IN THE YEAR 73 A.D. a group of Canaanites held down the last stronghold of resistance against the inevitably victorious legions of Rome. From their desert fortress, the defenders and their families, cognizant of the fact that the rest of their nation had fallen, watched the Roman soldiers encircle them. The situation was hopeless, they decided; even if they fought off this wave of soldiers another would come, and then another--as many as it would take--until the siege snuffed out the defenders. With all this in mind, the defenders of the embattled mountaintop called Masada decided that the only logical course was suicide. They debated the issue, and soon the decision was made. Early the following morning, as the Roman troops started to climb the rocky path towards the fortress, the men inside held their wives and children close, then killed them. When only the adult males were left, they lay down near their families, and one of them, chosen in advance, killed his mates one by one. Finally, with the Romans approaching, this last man completed his task by driving a dagger into his chest. Masada had fallen after a three-year stand, but the symbolic act of defiance remains even now as heroic. Faced with the choice of life under a hated regime or death as free men, the defenders of Masada decided that death was better.

Mass suicides are not common; certainly the ones we know about are rare enough so that until last week Masada stood out in history as the sole example. Men kill each other with great regularity and ever-increasing efficiency, and single suicides are frequent, but modern-day mass suicide remained unthinkable.

Or so it seemed until last week, when the followers of the Rev. Jim Jones--more than 900 of them--downed those cups of cyanide-laced Flavor-aide and promptly died in the jungle of Guyana. In the 11 days since that terrifying event, those deaths (no one will ever really be sure whether they were all suicides, or whether some drank the poison at gunpoint) have stolen the world's attention away from less exotic, less titillating news. In short, the Jonestown affair has become the most publicized spot-news event since Richard Nixon's resignation, with every form of media jumping on each set of gruesome revelations and/or body counts, screaming them out to a public drooling for more, repulsed and fascinated at the same time. Indeed, the publicity surrounding the event would obscure anything less ghoulish, but in this case, nothing can overwhelm the awesome image of nearly 1000 men, women and children (perhaps) choosing to die together.

But the question no one can answer is annoyingly simple: Why? Because the psychotic, power-mad and paranoid preacher they followed from California to South America told them the time had come? Because someone--apparently acting on Jones's orders--murdered a Congressman and a couple of journalists? When Masada's people did away with themselves, there was something approaching a good reason, but that essential motivation just cannot be found in the Jonesville case.

A PARTICULARLY interesting facet of the Jonestown affair is that it involved many of the vague, somehow threatening phenomena and mindsets that characterize fringe groups in America today. The very embodiment of this, of course, was the Rev. Jim Jones, a peculiarly American product. So many details of his bizarre life have emerged in the past week that most people are probably tired of him already, but for others the fascination, albeit morbid, remains. Here was a man who managed to combine and warp good impulses by way of a twisted psyche.

Jones followed in the dubious tradition of megalomaniacal American religious leaders. The obvious parallel lies between Jones and his self-declared idol, Father Divine. Sun Myung Moon also comes to mind; but somehow the connection to more mainstream evangelists--the Billy Grahams and Oral Roberts of the world--does not seem so far off. We recoil from the terrible spectacle of California cults gone berserk, but manage to forget their antecedents, presumably because the more conventional, if hardly more genuine, religious-business organizations don't break the laws of propriety in such flamboyant ways.

Jones himself, of course, provides the most fascinating figure in the debris of his cult, but the details of his psychotic life only provide surface information. What is not so obvious, at least at first glance, is the significant breakdown of values that could alienate nearly 1000 people so completely that they would follow a madman to their graves. Something is lacking, something America either could not supply or those unfortunates were incapable of receiving. In addition to this perceived societal lapse, there is the uncomfortable confluence at Jonestown and its aftermath of several things that typify the culture, or lack thereof, of America in the 70's.

MOST NOTICEABLE is the ridiculous position of the media in the whole affair. Television cameras have provided us with a grotesquely complete portrait of all events pre-and post-suicide in Jonestown and anywhere else the People's Temple has left its mark; in fact, the only thing missing was the main event. Nothing could be errier than watching the films broadcast last Wednesday night by NBC, when they showed the tapes Don Harris would have broadcast had he made it back alive. Therein American viewers, waiting to see Johnny Carson, were treated to the sight of a now-dead reporter interviewing and filming scores of people just a few hours before the deal went down for all of them. Never before have we been able to witness a lurid event in such detail. While the coverage has been good from an informational standpoint, it is somehow uncomfortable...as if it were an invasion of the dead's privacy...and unquestionably in poor taste. If you doubt that, take a quick look at the way Newsweek and Time featured bloated corpses and screaming headlines on their covers this week, or think about The Boston Globe's characteristically sensitive headlines and pictures last week ("They Lined Up to Take Poison," "The Babies Went First..."). America has become media saturated; the Jonestown affair simply gave that group another chance to strut its stuff.

The very existence of the People's Temple--California cult religion par excellence--and the knowledge that there are plenty of similar groups out there somewhere, does not speak too well for modern culture. If society's rejects can be coddled and hosannaed into giving up their possessions, leaving the country and then killing themselves, then there are a lot of sheep out there and a lot of wolves to lead them. Moonies stalk the streets, even hold semi-respectable conventions; they and countless other groups offer an identity to people alienated by a society that doesn't give a good god damn about them. And Jonestown or not, upcoming FBI investigation or not, these cults will continue to flourish.

Worse still is the political tool the People's Temple had become before many of its members left California. Jim Jones became the late George Moscone's Housing Authority Commissioner in San Francisco two years ago because he could, on six hours' notice, produce two or three thousand obedient bodies to flesh out a campaign rally or go door-to-door with literature. His services apparently went to the politico willing to do the most in return. Jones could deliver, even if his political army was somehow reminiscent of Nixon's Youth in 1972, that wonderful army that would begin spontaneous cheering at 9:28 and spontaneously stop at 9:33, when the Trickster would spontaneously appear. If you didn't believe it was spontaneous, you could look at their mimeographed schedules--it said so right there. Of course, there's nothing new about staged politics, but the use of ostensibly religious groups as campaign auxiliaries and political chips somehow menaces.

Brief, staccato bursts of things everyone fears but is unable to do anything about appeared in Guyana last week. The events rankled of third-world terrorism, possible mercenary involvement (in the airstrip murders), government corruption and laziness, both on the part of Guyana and the United States. The presence of conspiracy-man Mark Lane as Jones's attorney, warning that Ryan's investigation would have disastrous results, even adds heat to the conspiracy theories. One gets the nagging feeling that all of these seemingly random things are tied up somehow, but in fact they aren't, at least not in any discernable pattern.

THE SPECULATION about Jonestown will continue for some months to come, but no answers will be found, no sweeping conclusions reached. In many respects there is nothing more to say. But as long as the image of 900 bodies, piled layer upon layer on the damp ground, persists in our consciousness, there can be no forgetting Jonestown. And while the direct responsibility for all those needless deaths lies with the madman Jim Jones, most everyone will be able to duck the broader responsibility which indicts our entire society for spawning such a monster. By now Jim Jones's ashes have been scattered at sea off the Delaware coast, the bodies of the dead are mostly buried. But the image refuses to go away; the clear defiance of sanity on a mass scale is even more upsetting than the deaths themselves, in many ways.

Until last week, no one would have seriously equated men with lemmings. But now the lemmings would seem to have the better side of the comparison, for they kill themselves en masse for subconscious, biologically-inspired reasons. Twentieth-century man, lacking any such justification, has finally managed to do away with himself in large groups. The Jonestown affair surely marks an isolated incident, but the promise it holds for the future of our social fabric is merely a grim joke.