how little is requisite to supply the demands of nature, and lavished
their unavailing treasures of gold and silver to obtain the coarse and
scanty sustenance which they would formerly have rejected with disdain.
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. Pompeianus, prefect of the city, had been persuaded, by the
art or fanaticism of some Tuscan diviners, that, by the mysterious force
of spells and sacrifices, they could extract the lightning from the
clouds, and point those celestial fires against the camp of the
Barbarians. The important secret was communicated to Innocent, the
Bishop of Rome; and the successor of St. Peter is accused, perhaps with
foundation, of preferring the safety of the republic to the rigid
severity of the Christian worship. But when the question was agitated in
the senate; when it was proposed, as an essential condition, that those