Diaspora Revolt

The uprisings broke out almost simultaneously in several eastern provinces. In Cyrenaica the rebels were led by Lukuas, whom Eusebius styles “king” and who is probably the same man that Cassius Dio calls Andreas; they destroyed temples and public buildings in Cyrene, among them the sanctuary of Apollo, the Caesareum and the temples of Zeus and Hecate. Most historians date the outbreak in Egypt, on the evidence of the papyri, to about October 115, though Miriam Pucci Ben Zeev prefers 116. There the Greeks, defeated at first, fled to Alexandria and massacred its Jews, while the rebels plundered the countryside. On Cyprus rebels led by Artemion destroyed the port of Salamis. Cassius Dio speaks of 220,000 dead in Cyrenaica and 240,000 on Cyprus; historians regard such figures as exaggerated.

Trajan sent Quintus Marcius Turbo with land and sea forces; he reached Egypt in late 116 or early 117 and put down the revolt in Egypt and Cyrenaica after many battles, while Lusius Quietus crushed the unrest among the Jews of Mesopotamia and was then made governor of Judaea. The rising was over by the autumn of 117, though some unrest may have lasted into the winter. It drew troops away from Trajan’s Parthian campaign, which was faltering at the same time. Hadrian had to rebuild Cyrene at the beginning of his reign; eighty years later a festival of the victory over the Jews was still celebrated at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, and in Dio’s time no Jew was allowed to set foot on Cyprus.

The rabbinic name “War of Kitos” (from Quietus) is often applied to the whole revolt, although it may refer to Quietus’s campaign against the Jews of Mesopotamia or to unrest in Judaea, for which the evidence is disputed.