This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
[424]
But as for the richer sort, it proved all one to them whether they
staid in the city, or attempted to get out of it; for they were equally
destroyed in both cases; for every such person was put to death under this
pretense, that they were going to desert, but in reality that the robbers
might get what they had. The madness of the seditious did also increase
together with their famine, and both those miseries were every day inflamed
more and more; for there was no corn which any where appeared publicly,
but the robbers came running into, and searched men's private houses; and
then, if they found any, they tormented them, because they had denied they
had any; and if they found none, they tormented them worse, because they
supposed they had more carefully concealed it. The indication they made
use of whether they had any or not was taken from the bodies of these miserable
wretches; which, if they were in good case, they supposed they were in
no want at all of food; but if they were wasted away, they walked off without
searching any further; nor did they think it proper to kill such as these,
because they saw they would very soon die of themselves for want of food.
Many there were indeed who sold what they had for one measure; it was of
wheat, if they were of the richer sort; but of barley, if they were poorer.
When these had so done, they shut themselves up in the inmost rooms of
their houses, and ate the corn they had gotten; some did it without grinding
it, by reason of the extremity of the want they were in, and others baked
bread of it, according as necessity and fear dictated to them: a table
was no where laid for a distinct meal, but they snatched the bread out
of the fire, half-baked, and ate it very hastily.
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.