouths of the living, so that they themselves not long after were consumed by a heavier sickness and groaned that they had survived, to perish by a harsher penalty; and that they had been kept alive to see, together with their homeland, even the laws of nature dissolved, right denied to the living, peace to the citizens, burial to the dead; human and divine things alike stained and polluted, everything confounded, mercy a crime, cruelty held in place of religion. A fortress in the temple, war on the threshold, smoke on the altars: they saw with their own eyes what they had not believed would happen when the prophets announced it. Had not David said of them: “They have defiled your holy temple; they have given the dead bodies of your servants as food to the birds of heaven; they have poured out their blood like water around Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them” (Ps 78:1, 3 Vulg.)? For then at the same time the Gentiles came into the inheritance of God to carry everything off, and the temple was defiled by the deaths of its own, and the corpses of the slain lay unburied as food for birds and the voracity of beasts; and blood was poured out so that it pooled in the temple, and there was no one to bury, because fury was transferred from the living to the dead, and from the dead to those still living. Did someone wish to bury a dead man? He himself was killed; and he who had killed the dead man turned his anger on the burier, so as to deny the one burial, he killed the other; again, he who had killed the burier practiced greater cruelty on the dead, so as to strip of the last debt of nature a man who no longer owed anything to hatred and felt no punishment. What else could befall those who did not receive the divine oracles? They laughed at the announcements of the prophets, they trampled on all that is right; they did not believe what was to come, which they themselves hastened to bring about. For there was an old and frequent saying that the city of Jerusalem would perish and its holy places be burned when sedition and war came upon the law and hands of its own defiled the temple of God; but not even this did they understand. For how often was the house of God destroyed, how often sedition, how often siege, how often war! And never did that city perish except when they crucified the true temple of God with hands of their own. And what temple is that? Let them hear: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” For what else was it but sacrilege, when they stretched out impious hands against the author of salvation, when they stoned, when they scourged, when they seized, when they killed? Then truly the divine fire consumed their holy things: for burned by the Babylonians, they were restored afterward; destroyed by Pompey, they were restored again; but they were utterly burned when Jesus came, and, dissolved by the heat of the divine Spirit, they vanished. It would have been fitting for us to go before with a fuller lament, as at a kind of funeral of our ancestral solemnity, and to follow it as with funeral rites, and to discharge them according to the customs of our forefathers; but let us come to the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem.

Titus had returned to Judea, and after a few days had passed, so that the ranks of the military units from which a chosen band had been sent to Italy might be filled up, he was kindling the war, hastening to join his father so that he would not leave him to face dangers alone, as he was about to clash with the arms of Vitellius. So he set out with the great splendor of an army: solitude everywhere, and with his column ready he suspected ambushes, because he saw he was superior in strength. He came through the region of Samaria; Gophna received him, which had long since gone over to the Romans. They came to the Valley of Thorns, from which Jerusalem was no more than thirty stadia away. From there, taking six hundred horsemen, he led the cavalry forward before the city, to reconnoitre the lie of the place, the nature of the fortifications, the height of the walls, and the inclinations of the people, who were said to be oppressed by the arms of the robbers and hemmed in by the throng of the factions, so that they submitted to the siege unwillingly, rather than betray their goodwill toward the Romans if freedom were given. So with a few men he rode in fine array along the public causeway that led to the city walls, and no one was seen to come out. But when he turned his horse sideways to go around the circuit of the walls, while the rest of the troop followed their general, many suddenly burst out from the place called opposite the tomb of Helena, and leaping out they occupied the road, so as to cut off the greater part of the horsemen who were following Titus. He himself had passed on with a few men, by the design of those lying in wait, so that, cut off from the rest, he might be more easily overwhelmed; for it was neither easy to go back to his own because of the pressing multitude of the enemy, nor did the ditch or rampart and the other obstacles of the ground allow him to go farther, by which a double danger was brought on him.

So Titus, seeing that the remedy of his safety lay in his own courage, and that a way must be opened only by the sword (for others had already turned their horses and gone off, though they hoped that they themselves would be followed by the emperor's son), turned his horse and, urging the rest with a shout to follow, charged upon the enemy. This would seem impossible, how he could escape, were it not known that in war daring can do very much, and that it alone is a wall to itself; then also because, with others following behind, the worthless crowd thought it should look to itself in danger rather than pursue the enemy; and if anyone stretched out a hand to seize his horse, he was struck down. In the end only two of Titus's companions were killed; with the rest the emperor's son returned to his own. Nor does it seem there can be any doubt that, with his head uncovered and otherwise unprotected, since he had gone out on a reconnaissance, not prepared for battle, and had put on neither helmet nor breastplate, he received no wound, though weapons were hurled above all at him, because so great a man was being kept for the destruction of that city. Truly, truly “the heart of the king is in the hand of God” (Prov 21:1). So, lest the Jews' daring grow from the success of their fraud and guile, he set out for the city with the army after the night and, from a lookout from which the city and the vast size of the temple could be seen, he showed his men with what a city they would have war: they must be energetic and more cautious, because they would have to storm a countless people, ready for fraud. He arranged the ranks that were to approach the walls; those he knew to be still tired from the night march he placed at a distance as a reserve. They advanced little by little. When they came to the Mount of Olives, a valley lay below it, between it and the city, whose name is Kidron. There, seeing from the walls the army drawn up (for it was six stadia away), they laid aside for the time their zeal for sedition, and with foreign enemies approaching the contests of civil war were set aside by a domestic truce. For fear often suppresses even bitter hatreds. Indeed, the men of the factions urged one another to defend their homeland with united zeal, lest their discord give the Romans a bloodless victory; trusting in their numbers, they thought the enemy should be attacked suddenly, and by an unexpected sally they threw the foremost into confusion. But when the Romans, trained by long experience and by battles of various kinds, steadied their minds, bound to their ranks, they began to cut down those who rushed at them, to drive them back with their shields, to repel them with volleys of weapons, though not at all without loss on both sides. And the Jews had almost overwhelmed them, and the Roman line was wavering, had not Titus come up on learning what was happening and, meeting the adversaries and strengthening his own, renewed the battle and raised the soldiers' spirits, reproaching the Roman lines for yielding victory to a disordered multitude, not without the reproach of the greatest cowardice. Having driven back the Jews, who were pursuing even those separated from them by the valley, he returned victorious to his own. And secure in the help that the higher ground gave against those below, if they tried to engage, the Roman army turned to another part. As Caesar departed, the Jews poured down from the walls and fell upon the enemy in a huge column, so that the soldiers fled before the onrush of a countless multitude and betook themselves to the higher parts of the hills; their flank being exposed, the rest too who were holding the battle fled. Meanwhile Caesar, placed in the middle of the people, when many begged him not to expose himself to dangers and, with the army scattered, undergo alone the full weight of the danger, since he was lord of the world (for he should not, as before, fight in the role of a soldier but of an emperor, in whose danger lay the ruin of all), did not agree; but, setting the honor of soldiering before safety, as one for whom a glorious death outweighed a life of disgrace, he turned his breast to face the enemy, and having terrified those he had gone against, he swung round upon others. For by the mere expectation of him and the glory of his well-known and eager courage he threw the enemy into confusion. Those he approached gave way, but from other parts the Jews poured in more and more; and they had almost shut Titus in, were it not that many of the soldiers, seeing Caesar in the midst of the battle, shouted out, signaling to the rest that the emperor's son must not be left in danger. So shame recalled them all and fear armed them, lest they be branded with the disgrace of having deserted Caesar. Turning on the Jews with every effort and courage, they pressed the disorderly multitude into the valley, and it was not hard to make them slide back as they climbed. So Titus twice recalled the fleeing soldiers from flight and stripped them alike of danger and disgrace, using courage equally and, in the end, shame. While they avoided cowardice, he brought in courage: first so that Caesar would not be abandoned; afterward also so that the enemy would be driven back.

After this, when the battle outside had rested a little, a battle within followed. For on the coming of the feast of Passover, John suborned many to enter the temple as if for the sake of the observance; and, since leave to enter was given to them as to allies, he carried out his trick. For they went in looking like citizens but armed underneath; throwing off their outer garments, they raised their swords, with breastplates on their chests, girded with protection for fighting. Struck with terror at this, those who were unarmed within the temple, busy with the celebration, leapt out and left the temple empty. While the men followed these and butchered whom they could seize, and pursued others beyond the circuit of the temple, John and his companions had the opportunity to break in. Many people were slain there, so that even those who had not resisted were butchered on account of private grudges: calm and quiet did not help, nor silence the silent, nor patience those who gave way. Having seized the inner parts of the temple, John harassed Simon as well, Eleazar and the other leaders of the third faction having been brought into second place under him.

Titus advanced against the enemy a third time and brought out the army. On arriving he found a crowd of Jews massed before the city, looking as if they wished to surrender to the Romans but were afraid. Suspecting a trick, especially since he had just seen them united among themselves and stubborn, and not thinking it credible that they had suddenly changed, he warned the soldiers to beware of fraud, and not to approach the walls rashly except according to his orders and in close column, lest they be surrounded from behind by those who had gone out of the city. Suddenly a noise rang out from the city, and a kind of sedition resounded madly: some pretending a voluntary departure, others resisting, the former demanding that the gates be opened to them, the latter ordering them kept shut; some wanting war, others peace. The mass of the soldiers rushed out to help those who had begged from the walls to be helped; many went out headlong, without order, in no single manner, as if to meet them as they came and bring help, so that by a nearer remedy more might be given confidence to break out, or fear be given to those resisting, or a chance to break out amid those struggling against it. Those who were standing outside began to surround them from behind and press them hard once surrounded; they fled as if toward the wall, suspecting nothing from those who were pretending peace. From there too stones and weapons were thrown, and suddenly the feigned peace was turned into battle. Roused by this, they ran back against the enemy, who, although they had tried to surround the advancing Roman soldiers, were themselves afraid of being surrounded by the whole army. So, while they guarded against them all, though many wounds had been inflicted on these, and they themselves for the most part wounded, they almost let slip from their hands those they thought already captured. Yet they followed as far as the tomb of Helena and, as is the custom of those who mock, clashed their shields, jeering at the Romans because they had now twice caught them in an ambush.

Caesar, much moved, forbade those returning to mix with the rest and called an assembly, saying: “Although Roman valor is great, outstanding above the peoples of all nations, yet it excels above all in the order of its arrangements and obedience to commands: for this is the safeguard of military discipline. Nor is it any wonder if the Jews weave tricks and contrive frauds, since they judge themselves unequal in strength. But as it is for inferiors to rely on ambushes, so it is for the stronger to beware lest guile mock their valor.” He wondered, he said, that the Jews were of one mind in their desperation, while the Romans could not agree in the progress of their success; and so it came about that for them the effect of fraud was assured, for us the effort of valor uncertain. “If the enemy's strength were stronger than their fraud, being conquered would be less disgraceful. For to be conquered by equals or by the stronger is free of reproach. But since nothing in us gives offense except our immoderation in fighting and a certain intemperance of our own hands, what can be more wicked than to reject military discipline in the presence of Caesar? I think the very laws of soldiering groan greatly at the disgrace of such slackness; and so will the emperor, when he learns of it, who always preferred to be obeyed by his soldiers rather than feared by the enemy. For the soldier's obedience hastens the outcome; fear of the enemy delays victory. What do you think the father will judge of his son, whose command counts for so little with the army? For judgment is passed on a general whose order is set aside; and there is no doubt that punishment has more often been inflicted on those who fought the enemy against orders than on those who advanced according to orders and gave way before courage. For death is prescribed by the laws for one who leaves his rank. What then will happen when not one man but the army everywhere leaves its rank and neglects the general's order? Know that you are soldiers of the Roman empire, of the people and senate, among whom even to have conquered without the authority of a command is a crime.” With such a speech he terrified not only the officers but the whole army. For since he attacked the commanders of the ranks themselves sharply, he seemed about to punish everyone. So they all crowded around him and begged that the fault of the few who had first left their post be pardoned for the sake of all. Although Caesar was not quick to pardon the offense, he was nevertheless open to entreaty for indulgence. He granted it with the greatest gravity, saying that he pardoned them all, and that punishment enough had been exacted on all by the authority of his rebuke, since punishment of individuals ought to go as far as the deed, that of a multitude only as far as words; the one as far as penalty, the other as far as correction. For often in good armies lapses in battle have given causes for future valor.

After this Titus turned his anger against the enemy and, considering how dangerous the siege was amid so many precipices and so many sheer places, since the soldiers, forestalled by sudden sallies, had nowhere to step back, and would rush unprotected upon the enemy where they set up the engines, he ordered the precipices before the city to be filled in. While this was being done, not even so were the Jews free of present dangers. They were afflicted by civil battle while the Romans were busy filling in the precipices. Nor was the force of either side small: ten thousand were with Simon and fifty of their leaders; the Idumaeans too, about five thousand, supported Simon's side, commanded by James and Simon the younger. John, having seized the inner parts of the temple by the trick we described above, surrounded by six thousand armed men, kept the war burning. There were added to him also two thousand four hundred men, after they began to come together with harmonious zeal for the defense of the city, under Eleazar and Simon son of Arinus, whom they had also had as leaders before. While these contended with one another, the people lay in the middle as the prey of whoever won, and, as the prize of the contest, was shifted this way and that according to the varying outcome. For a little while they had come to an agreement among themselves in the manner of a truce, and, roused by the first attack of the Romans, they relapsed into the old disease of the internal fever in their sick entrails whenever the onset of the outward diseases was slackened. Outside there was mostly war, within sedition, all the more grievous because sedition itself was nourished by war and nourished war. Two contended for power; the people between them were anxious not about slavery, but lest they come to a worse master.

The city of Jerusalem was founded by a certain powerful man of the Canaanites, who in the language of his fathers was called the Righteous King; he first named it Solyma; afterward he added a temple, from which the city was called Hierosolyma. From the beginning it had its own inhabitants of the race of the Canaanites. David, the first Hebrew, expelled the Canaanites and settled his own people, and made himself a royal house in it. He wished also to build a temple to God, but, forbidden by an oracle, he left Solomon as his heir to build the temple he himself had wished for. So Solomon founded the temple; the other kings too added much to the adornment of the city. Envy arose from its magnificence; yet among all the works the temple excelled in its vast structure and gleaming marble. In it was a walkway, and a precious and very great curtain, woven of scarlet, blue, fine linen and purple. Not idle was the material of such variety, but its appearance signified the substance of hidden things: because the temple belonged to him who, as creator of the elements, rules over heaven and air, earth and sea, and alone directs and governs all things. For by the scarlet the fire of the heavens is figured, by the blue the air, by the fine linen the earth, because it grows in it, by the purple the sea, because it is dyed by sea shellfish; so that you may gather two from their color, two from their origin. Indeed the chief priest was accustomed to express these four in his vestment when there was the greatest celebration of feast days, as if putting on the whole world when about to pray for the people, in the figure of him who was to come as chief priest, Jesus, who would take away the sin of the world. The chief priest covered his loins with an inner covering of linen, because above all else in a priest faith of mind is sought, and chastity of body, which ought to gird up the intemperance of the flesh. There were two sacred tabernacles, one inner and the other outer: into this the priests always entered; into the inner one, which was called the second, the chief priest alone entered once only, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for the sin of the people, the Holy Spirit signifying by this that Jesus would come, who alone would truly enter the inner sanctuaries of the divine mysteries and the secrets of the heavenly substance, he who knew all things. He alone too would reconcile the whole world to the Father by his blood, so as to have mercy on things in heaven and things on earth. Indeed after he came, he made peace through the blood of his cross for all things, whether in heaven or on earth. Inside was the altar of incense, inside the table, inside the lamp: the altar of incense, because the prayer of the great high priest is directed to God the Father like incense (Ps 140:2 Vulg.); the table, because on it is the passion of Christ and the mysteries of the sacraments, whence David too says: “You have prepared a table in my sight”; its twelve loaves, as it were, are the twelve apostles, witnesses of his passion and of his resurrection. The lamp, which is placed on the lampstand, was before under a bushel, that is, under the measure of the law; now it is under the fullness of grace, pouring out abundant light from its seven branches, because the Holy Spirit would illuminate the temple of God with the powers of the seven greatest graces. The knowledge of the Trinity, then, was in the inner parts of the temple, which were called the Holy of Holies, where Aaron's rod that blossomed was once laid up, because the priestly grace in Christ would work more fully after his death, by which he redeemed the world. Before the temple were fourteen steps, up which in the time of King Hezekiah the shadow had ascended, signifying to him that the end of his life was to come. But, warned by an oracle, he prayed and obtained a delay of death by this sign, that the sun was turned back on those same steps, signifying that a furlough of life had been given back to him by just so many years.

Since, then, the city was fortified on all sides by the works of many kings, and above all of Herod, who fortified the castle named Antonia to the magnificence of a supreme work and adorned it with the most ample decoration, Caesar went around seeking from what side he could more easily pour himself into the city; and having inspected the whole circuit of the wall, he judged that the siege should be undertaken near the monument in which the chief priest John lay buried. As he was reconnoitring more carefully, one of his friends, Nicanor, who stayed close to him and attended eagerly to his task, was struck by an arrow and fell. For he had come rather close, thinking there would be some progress toward a future peace if he were given an opportunity to converse, since he was regarded as able and strong at swaying the minds of his hearers. Caesar, moved because they had inflicted death by an unexpected wound on a man who was urging what was for their safety, drove the columns into battle, and the war was kindled with varied throwing of weapons, above all missiles; rams were brought up, with which the strong parts of the walls were struck. Thrown into confusion by this, all who before had contended among themselves out of zeal for domination came together in concord, and, granting impunity for the past, formed one body and, united by the pressure of danger, defended the city. Going out beyond the mounds too, they hurled fire on the engines, to destroy the earthworks, burn the sheds, and set the rams on fire; and they had burned almost every kind of engine, had not chosen men, and very many soldiers and allies, especially from the region of the city of Alexandria, fought back vigorously. As these resisted strongly, Caesar added the help of the stronger cavalry. He himself, fighting fiercely, laid low twelve champions of the opposing column. So the force of the remaining multitude, avoiding destruction, returned into the city, and the Roman works were saved from the fire. In that battle fell John, the leader of the Idumaeans: while he was talking before the walls with a Roman soldier he knew, he was struck by an arrow wound and at once fell. They say that the author of his death was a most skilful Arab among the archers; and the Idumaeans were stricken with heavy grief because they had lost a man both ready of hand and good in counsel.