The blockade had lasted six months, and the Numantines were hard pressed by famine, before they condescended to inquire whether, if they surrendered, they would meet with honourable treatment. An unconditional surrender was required. Urged even to desperation, they still refused to consign themselves to slavery or mutilation, for the latter often was the fate of those whose strength and valour the Romans had found reason to respect. Rather than submit to such a fate, they consumed their arms and effects, and houses, in one general conflagration, and dying by the sword, or poison, or fire, left the victor nothing of Numantia to adorn his triumph but the name.[12] Such was the unworthy fate of a city which had spared more Roman soldiers than itself could muster armed men. “Most brave,” says the historian, “and, in my opinion, most happy in its very misfortunes! It asserted faithfully the cause of its allies; alone it resisted, for how long a time, a nation armed with the strength of the whole world.”[13] It is an easy thing to write rhetorical flourishes, and very often mischievous as well as easy. Had Florus ever undergone one tithe of the sufferings inflicted on the miserable Numantines, we might possibly not have heard of their supreme felicity. It might have done him some good by quickening his moral sense, and might have prevented his beginning the next chapter with the assertion, that “hitherto the Roman people was excellent, pious, holy.” Verily, such history as this is a profitable study! [Illustration: Battering–ram, combined with tower, from Pompeii, vol. i. p. 78.]