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[193]
Now of those that perished by famine in the city, the number was
prodigious, and the miseries they underwent were unspeakable; for if so
much as the shadow of any kind of food did any where appear, a war was
commenced presently, and the dearest friends fell a fighting one with another
about it, snatching from each other the most miserable supports of life.
Nor would men believe that those who were dying had no food, but the robbers
would search them when they were expiring, lest any one should have concealed
food in their bosoms, and counterfeited dying; nay, these robbers gaped
for want, and ran about stumbling and staggering along like mad dogs, and
reeling against the doors of the houses like drunken men; they would also,
in the great distress they were in, rush into the very same houses two
or three times in one and the same day. Moreover, their hunger was so intolerable,
that it obliged them to chew every thing, while they gathered such things
as the most sordid animals would not touch, and endured to eat them; nor
did they at length abstain from girdles and shoes; and the very leather
which belonged to their shields they pulled off and gnawed: the very wisps
of old hay became food to some; and some gathered up fibres, and sold a
very small weight of them for four Attic [drachmae]. But why do I describe
the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in their eating
inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like
to which no history relates, 1
either among the Greeks or Barbarians? It is horrible to speak of it, and
incredible when heard. I had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of
ours, that I might not seem to deliver what is so portentous to posterity,
but that I have innumerable witnesses to it in my own age; and besides,
my country would have had little reason to thank me for suppressing the
miseries that she underwent at this time.
1 What Josephus observes here, that no parallel examples had been recorded before this time of such sieges, wherein mothers were forced by extremity of famine to eat their own children, as had been threatened to the Jews in the law of Moses, upon obstinate disobedience, and more than once fulfilled, (see my Boyle's Lectures, p. 210-214,) is by Dr. Hudson supposed to have had two or three parallel examples in later ages. He might have had more examples, I suppose, of persons on ship-board, or in a desert island, casting lots for each others' bodies; but all this was only in cases where they knew of no possible way to avoid death themselves but by killing and eating others. Whether such examples come up to the present case may be doubted. The Romans were not only willing, but very desirous, to grant those Jews in Jerusalem both their lives and their liberties, and to save both their city and their temple. But the zealots, the rubbers, and the seditious would hearken to no terms of submission. They voluntarily chose to reduce the citizens to that extremity, as to force mothers to this unnatural barbarity, which, in all its circumstances, has not, I still suppose, been hitherto paralleled among the rest of mankind.
Flavius Josephus. The Works of Flavius Josephus. Translated by. William Whiston, A.M. Auburn and Buffalo. John E. Beardsley. 1895.
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