flour and salt provisions was adequate to the consumption of
five years; the want of wine was supplied by vinegar; and of grain from
whence a strong liquor was extracted, and a triple aqueduct eluded
the diligence, and even the suspicions, of the enemy. But the firmest
defence of Petra was placed in the valor of fifteen hundred Persians,
who resisted the assaults of the Romans, whilst, in a softer vein of
earth, a mine was secretly perforated. The wall, supported by slender
and temporary props, hung tottering in the air; but Dagisteus delayed
the attack till he had secured a specific recompense; and the town was
relieved before the return of his messenger from Constantinople. The
Persian garrison was reduced to four hundred men, of whom no more than
fifty were exempt from sickness or wounds; yet such had been their
inflexible perseverance, that they concealed their losses from the
enemy, by enduring, without a murmur, the sight and putrefying stench
of the dead bodies of their eleven hundred companions. After their
deliverance, the breaches were hastily stopped with sand-bags; the
mine was replenished with earth; a new wall was erected on a frame
of substantial timber; and a fresh garrison of three thousand men
was stationed at Petra to sustain the labors of a second siege. The
operations, both of the attack and defence, were conducted with skilful
obstinacy; and each party derived useful lessons from the experience of
their past faults. A battering-ram was invented, of light construction
and powerful effect: it was transported and worked by the hands of forty
soldiers; and as the stones were loosened by its repeated strokes, they
were torn with long iron hooks from the wall. From those walls, a shower
of darts was incessantly poured on the heads of the assailants; but
they were most dangerously annoyed by a fiery composition of sulphur and
bitumen, which in Colchos might with some propriety be named the oil
of Medea. Of six thousand Romans who mounted the scaling-ladders, their
general Bessas was the first, a gallant veteran of seventy years of age:
the courage of their leader, his fall, and extreme danger, animated
the irresistible effort of his troops; and their prevailing numbers
oppressed the strength, without subduing the spirit, of the Persian
garrison. The fate of these valiant men deserves to be more distinctly
noticed. Seven hundred had perished in the siege, two thousand three
hundred survived to defend the bre
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