and graceful persons, and in the prime of their youth, he reserved them for the triumph; sending away all above seventeen years of age to the remainder of them in chains in Egypt, to be employed in servile offices and drudgery, besides those that were distributed up and down the provinces for the use of the theatres in the quality of swords-men or gladiators, all under seventeen he exposed to sale.
In the mean time, while the prisoners were under Fronto's charge, there were 11000 of them starved to death, betwixt the churlishness of the keepers that would give them no meat, and the squeamishness of their stomachs that would swallow none. But in truth the mouths were too many for the provisions.
The number of the prisoners in this war was 97000. The number of the dead was 110000; the greater part of them Jews by nation, though not natives of Judea, for it was only a general meeting of them at Jerusalem, gathered together from all quarters to celebrate the feast of the passover; who were then surprised into a war. There was such a prodigious multitude, and they so straitened for lodgings, that the crowd first brought the plague into the town, and then quickly made way for a famine. The city not being capable of entertaining that vast body of people, if the calculation of Cestius may at least pass for any thing, as follows.
Nero had so great a contempt for the Jews, that Cestius made it his suit to the high priests to bethink themselves of some way of number-
