rapidly.  Regarding the battle as over, and the victory as assured, the Romans gave themselves up to sleep or feasting.  But now Sapor saw his opportunity—­the opportunity for which he had perhaps planned and waited.  His light troops on the adjacent hills commanded the camp, and, advancing on every side, surrounded it.  They were fresh and eager for the fray; they fought in the security afforded by the darkness; while the fires of the camp showed them their enemies, worn out with fatigue, sleepy, or drunken.  The result, as might have been expected, was a terrible carnage.  The Persians overwhelmed the legionaries with showers of darts and arrows; flight, under the circumstances, was impossible; and the Roman soldiers mostly perished where they stood.  They took, however, ere they died, an atrocious revenge.  Sapor’s son had been made prisoner in the course of the day; in their desperation the legionaries turned their fury against this innocent youth; they beat him with whips, wounded him with the points of their weapons, and finally rushed upon him and killed him with a hundred blows.

The battle of Singara, though thus disastrous to the Romans, had not any great effect in determining the course or issue of the war.  Sapor did not take advantage of his victory to attack the rest of the Roman forces in Mesopotamia, or even to attempt the siege of any large town.  Perhaps he had really suffered large losses in the earlier part of the day; perhaps he was too much affected by the miserable death of his son to care, till time had dulled the edge of his grief, for military glory.  At any rate, we hear of his undertaking no further enterprise till the second year after the battle, A.D. 350, when he made his third and most desperate attempt to capture Nisibis.

The rise of a civil war in the West, and the departure of Constantius for Europe with the flower of his troops early in the year no doubt encouraged the Persian monarch to make one more effort against the place which had twice repulsed him with ignominy.  He collected a numerous native army, and strengthened it by the addition of a body of Indian allies, who brought a large troop of elephants into the field.  With this force he crossed the Tigris in the early summer, and, after taking several fortified posts, march northwards and invested Nisibis.  The Roman commander in the place was the Count Lucilianus, afterwards the father-in-law of Jovian, a man of resource and determination.  He is said to have taken the best advantage of every favorable turn of fortune in the course of the siege, and to have prolonged the resistance by various subtle stratagems.  But the real animating spirit of the defence was once more the bishop, St. James, who raised the enthusiasm of the inhabitants to the highest pitch by his exhortations, guided them by his counsels, and was thought to work miracles for them by his prayers.  Sapor tried at first the ordinary methods of attack; he battered the walls