Section 122
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90 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. them. These, at first, not bearing the effluvia from the dead bo dies, ordered them to be buried out of the public treasury ; after wards, when they were not able to continue this, they threw the bodies from the walls into the ditches below. As Titus went around these, and saw them filled with the dead, and the deep gore flowing around the putrid bodies, he groaned heavily, and raising his hands, called God to witness that it was none of his work." After some additional remarks, Josephus proceeds : " 1 cannot hesitate to declare what my feelings demand. I think that had the Romans lingered to proceed against these guilty wretches, the city would either have been swallowed up by the opening earth, or overwhelmed with a flood, or like Sodom, been struck with the lightning. For it bore a much more impious race than those who once endured such visitations. Thus, by the mad ness of these wretches, the whole people perished." In the sixth book, he also writes thus: "Of those that perished by the famine in the city, there fell an infinite number. The miseries that befel them were indescribable; for at every house, wherever there was a shadow of food, there was war. The nearest relatives contended with one another, to seize the wretched supports of life. There was no belief that hunger was the cause, even when they saw the dying ; but the robbers would search them whilst yet breath ing, lest any one should pretend that he was dying, whilst he con cealed food in his bosom. But the robbers themselves, with their mouths wide open for want of food, roved and straggled hither and thither, like mad dogs, beating the doors as if they were drunk ; and for want of counsel, rushing twice or thrice an hour into the same houses. Indeed, necessity forced them to apply their teeth to every thing, and gathering what was no food, even for the filthiest of irrational animals, they devoured it, and did not abstain at last even from belts and shoes. They took off the hides from their shields and devoured them, and some used even the remnants of old straw as food ; others gathered the stubble, and sold a very small weight of it for four Attic drachms.* ^.nd why Attic drachms."] The drachma was a coin of about fifteen cents. Some make it more. Shorting, in his translation, has computed the four drachms to be half a pound sterling, and refers to his note on B. I. ch. viii. He there states very cor