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 406 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap, xlii Petra was placed in the valour of fifteen hundred Persians, who resisted the assaults of the Eomans, whilst, in a softer vein of earth, a mine was secretly perforated. The wall, supported by slender and temporary props, hung tottering in the air ; but Daoisteus delayed the attack till he had secured a specific re- compense ; and the town was relieved before the return of his messenger from Constantinople. The Persian garrison was reduced to four hundred men, of whom no more than fifty were exempt from sickness or wounds ; yet such had been their inflexible perseverance, that they concealed their losses from the enemy, by enduring, without a murmur, the sight and putrefying stench of the dead bodies of their eleven hundred companions. After their deliverance, the breaches were hastily stopped with sand-bags ; the mine was replenished with earth ; a new wall was erected on a frame of substantial timber ; and a fresh garrison of three thousand men was stationed at Petra to sustain the labours of a second siege. The operations, both of the attack and defence, were conducted with skilful obsti- nacy ; and each party derived useful lessons from the experience of their past faults. A battering ram was invented, of light construction and powerful effect ; it was transported and worked by the hands of forty soldiers ; and, as the stones were loosened by its repeated strokes, they were torn with long iron hooks from the wall. From those walls a shower of darts was incessantly poured on the heads of the assailants, but they were most dangerously annoyed by a fiery composition of sulphur and bitumen, which in Colchos might with some propriety be named the oil of Medea. Of six thousand Eomans who mounted the scaling-ladders, their general, Bessas, was the first, a gallant veteran of seventy years of age ; the courage of their leader, his fall, and extreme danger, animated the irresist- ible effort of his troops ; and their prevailing numbers oppressed the strength, without subduing the spirit, of the Persian garri- son. The fate of these valiant men deserves to be more dis- tinctly noticed. Seven hundred had perished in the siege, two thousand three hundred survived to defend the breach. One thousand and seventy were destroyed with fire and sword in the last assault : and, if seven hundred and thirty were made prisoners, only eighteen among them were found without the marks of honourable wounds. The remaining five hundred