4 Maccabees 15:20-22

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

²⁰ When you saw the flesh of children burned^[a] upon the flesh of other children, severed hands upon hands, scalped heads upon heads, and corpses fallen on other corpses, and when you saw the place filled with many spectators because of the children’s torments, you did not shed tears. ²¹ Neither the melodies of sirens nor the songs of swans attract the attention of their hearers as did the voices of the children in torture calling to their mother. ²² How great and how many torments the mother then suffered as her sons were tortured on the wheel and with the hot irons!