matter for them will be to be carried off straightway to the prison, and
finally, after suffering extreme torture, to be destroyed. So there
grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no
cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place
neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship,
and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to
these colours be brothers or any other kin. They care neither for things
divine nor human in comparison with conquering in these struggles; and
it matters not whether a sacrilege is committed by anyone at all against
God, or whether the laws and the constitution are violated by friend or
by foe; nay even when they are perhaps ill supplied with the necessities
of life, and when their fatherland is in the most pressing need and
suffering unjustly, they pay no heed if only it is likely to go well
with their "faction"; for so they name the bands of partisans. And even
women join with them in this unholy strife, and they not only follow the
men, but even resist them if opportunity offers, although they neither
go to the public exhibitions at all, nor are they impelled by any other
cause; so that I, for my part, am unable to call this anything except a
disease of the soul. This, then, is pretty well how matters stand among
the people of each and every city.

But at this time the officers of the city administration in Byzantium
were leading away to death some of the rioters. But the members of the
two factions, conspiring together and declaring a truce with each other,
seized the prisoners and then straightway entered the prison and
released all those who were in confinement there, whether they had been
condemned on a charge of stirring up sedition, or for any other unlawful
act. And all the attendants in the service of the city government were
killed indiscriminately; meanwhile, all of the citizens who were
sane-minded were fleeing to the opposite mainland, and fire was applied