The people came and watched the fighting, cheering and applauding 83 now one side, now the other, like spectators at a gladiatorial contest.  Whenever one side gave ground, and the soldiers began to hide in shops or seek refuge in some private house, they clamoured for them to be dragged out and killed, and thus got the greater part of the plunder for themselves:  for while the soldiers were busy with the bloody work of massacre, the spoil fell to the crowd.  The scene throughout the city was hideous and terrible:  on the one side fighting and wounded men, on the other baths and restaurants:  here lay heaps of bleeding dead, and close at hand were harlots and their companions—­all the vice and licence of luxurious peace, and all the crime and horror of a captured town.  One might well have thought the city mad with fury and mad with pleasure at the same time.  Armies had fought in the city before this, twice when Sulla mastered Rome,[220] once under Cinna.[221] Nor were there less horrors then.  What was now so inhuman was the people’s indifference.  Not for one minute did they interrupt the life of pleasure.  The fighting was a new amusement for their holiday.[222] Caring nothing for either party, they enjoyed themselves in riotous dissipation and took a frank pleasure in their country’s disaster.

The storming of the Guards’ camp was the most troublesome task.  It 84 was still held by some of the bravest as a forlorn hope, which made the victors all the more eager to take it, especially those who had originally served in the Guards.  They employed against it every means ever devised for the storming of the most strongly fortified towns, a ’tortoise’,[223] artillery, earthworks, firebrands.  This, they cried, was the crown of all the toil and danger they had undergone in all their battles.  They had restored the city to the senate and people of Rome, and their Temples to the gods:  the soldier’s pride is his camp, it is his country and his home.  If they could not regain it at once, they must spend the night in fighting.  The Vitellians, for their part, had numbers and fortune against them, but by marring their enemy’s victory, by postponing peace, by fouling houses and altars with their blood, they embraced the last consolations that the conquered can enjoy.  Many lay more dead than alive on the towers and ramparts of the walls and there expired.  When the gates were torn down, the remainder faced the conquerors in a body.  And there they fell, every man of them facing the enemy with all his wounds in front.  Even as they died they took care to make an honourable end.