The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 02 : $b Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia
History
The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 02 : $b Israel, India, Persia, Phoenicia, Minor Nations of Western Asia
World history
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 entrusted 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
(Tammuz). 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 medimnus of wheat was sold for a talent; and
that when, a while afterwards, 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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