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.

The Romans had an advantage, in that their engines for sieges cooperated
with them in throwing darts and stones as far as the Jews, when they
were coming out of the city; whereby the man that fell became an
impediment to him that was