[Sidenote:  A.D. 196 (a.u. 949)] When all the supplies in the town had been exhausted and the people had been set fairly in a strait with regard to both their situation and the expectations that might be founded upon it, at first, although beset by great difficulties (because they were cut off from all outside resources), they nevertheless continued to resist; and to make ships they used lumber taken from the houses and braided ropes of the hair of their women.  Whenever any troops assaulted the wall, they would hurl upon them stones from the theatres, bronze horses, and whole statues of bronze.  When even their normal food supply began to fail them, they proceeded to soak and eat hides.  Then these, too, were used up, and the majority, having waited for rough water and a squall so that no one might man a ship to oppose them, sailed out with the determination either to perish or to secure provender.  They assailed the countryside without warning and plundered every quarter indiscriminately.  Those left behind committed a monstrous deed; for when they grew very faint, they turned against and devoured one another.

[Sidenote:—­13—­] This was the condition of the men in the city.  The rest, when they had laden their boats with more than the latter could bear, set sail after waiting this time also for a great storm.  They did not succeed, however, in making any use of it.  The Romans, noticing [Sidenote:  A.D. 196 a.u. 949] that their vessels were overheavy and depressed almost to the water’s edge, put out against them.  They assailed the company, which was scattered about as wind and flood chose to dispose them, and really engaged in nothing like a naval contest but crushed the enemy’s boats mercilessly, striking many with their boat-hooks, ripping up many with their beaks, and actually capsizing some by their mere onset.  The victims were unable to do anything, however much they might have wished it:  and when they attempted to flee in any direction either they would be sunk by force of the wind, which encountered them with the utmost violence, or else they would be overtaken by the enemy and destroyed.  The inhabitants of Byzantium, as they watched this, for a time called unceasingly upon the gods and kept uttering now one shout and now another at the various events, according as each one was affected by the spectacle or the disaster enacted before his eyes.  But when they saw their friends perishing all together, the united throng sent up a chorus of groans and wailings, and thereafter they mourned for the rest of the day and the whole night.  The entire number of wrecks proved so great that some drifted upon the islands and the Asiatic coast, and the defeat became known by these relics before it was reported.  The next day the Byzantines had the horror increased even above what it had been.  For, when the surf had subsided, the whole sea in the vicinity of Byzantium was covered with corpses and wrecks with blood, and many of the remains were cast up on shore, with the result that the catastrophe, now seen in its details, appeared even worse than when in process of consummation.