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The miserable state of the city drove hundreds to desert. They came down from the walls, or they made a pretended sortie and passed over to the Romans; but here a worse fate accompanied them, in spite of Josephus’s promises, for Josephus had not reckoned on the expectation that the Jews, famishing and mad for food, would, as proved the case, cause their own death by over-eating at first. And a more terrible danger awaited them. It was rumoured about that the deserters swallowed their gold before leaving the city, and the auxiliaries in the Roman camp, Arabians and Syrians, seized the suppliants, and fairly cut them open to find the gold. And though Titus was incensed when he heard of it, and prohibited it strictly, he could not wholly stop the practice, and the knowledge of this cruelty getting into the city stopped many who would otherwise have escaped: they remained to die. One of those who kept the register of burials and paid the bearers of the dead, told Josephus that out of his gate alone 115,880 bodies had been thrown since the siege began, and many citizens, whose word could be depended on, estimated the number who had died at 600,000.