September indiscriminately all whom they met and burnt over their heads the houses of those who had taken refuge within. Often in the course of their raids, on entering the houses for loot, they would find whole families of dead bodies and the rooms filled with the victims of the famine, and then, shuddering at the sight, would retire empty-handed. Yet, while they pitied those who had thus perished, they had no similar feelings for the living, but, running every one through that fell in their way, they choked the alleys with corpses and deluged the whole city with blood, insomuch that the flames of many of the burning buildings were extinguished by the gory stream. Towards evening they ceased slaughtering, but when night fell the fire gained the mastery, and the dawn of the eighth day of the month Gorpiæus broke upon Jerusalem in flames; a city which had suffered such calamities in the siege, that, had she from her first foundation enjoyed an equal share of blessings, she would have been thought wholly enviable; and undeserving, moreover, of these great misfortunes on all other grounds, save that she produced so evil a generation as that which caused her overthrow.
Of all the strong defences of the city those which chiefly aroused the admiration of Titus, on his entry, were the towers, which the tyrants, in their infatuation, had abandoned. Indeed, when he beheld their solid lofty mass, the magnitude of each block of stone and the accuracy of the joinings, and saw how great was their breadth, how vast their height, "We have indeed," he exclaimed, "had God on our side in the battle. God it was who ejected the Jews from these strongholds; for what power have human hands or engines against these towers?" He made many similar observations to his friends on that occasion, and also liberated all who had been imprisoned by the tyrants and left in the forts.
