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And yet, with the city in this miserable and wretched condition, with the certain knowledge that the Romans were coming, the usual crowds of Jews and Idumeans flocked to the city to keep the feast of the Passover. Their profound faith was proof against every disaster. That the Temple should actually fall, actually be destroyed, seems never even to have entered into their heads; and there can be little doubt that the rude, rough, country people, coming to keep the Passover with their wives and children, were filled with a wild hope that the God of Joshua was about to work some signal deliverance for them. The population thus crowded into the city is estimated by Tacitus at six hundred thousand; by Josephus at more than double that number. There are reasons for believing the number at least as great as that stated by Tacitus. A register of the buried had been kept in the city, and the registrar of one gate, out of which the dead were thrown, gave Josephus a note of his numbers. The historian conversed with those who escaped. A list of the captives would be, no doubt, made—the Romans were not in the habit of doing things carelessly, even after a great victory—and they would be accessible to Josephus. So far as these go we ought to allow Josephus’s right to the consideration due to an eye-witness; and it seems to us absolutely unwarranted by any historical or other arguments, to put down, as has been done, the population of this city during the siege at sixty or seventy thousand.^[9] This was doubtless something like the ordinary population; but it was swelled tenfold and twentyfold by the crowds of those who came yearly to keep the feast. Again, the argument based by Mr. Fergusson on the area of the city fails for the simple reason that it is founded on wrong calculations^[10] as to the number of square yards. Moreover, it seems to assume the besieged to have been all comfortably lodged; it ignores altogether the estimate taken by Cestius; while, if the numbers adopted by Mr. Fergusson be correct, the horrors of the siege must have been grossly exaggerated, and the stories told by Josephus cannot be accepted; and, for a last objection, it appears to be assumed, what is manifestly incorrect, that every able-bodied man fought. For this vast mass of poor helpless people were like a brutum pecus; they took no part whatever in the fighting. Nothing is clearer than the statement made by Josephus of the fighting men. They were twenty-three thousand in all at the beginning: they did not invite help, and probably would not allow it, from the population within the walls. These, who very speedily found relief, in the thinning of death, for their first lack of accommodation, sat crouching and cowering in the houses, desperately hoping against hope, starving from the very commencement, beginning to die in heaps almost before the camp of the 10th Legion was pitched upon the Mount of Olives. The numbers given by Josephus may not be correct within a great many thousands; there is reason enough, however, to believe that, within limits very much narrower than some of his readers are disposed to believe, his numbers may be fairly depended on. After all, it matters little enough what the numbers really were; and even if we let them be what any one chooses to call them, there yet remains no doubt that the sufferings of the people were very cruel, and that, of all wretched and bloody sieges in the world’s history, few, if any, have been more wretched or more bloody than the siege of Jerusalem by Titus.