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.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.