The Wars of the Jews are the History of the Destruction of Jerusalem, book six, containing

the interval about one month, from the great extremity to which the Jews were reduced to

the taking of Jerusalem by Titus.

Chapter 1.

That the misery still grew worse, and how the Romans made an assault upon the Tower

of Antonia. 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 prayed upon the people. And indeed the multitude of carcasses

that lay in heaps upon

one another was a horrible sight and produced a pestilential stench, which was a hindrance 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 10,000 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 in the front offered to the deceased to be any ill omen to themselves. But as they had

had their right hands already polluted with the murders of their own countrymen,

and in that condition ran out to fight with foreigners. They seemed 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 they had any hope of victory, for they had 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 in 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 roundabout as I've already related.

That's about 10 miles around the city of Jerusalem.

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