seventeen years of age were sold for slaves. Now
during the days wherein Fronto was distinguishing these men there
perished, for want of food, eleven thousand, some of whom did not taste
any food, through the hatred their guards bore to them, and others would
not take in any when it was given them. The multitude also was so very
great that they were in want even of corn for their sustenance.

Now the number of those that were carried captive during this whole war
was collected to be ninety-seven thousand; as was the number of those
that perished during the whole siege eleven hundred thousand, the
greater part of whom was indeed of the same nation [with the citizens of
Jerusalem], but not belonging to the city itself. They were come up from
all the country to the feast of unleavened bread and were on a sudden
shut up by an army, which, at the very first, occasioned so great a
straitness among them that there came a pestilential destruction upon
them, and soon afterward such a famine as destroyed them more suddenly.

That this city could contain so many people in it is manifest by that
number of them which was taken under Cestius, who, being desirous of
informing Nero of the power of the city, who otherwise was disposed to
contemn that nation, entreated the high-priests, if the thing were
possible, to take the number of their whole multitude. So these
high-priests, upon the coming of that feast which is called the
Passover, when they slay their sacrifices, from the ninth hour till the
eleventh, but so that a company not less than ten belong to every
sacrifice (for it is not lawful for them to feast singly by themselves),
and many of them were twenty in a company, found the number of
sacrifices was two hundred and fifty-six thousand five hundred, which,
upon the allowance of no more than ten that feast together, amounts to
two millions seven hundred thousand and two hundred persons that were
pure and holy; for as to those that have the leprosy, or the
gonorrhoea, or women that have their monthly courses, or such as are
otherwise polluted, it is not lawful for them to be partakers of this
sacrifice; nor indeed for any foreigners neither, who come hither to
worship.

Now this vast multitude is indeed collected out of remote places, but
the entire nation was now shut up by fate as in prison, and the Roman
army encompassed the city when it was crowded with inhabitants.
Accordingly, the multitude of those that therein perish