Famine Inside the City

For all Josephus’s tearful appeals, the rebels neither gave way nor judged it safe to change course; but the people were moved to desert. Some sold their property for next to nothing, others their more valuable treasures, and swallowed the gold coins so that the robbers would not find them. Then they slipped away to the Romans, and once they had passed the coins, they had plenty for whatever they needed. For Titus let most of them go off into the country wherever each one wished, and this very thing encouraged desertion all the more: they would be rid of the miseries inside and yet not be slaves to the Romans. But John’s and Simon’s men watched these people’s ways out more closely than the Romans’ ways in, and anyone who gave even a shadow of suspicion had his throat cut at once. [a]

For the well-off, staying was as fatal as going: a man would be killed on a charge of desertion for the sake of his property. The rebels’ frenzy grew together with the famine, and both horrors blazed up more fiercely every day. Grain was nowhere to be seen openly. The rebels burst into houses and searched them. If they found some, they tortured the owners for having denied it; if they found none, they tortured them for having hidden it too carefully. The proof of whether a person had food or not was the wretched person’s own body. Those still in good condition were taken to be well supplied; those already wasting away were passed by, for it seemed pointless to kill people who would soon die of want. Many secretly gave all they owned for a single measure of wheat, if they were richer, or of barley, if they were poorer. Then they shut themselves away in the innermost rooms of their houses. Some, in the extremity of their want, ate the grain unground; others baked it, as need and fear allowed. No table was laid anywhere; they snatched the food from the fire still raw and tore it apart. [c]

It was a pitiable way to eat, and a sight to bring tears: the stronger took more than their share, and the weak wailed. Famine overpowers every feeling, but it destroys nothing so completely as shame; what at other times commands respect is in famine despised. Wives snatched the food out of their husbands’ very mouths, children out of their fathers’, and, most pitiful of all, mothers out of their infants’. While their dearest ones wasted away in their arms, they did not hesitate to take from them the last drops that kept them alive. [d]

Even eating in this way they were not left unnoticed; the rebels were everywhere at hand to seize even these scraps. Whenever they saw a house shut up, they took it as a sign that the people inside had come by some food. At once they smashed in the doors and rushed in, and all but squeezed the morsels back up out of their throats. Old men were beaten as they clung to their food, and women were dragged by the hair for hiding what was in their hands. There was no pity for gray hair or for infants: they lifted up the little children as they clung to their scraps and dashed them to the ground. Those who had got ahead of their rush and swallowed what was to be seized, they treated more cruelly still, as if they had been wronged.

They devised terrible ways of torture in their search for food. They stopped up the genital passages of their wretched victims with bitter vetch and drove sharp stakes up their anuses. A man suffered things horrible even to hear of, to make him confess to a single loaf or reveal a single hidden handful of barley meal. The torturers were not hungry themselves; it would have been less cruel if need had driven them. They did it to keep their frenzy in practice and to lay in provisions for themselves for the days ahead. Some people crept out by night as far as the Roman outposts to gather wild plants and grass. Just when they thought they had escaped the enemy, these men met them and seized what they had brought back. Often the victims begged them, calling on the awesome name of God, to give them some share of what they had risked their lives to bring, but they gave them nothing at all. It was counted a mercy to have been robbed and not killed as well.

Such were the sufferings of the humbler people at the hands of the tyrants’ bodyguards. Men of rank and wealth were brought before the tyrants themselves. Some were put to death on false charges of plotting, others on the charge that they were betraying the city to the Romans; but the readiest method was a bribed informer who would swear they had decided to desert. A man stripped by Simon was sent on to John, and Simon in his turn took over the man John had plundered. They drank one another’s health in the blood of the townspeople and shared out the corpses of the wretched. Over who should rule there was faction between the two, but in their crimes there was perfect harmony. Whichever of them did not share with the other the profits of other men’s misery was thought a villain of the selfish kind, and the one who got no share grieved at being cheated of the cruelty, as if he had lost something good. [f]

To go through their crimes one by one is impossible. To put it briefly: no other city ever suffered such things, and no generation since the world began was more fertile in wickedness. In the end they even disparaged the Hebrew race, so as to seem less impious toward foreigners, and they confessed themselves to be what they were: slaves, a rabble, the bastard dregs of the nation. It was they who overthrew the city, and they forced the Romans, against their will, to put their names to a grim success, and all but dragged onto the temple the fire that was slow in coming. Indeed, when they watched it burning from the upper city, they neither grieved nor wept, while those feelings were found among the Romans. But this we shall tell later in its place, with a full account of the facts. [g]