And, indeed, why do I relate these particular calamities? while Manneus, the son of Lazarus, came running to Titus at this very time and told him that there had been carried out through that one gate, which was intrusted to his care, no fewer than a hundred and fifteen thousand eight hundred and eighty dead bodies in the interval between the fourteenth day of the month Xanthicus (Nisan), when the Romans pitched their camp by the city, and the first day of the month Panemus (Tamuz). This was itself a prodigious multitude; and though this man was not himself set as a governor at that gate, yet was he appointed to pay the public stipend for carrying these bodies out, and so was obliged of necessity to number them, while the rest were buried by their relations, though all their burial was but this, to bring them away and cast them out of the city. After this man there ran away to Titus many of the eminent citizens and told him the entire number of the poor that were dead, and that no fewer than six hundred thousand were thrown out at the gates, though still the number of the rest could not be discovered; and they told him further that when they were no longer able to carry out the dead bodies of the poor they laid their corpses on heaps in very large houses and shut them up therein; as also that a medimno of wheat was sold for a talent; and that when, a while afterward, it was not possible to gather herbs, by reason the city was all walled about, some persons were driven to that terrible distress as to search the common sewers and old dunghills of cattle, and to eat the dung which they got there, and what they of old could not endure so much as to see they now used for food. When the Romans barely heard all this they commiserated their case; while the seditious, who saw it also, did not repent, but suffered the same distress to come upon themselves, for they were blinded by that fate which was already coming upon the city, and upon themselves also. And now the Romans, although they were greatly distressed in getting together their materials, raised their banks in one-and-twenty days, after they had cut down all the trees that were in the country that adjoined to the city, and that for ninety furlongs round about. And when the banks were finished, they afforded a foundation for fear both to the Romans and to the Jews, for the Jews expected that the city would be taken unless they could burn those banks, as did the Romans expect that, if these were once burned down they should never be able to take it, for there was a mighty scarcity of materials, and the bodies of the soldiers began to fail with such hard labors, as did their souls faint with so many instances of ill-success.