There is no space here to tell in detail the horrors of the civil war that ensued within Jerusalem. The cruelties inflicted by the Romans themselves hardly rivalled the infamous treacheries, murders, and indignities even to corpses, which the Jews heaped upon their own people. The Roman Empire itself, however, was also undergoing the throes of a civil war, in which the Jews thought they saw the dissolution of the empire and the golden opportunity for the independence of their own country. But the ship of Roman state weathered this tempest as so many another, and by the spring of the year 70 A.D. Titus commenced the siege of the city in earnest. At this time Jerusalem was crowded with something like a million persons who had come in for the Passover, but the aggregate number of fighting men seems to have been less than twenty-four thousand, while the forces of Titus are estimated at about eighty thousand. The Jews expected succour from their kinsmen of Parthia as well as from other quarters of the empire, but before these arrived, if they were ever sent at all, the forces of Titus appeared before the city. Taking six hundred horse with him Titus advanced at once to reconnoitre, but as no one appeared to oppose his progress he incautiously approached so near the wall that he was suddenly surrounded by a multitude of men who rushed out from one of the gates behind him. Bareheaded and without his breastplate as he was, yet he forced his way through this multitude and escaped unharmed to the Roman camp, although many of his followers were slain. [Sidenote: [70 A.D.]] Attempts were made at once to take the walls by storm, but these assaults were repulsed by the defenders, the Roman army retired to its entrenchments, and a regular siege began. Battering-rams were brought into play against the walls, while catapults and ballistæ were plied incessantly against the defenders on the walls, and were responded to with similar weapons by them. In the use of these weapons, however, the Jews were very unskilful, while the bolts and stones thrown from the Roman camp did effective work both on the walls and inside them. The enormous thickness of the outer walls resisted the battering-rams for some days, but they gave way at last and the defenders retired within their second line. This second wall was carried five days later and Titus was thus made master of the lower city. Famine now added to the war within and without the city its ghastly terrors. Never has a more thrilling picture of human misery been painted than that of Josephus.[a] JOSEPHUS’ ACCOUNT OF THE FAMINE