The food the most repugnant to sense or imagination, the aliments the
most unwholesome and pernicious to the constitution, were eagerly
devoured, and fiercely disputed, by the rage of hunger. A dark suspicion
was entertained that some desperate wretches fed on the bodies of their
fellow-creature, whom they had secretly murdered; and even mothers--such
was the horrid conflict of the two most powerful instincts implanted by
nature in the human breast--even mothers are said to have tasted the
flesh of their slaughtered infants!
Many thousands of the inhabitants of Rome expired in their houses or in
the streets for want of sustenance; and as the public sepulchres without
the walls were in the power of the enemy, the stench which arose from so
many putrid and unburied carcasses infected the air; and the miseries of
famine were succeeded and aggravated by the contagion of a pestilential
disease. The assurances of speedy and effectual relief, which were
repeatedly transmitted from the court of Ravenna, supported for some
time the fainting resolution of the Romans, till at length the despair
of any human aid tempted them to accept the offers of a preternatural
deliverance.
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