he temple, and
distributed it among the multitude, who, in their anointing themselves
and drinking, used [each of them] above an hin of them. And here I
cannot but speak my mind, and what the concern I am under dictates to
me, and it is this: I suppose, that had the Romans made any longer delay
in coming against these villains, that the city would either have been
swallowed up by the ground opening upon them, or been overflowed by
water, or else been destroyed by such thunder as the country of Sodom
[20] perished by, for it had brought forth a generation of men much more
atheistical than were those that suffered such punishments; for by their
madness it was that all the people came to be destroyed.

7. 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