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And then they set fire to the houses, and all was over.

As for the prisoners who remained alive, they were destined to the usual fate of slaves. To fight as gladiators; to afford sport among the wild beasts in the theatres; and to work for life in the mines, was their miserable lot. Woe, indeed, to the conquered in those old wars, where defeat meant death, whose least cruel form was the stroke of the headsman, or, worse than death, life, whose least miserable portion was perpetual slavery in the mines. It would have been well had Josephus, after narrating the scenes which he tells so well, gone to visit these his miserable fellow-countrymen in slavery, and described for us, if he could, the wretchedness of their after-life, the unspeakable degradation and misery which the Jew, more than any other man, would feel, in his condition of slavery. Their history began with the slavery in Egypt: to these unfortunate captives it would seem as if it was to end with slavery in Egypt.

The Romans, knowing that Jerusalem had a sort of subterranean city of excavated chambers beneath it, proceeded to search for hiding insurgents and for hidden wealth. The chambers were, like the houses, often full of dead bodies. They found fugitives in some of them; these they put to death. In others they found treasure; in others they found corpses.