This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[181]
Now the besieged had plenty of corn within the city, and indeed
of all necessaries, but they wanted water, because there was no fountain
in the city, the people being there usually satisfied with rain water;
yet is it a rare thing in that country to have rain in summer, and at this
season, during the siege, they were in great distress for some contrivance
to satisfy their thirst; and they were very sad at this time particularly,
as if they were already in want of water entirely, for Josephus seeing
that the city abounded with other necessaries, and that the men were of
good courage, and being desirous to protract the siege to the Romans longer
than they expected, ordered their drink to be given them by measure; but
this scanty distribution of water by measure was deemed by them as a thing
more hard upon them than the want of it; and their not being able to drink
as much as they would made them more desirous of drinking than they otherwise
had been; nay, they were as much disheartened hereby as if they were come
to the last degree of thirst. Nor were the Romans unacquainted with the
state they were in, for when they stood over against them, beyond the wall,
they could see them running together, and taking their water by measure,
which made them throw their javelins thither the place being within their
reach, and kill a great many of them.
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.