him ten couches
were dressed, bearing effigies of dead men, so carefully laid out, that
they resembled corpses already buried; and for seven days all the men in
the companies and battalions celebrated a funeral feast, dancing, and
singing melancholy kinds of dirges in lamentation for the royal youth.

11. And the women, with pitiable wailing, deplored with their customary
weepings the hope of their nation thus cut off in the early bloom of
youth; as the worshippers of Venus are often seen to do in the solemn
festival of Adonis, which the mystical doctrines of religion show to be
some sort of image of the ripened fruits of the earth.

II.

Sec. 1. When the body was burnt and the bones collected in a silver urn,
which his father had ordered to be carried back to his native land, to
be there buried beneath the earth, Sapor, after taking counsel,
determined to propitiate the shade of the deceased prince by making the
destroyed city of Amida his monument. Nor indeed was Grumbates willing
to move onward while the shade of his only son remained unavenged.

2. And having given two days to rest, and sent out large bodies of
troops to ravage the fertile and well-cultivated fields which were as
heavy with crops as in the time of peace, the enemy surrounded the city
with a line of heavy-armed soldiers five deep; and at the beginning of
the third day the brilliant squadrons filled every spot as far as the
eye could see in every direction, and the ranks marching slowly, took up
the positions appointed to each by lot.

3. All the Persians were employed in surrounding the walls; that part
which looked eastward, where that youth so fatal to us was slain, fell
to the Chionitae. The Vertae were appointed to the south; the Albani
watched the north; while opposite to the western gate were posted the
Segestani, the fiercest warriors of all, with whom were trains of tall
elephants, horrid with their wrinkled skins, which marched on slowly,
loaded with armed men, terrible beyond the savageness of any other
frightful sight, as we have often said.

4. When we saw these countless hosts thus deliberately collected for the
conflagration of the Roman world, and directed to our own immediate
destruction, we despaired of safety, and sought only how to end our
lives gloriously, as we all desired.

5. From the rising of the sun to its setting, the enemy's lines stood
immovable, as if rooted to the ground, without changing a step or
uttering a