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In the interval he employed his legionaries, who could work as well as fight, in erecting upon the left bank of the Rhone a wall sixteen feet high and ten miles long, which rendered the passage of the river very difficult, and, on the return of the Helvetian envoys, he formally forbade them to pass by the road they had proposed to follow.
Equally conspicuous was the grandeur of fortitude with which he faced the whole extent of a calamity when palliation could do no good, "non negando, minuendove, sed insuper amplificando, ementiendoque"; as when, upon finding his soldiery alarmed at the approach of Juba, with forces really great, but exaggerated by their terrors, he addressed them in a military harangue to the following effect: "Know that within a few days the king will come up with us, bringing with him sixty thousand legionaries, thirty thousand cavalry, one hundred thousand light troops, besides three hundred elephants.
Paul's helpfulness was forgotten. A still more ignoble exhibition of the instinct of self- preservation than the sailors had shown dictated that cowardly, cruel suggestion to kill the prisoners. Brutal indifference to human life, and Rome's iron discipline holding terror over the legionaries' heads, are vividly illustrated in the 'counsel, So were Paul's kindnesses requited!
And then, as if this undermining of our schoolboy faith in pure Quantity were not enough, came the surprising information that the Romans had kept, perhaps from the beginning of their poetizing, a popular type of accented verse, as seen in the rude chant of the Roman legionaries,
Nissr had already begun to slant to lower levels. Now at no more than twenty-five hundred feet, with greatly reduced speed, she was drifting down the valley toward the city, the details of which were every moment becoming more apparent. Its size, the wondering Legionaries saw, must be very considerable; it might have contained three or four hundred thousand inhabitants.
She rose and laid her hands on the Christian's shoulders. "My husband," she said. Something had happened at the Temple. She saw the Jews at the wall recoil from the dust of battle, rally, plunge in and disappear. From out that presently shone now and again, then with increasing frequency and finally in great numbers, the brass mail of Roman legionaries. Titus' forces had scaled the wall.
Already the door was creaking, giving, as the Legionaries now hardly more than a dozen in number began the first steps of their retreat, that should rank in history with that of Xenophon's historic Ten Thousand. The Greeks had all of God's outdoors for their maneuvers. These Legionaries had nothing but dark pits and runways, unexplored, in the bowels of a huge, fanatic city.
The Roman army of occupation also, which had been essentially denationalised by its long abode in Egypt and the many intermarriages between the soldiers and Egyptian women, and which moreover numbered a multitude of the old soldiers of Pompey and runaway Italian criminals and slaves in its ranks, was indignant at Cæsar, by whose orders it had been obliged to suspend its action on the Syrian frontier, and at his handful of haughty legionaries.
Furiously the Legionaries worked the stone back and forth; a shower of mortar fell on the workers' feet and on the upturned, staring faces of the paralyzed Moslems trampled by the horrible contamination of heretical boots perhaps even pigskin boots! and then, all at once, the Hajar el Aswad slid from the place where it had lain uncounted centuries.
Talk of this sort had procured for him his second consulship, and hopes of this sort had now brought to his camp so great a multitude of unarmed followers eager for spoil, that their number, according to the assurance of sober historians, exceeded that of the legionaries. Hannibal based his plan in part on this circumstance.
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