83
now one side, now the other, like spectators at a gladiatorial
contest. Whenever one side gave ground, and the soldiers began to hide
in shops or seek refuge in some private house, they clamoured for them
to be dragged out and killed, and thus got the greater part of the
plunder for themselves: for while the soldiers were busy with the
bloody work of massacre, the spoil fell to the crowd. The scene
throughout the city was hideous and terrible: on the one side fighting
and wounded men, on the other baths and restaurants: here lay heaps of
bleeding dead, and close at hand were harlots and their
companions--all the vice and licence of luxurious peace, and all the
crime and horror of a captured town. One might well have thought the
city mad with fury and mad with pleasure at the same time. Armies had
fought in the city before this, twice when Sulla mastered Rome,[220]
once under Cinna.[221] Nor were there less horrors then. What was now
so inhuman was the people's indifference. Not for one minute did they
interrupt the life of pleasure. The fighting was a new amusement for
their holiday.[222] Caring nothing for either party, they enjoyed
themselves in riotous dissipation and took a frank pleasure in their
country's disaster.

The storming of the Guards' camp was the most troublesome task. It 84
was still held by some of the bravest as a forlorn hope, which made
the victors all the more eager to take it, especially those who had
originally served in the Guards. They employed against it every means
ever devised for the storming of the most strongly fortified towns, a
'tortoise',[223] artillery, earthworks, firebrands. This, they cried,
was the crown of all the toil and danger they had undergone in all
their battles. They had restored the city to the senate and people of
Rome, and their Temples to the gods: the soldier's pride is his camp,
it is his country and his home. If they could not regain it at once,
they must spend the night in fighting. The Vitellians, for their part,
had numbers and fortune against them, but by marring their enemy's
victory, by postponing peace, by fouling houses and altars with their
blood, they embraced the last consolations that the conquered can
enjoy. Many lay more dead than alive on the towers and ramparts of the
walls and there expired. When the gates were torn down, the remainder
faced the conquerors in a body. And there they fell, every man of them
facing the enemy with all h