rew Worse; And How The Romans Made
An Assault Upon The Tower Of Antonia.

1. Thus did the miseries of Jerusalem grow worse and worse every day,
and the seditious were still more irritated by the calamities they were
under, even while the famine preyed upon themselves, after it had preyed
upon the people. And indeed the multitude of carcasses that lay in
heaps one upon another was a horrible sight, and produced a pestilential
stench, which was a hinderance to those that would make sallies out of
the city, and fight the enemy: but as those were to go in battle-array,
who had been already used to ten thousand murders, and must tread upon
those dead bodies as they marched along, so were not they terrified,
nor did they pity men as they marched over them; nor did they deem this
affront offered to the deceased to be any ill omen to themselves; but
as they had their right hands already polluted with the murders of their
own countrymen, and in that condition ran out to fight with foreigners,
they seem to me to have cast a reproach upon God himself, as if he were
too slow in punishing them; for the war was not now gone on with as if
they had any hope of victory; for they gloried after a brutish manner
in that despair of deliverance they were already in. 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, as I have already related. And
truly the very view itself of the country was a melancholy thing; for
those places which were before adorned with trees and pleasant gardens
were now become a desolate country every way, and its trees were all cut
down: nor could any foreigner that had formerly seen Judea and the most
beautiful suburbs of the city, and now saw it as a desert, but lament
and mourn sadly at so great a change: for the war had laid all the signs
of beauty quite waste: nor if any one that had known the place before,
had come on a sudden to it now, would he have known it again; but
though he were at the city itself, yet would he have inquired for it
notwithstanding.

2. And now 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 we