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[567]
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 Xanthieus, [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
medimnus 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.
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