The verse calls them "the precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold" (Lamentations 4:2). According to Gittin 58a, the Jewish children taken captive to Rome after the Temple's destruction were so beautiful that they literally outshone precious metal.
The school of Rabbi Sheila taught that only two measures of fine gold existed in the entire world—one in Rome, one elsewhere. The children of Jerusalem were not covered in gold. They were so stunning that they made gold look dull by comparison.
The Roman aristocracy exploited this beauty. Noblemen who had previously placed artistic images beside their beds during intimacy—hoping to conceive attractive children—now brought Jewish children for the same purpose. They tied the captive children to the foot of their beds as living icons of beauty.
The Talmud records a conversation between two of these captive boys. One asked the other: "Where in the Torah is this affliction written?" The other cited (Deuteronomy 28:61): "Every sickness and every plague that is not written in the book of this Torah." The first child said: "How far was I from reaching that verse in my studies?" The answer: one and a half columns of text. "Had I reached it," the child said, "I would not have needed you to tell me."
The image is devastating—enslaved children, subjected to the most dehumanizing conditions, conducting a Torah study session about their own suffering. Their response to horror was not despair but scholarship. Even in captivity, even in degradation, the instinct to locate experience within the framework of Scripture persisted.
Rav Yehuda said in the name of Shmuel, quoting Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel: four hundred boys and four hundred girls were taken captive for the same purpose. When they understood what awaited them, they threw themselves into the sea.