They are careful not to spit into the midst of the company or to the right, and are stricter than all Jews in abstaining from work on the seventh day; for not only do they prepare their food on the day before, to avoid kindling a fire on that one, but they do not venture to remove any vessel or even to go to stool. On other days they dig a trench a foot deep with the _skalis_[347]—such is the purpose of the hatchet which they present to new members on admission[348]—and wrapping their mantle about them, that they may not offend the rays of the deity,[349] sit above it. They then replace the excavated soil in the trench. For this purpose they select the more retired spots. And though this secretion of bodily impurity is a natural function, they make it a rule to wash themselves after it, as if defiled. The Four Grades of Essenes—their Endurance of Persecution They are divided, according to the duration of their discipline, into four grades;[350] and so far are the junior members inferior to the seniors, that the latter, if but touched by the former, bathe themselves, as though they had been polluted by contact with an alien. They live to a great age—most of them to upwards of a century—in consequence, I imagine, of the simplicity of, and their moderation in, their diet.[351] They make light of danger, and conquer pain by their resolute will; death, if it come with honour, they consider better than immortality. The war with the Romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of test. Racked and twisted, burnt and broken, and made to pass through every instrument of torture, to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver or to eat some forbidden thing, they refused to yield to either demand, nor ever once did they cringe to their tormentors or shed a tear. Smiling in their agonies, and with gentle derision of the ministers of their tortures, they cheerfully resigned their souls, confident that they would receive them back again. Their Belief in the Immortality of the Soul For it is a fixed belief of theirs that bodies are corruptible, and the matter of which they are made has no permanence, but that souls continue for ever immortal. Emanating from the finest ether, these souls become entangled, as it were, in the prison-house of the body, to which they are dragged down by some magical[352] spell; but when once they are released from the bonds of the flesh, then, as though liberated from a long servitude, they rejoice and are borne aloft. For the good souls—and here they are of the same mind as the sons of Greece—they maintain that there is reserved a habitation beyond the ocean, in a place which is not oppressed by rain or snow or heat, but is refreshed by the ever-gentle breath of the west wind coming in from ocean; while to the base they allot a murky and tempestuous dungeon, big with never-ending punishments.