So what HAPPENED to the Sicarii? When all was said and done, how did the first terrorists end up?
Transcript

And with that, the terrorism comic is caught up to where I wanted to be exactly one year ago.

I’m glad to be back doing these comics again, they really are so much fun to make. My next creative burst will be finally finishing the chapter in Con Law. It only has a few pages left, it’s just a matter of doing them. And then THAT comic will be caught up to where it was supposed to be a year ago, as well, and we can start in on the super-controversial material!

Thank you very much for reading and participating in the comments. And if you want to help me put out more content faster, you can donate a few dollars on my Patreon! You’re awesome.


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Join the conversation! There are now 4 comments on “Sicarii pg 19: The Aftermath
  1. Gregory McKenna says

    Minor historical quibble here, but technically only one of the Sicarii committed proper suicide. Since it was regarded as an unforgivable sin, what they did was draw straws, murder each other until only one guy was left, and that last unlucky guy who got the short straw was the one who had to commit the deed of suicide.

    • Are we sure about this? It doesn’t seem especially difficult for two people to murder each other, with with simultaneous knife thrusts perhaps (although I can think of plenty of other possibilities). Are we trusting Roman reporting? How would they (or anybody) know what happened in such detail?

      • Obviously, 100% verification isn’t exactly possible. The initial source is the contemporary historian Flavius Josephus, himself a former Sicarii. Josephus was captured in an earlier siege of a Sicarii stronghold, was enslaved as punishment, and later set free some time after the revolt had ended. He seems to have believed it was his duty to record what happened and his account is the only one of the Jewish-Roman War which has survived to the current day. According to Josephus, he learned the story of what happened from two women who managed to survive the siege by hiding in Masada’s cisterns. There ARE inconsistencies and errors in Josephus’s account that throw them into doubt and various alternative theories have cropped up, but archeological evidence hasn’t really managed to verify either Josephus’s original account OR the alternative ones.

        • Yeah, I absolutely think that was just conjecture. Stating a reasonable assumption about something as fact was SOLIDLY within the range of acceptable behavior for a historian of the time, largely still is today. You wouldn’t believe some of the absurd fabrications they wouldn’t have even felt dishonest about entering into the annals back then, and even up to a few hundred years ago.

          It’s very important to keep historiography in mind in general, but especially with this chapter as it’s explicitly about a group of people making up a history that influenced people in centuries and millennia to come.

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