Rome enacted a carnage within the holy city, the like of which her inhuman legions, with all their multitudinous and murderous experience, had never seen before. What the famine had left the sword consumed, and what escaped the sword fell a prey to the flames, and what remained, after streams of human blood had quenched the flames, dropped dead beneath the pestilence, and they, that had defied all these grim allies of cruel death, were driven into an open space, the tallest and most handsome were reserved to grace the triumphal march of _Titus_, to be dragged along the streets of Rome with a halter around their neck, and to be executed after the eyes and ears of the Romans had had their fill of the conquered's sufferings; of the rest, all above seventeen years of age were sold to distant countries, to the most cruel servitude, or they were distributed among the provinces to give sport to the people by their gladiatorial combats, fighting for their lives against hungry and ferocious beasts. One million one hundred and ten thousand Jews perished during this siege; ninety-seven thousand were driven in chains as slaves to distant lands. The old and feeble, and the young and helpless who were spared, not from mercy, but because the Romans for once, weary of their slaughter, and sickened from the loathsome sight and insufferable stench that arose from the heaps of unburied, putrid bodies, were forced to retreat. This pitiable remnant was compelled to take the staff of exile. Forth they went from their native soil to roam the wide world over. Everywhere homeless, friendless, despised, trodden down, hunted down by man and beast, tortured, an object of derision, a shadow of their former greatness.