sault us, yet does it not permit us to meddle with
our enemies while they do any thing else.

3. Which thing when the Romans understood, on those days which we call
Sabbaths they threw nothing at the Jews, nor came to any pitched battle
with them; but raised up their earthen banks, and brought their engines
into such forwardness, that they might do execution the next day. And
any one may hence learn how very great piety we exercise towards God,
and the observance of his laws, since the priests were not at all
hindered from their sacred ministrations by their fear during this
siege, but did still twice a-day, in the morning and about the ninth
hour, offer their sacrifices on the altar; nor did they omit those
sacrifices, if any melancholy accident happened by the stones that were
thrown among them; for although the city was taken on the third month,
on the day of the fast, [6] upon the hundred and seventy-ninth olympiad,
when Caius Antonius and Marcus Tullius Cicero were consuls, and the
enemy then fell upon them, and cut the throats of those that were in the
temple; yet could not those that offered the sacrifices be compelled to
run away, neither by the fear they were in of their own lives, nor by
the number that were already slain, as thinking it better to suffer
whatever came upon them, at their very altars, than to omit any thing
that their laws required of them. And that this is not a mere brag, or
an encomium to manifest a degree of our piety that was false, but is the
real truth, I appeal to those that have written of the acts of Pompey;
and, among them, to Strabo and Nicolaus [of Damascus]; and besides
these two, Titus Livius, the writer of the Roman History, who will bear
witness to this thing. [7]

4. But when the battering-engine was brought near, the greatest of the
towers was shaken by it, and fell down, and broke down a part of the
fortifications, so the enemy poured in apace; and Cornelius Faustus,
the son of Sylla, with his soldiers, first of all ascended the wall, and
next to him Furius the centurion, with those that followed on the other
part, while Fabius, who was also a centurion, ascended it in the middle,
with a great body of men after him. But now all was full of slaughter;
some of the Jews being slain by the Romans, and some by one another;
nay, some there were who threw themselves down the precipices, or put
fire to their houses, and burnt them, as not able to bear the miseries
they were under.