PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE
IN LITERATURE AND ART

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY

HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

FRONTISPIECE

S. SEBASTIAN. BY SODOMA

PLAGUE
AND
PESTILENCE
IN
LITERATURE AND ART

BY
RAYMOND CRAWFURD

M.A., M.D. OXON., F.R.C.P.
FELLOW OF KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1914

PREFACE

This volume represents substantially the FitzPatrick Lectures which I had the privilege of delivering at the Royal College of Physicians in 1912. Originally I intended to do no more than gather together into a succinct record the various memorials and reminders of Pestilence that I had met with in my wanderings at home and abroad and in my casual incursions into general literature. Insensibly the desire to understand supplanted the desire merely to record, and the desire to explain superseded the endeavour to understand. I have turned my attention, as far as practicable, only to the literary and artistic associations of Pestilence, but these have inevitably overlapped the confines of history and of medical science. The latter territory has been invaded only so far as was necessary to ensure a correct orientation to the inquiry. I have thought it wise to let the curtain fall at the end of the eighteenth century, leaving it to my readers to decide what vestiges of the mentality of distant centuries have survived into this twentieth. A little reflection on this will afford a most salutary lesson to all of us.

January 1914.

LIST OF PLATES

CHAPTER I

The scattered records of literature afford a valuable, but neglected, contribution to the study of epidemic pestilence. They show us pestilence as an affair of the mind, as medical literature has shown it as an affair of the body. They teach us too the humiliating lesson that, in spite of the progress of civilization, in spite of the apparent growth of humanity, in spite of the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge, human nature has again and again reverted to the primitive instincts of savagery in face of the crushing calamity of epidemic pestilence. The superficial student of psychology may find it difficult to believe that, so late as 1630 in Milan, so late as 1656 in Naples, so late as 1771 in Moscow, the blood-lust of a maddened populace sought and found a sedative in an orgy of human sacrifice. But so it was. And in this homing instinct of the human mind is to be found the clue to much in the records of literature and art that else is wholly meaningless. It is a grim chapter of history that lies before us, but maybe we shall find here and there some spiritual Bethel reared out of the hard stones on which suffering humanity has lain its weary head.

The mind of primitive man conceives no power over nature higher than his own: so is his attitude conditioned to disease. He sees in disease only some evil magic, exercised by man on man. The Australian native believes that the assailant transmits disease by pointing some object at his victim, who in turn looks to magic to free him from the disease. In the New Hebrides the idea still persists that the aggressor shoots some charmed material at the victim by means of bow and arrow. Medicine has not yet emerged from magic. The human mind, as it passes to higher stages of enlightenment, does not wholly discard its primitive beliefs: of this we find abundant testimony in early records of pestilence. In Pharaoh’s plagues mark the importance of the manual acts, the stretching out of the rod, the smiting of the dust, the sprinkling of ashes. Again, when the Philistines of Ashdod ask for deliverance from plague, the diviners enjoin them to make images of their emerods, or swellings. This is crude magic—imitative magic—the essence of which is that any effect may be produced by imitating it. It is the spirit in which a savage sprinkles water when he wishes rain to fall.

As his own impotence is borne in on man, he comes to look beyond himself alike for the cause and cure of his disease; but human agency still bounds his whole horizon. He looks to those likest himself in nature, the imperishable spirits of his own departed dead. Endued with bodily form, their ghosts need offerings of food and drink, and humble homage of prayer. Neglect of these is recompensed by the sending of sickness and death. This cult prevailed in the religion of young Rome and in the Greek worship of beings of the underworld (χθόνιοι), and may be found to-day in Oceania. Such a deified spirit of the dead might exert his influence in dreams to those who slept over his abode. Such is the germ of the incubation ritual of the demigod Asclepius, who revealed remedies for sickness, and was invoked for deliverance from pestilence. Strabo says that Tricca in Thessaly was the oldest sanctuary of Asclepius, who was the deified ancestor of the Phlegyae and Minyae, the ruling family of Tricca.

With the emergence of the idea of a separable soul came the belief in its assumption after death of animal forms, and chief of these the mysterious earth-dwelling serpent, darting pestilence from his barbed tongue. The association of the serpent with disease and pestilence is wellnigh world-wide. The Vedas teem with it: classical and Christian literature and art are full of it. We find it in Ovid,[1] in Gregory of Tours,[2] in Paul the Deacon,[3] and in many other writers. The Book of Numbers too (xxi. 6 seq.) retains this imagery of pestilence: ‘And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.’ Imitative magic—the healing of like by like—is still the weapon with which Moses counters the pestilence.

In Fernando Po,[4] when an epidemic breaks out among children, it is customary to set up a serpent’s skin on a pole in the middle of the public square, and the mothers bring their infants to touch it. In Madagascar, Sibree[5] found that Ramahavaly, the god of healing, was also the patron of serpents, and was able to employ them as agents of his anger. In many parts of India also it is customary to make a serpent of clay or metal, and offer sacrifices to it on behalf of the sufferer.[6] Apollonius of Tyana also is said to have freed Antioch from scorpions by making a bronze image of a scorpion and burying it under a small pillar in the middle of the city. So the serpent has power not only to excite pestilence, but also to avert it.

From these spirits of the nether world, human or animal in form, it is a short passage to the conception of supernatural beings above the earth, but still in human shape and still with human attributes. Such are Apollo, Asclepius, and Rudra. Traces of the evolution of these deities are usually to be found in the attributes with which they are endowed in later literature and art. The usual symbol of Asclepius is a serpent coiled round a staff. Sacred snakes were kept in his temples,[7] and applicants for healing fed them with cakes.[8] Cures were frequently effected in the sanctuaries of Asclepius by serpents stealing out and licking the wounds of patients. The god-man finally supersedes the serpent, but conservative religious sentiment retains the older object of worship as the symbol and associate of the new. In Greek legend it is the serpent from which Asclepius learns the art of healing: true, Homer makes Chiron his teacher. Numerous other legends of the serpent origin of medicine survive. Polyindus the seer is said to have learnt the herbs that can restore men to life by observing how the serpents raised their dead to life. In Cashmere[9] the descendants of the Naga (serpent) tribes attribute their special skill in healing to knowledge bestowed on their ancestors by serpents: and the Celts acquired their medical lore from drinking serpent broth. As with Asclepius, so also we shall see with Apollo. Apollo in very truth slays the man-killing Python, and himself becomes also the sender of pestilence. He not only smites with disease the doer of evil, but wards it off from the upright. His are the arrows that scatter plague: but he is also the best of physicians. Such is the Apollo of the Iliad.

PLATE I (Face Page 4)

Homer’s[10] aged priest Chryses, when he calls upon Apollo to avenge the ravishing of his daughter, invokes him as God of the Silver Bow (Ἀργυρότοξος). Apollo hears his prayer, and

Down from Olympus’ heights he passed, his heart Burning with wrath: behind his shoulders hung His bow and ample quiver: at his back Rattled the fateful arrows as he moved: Like the night-cloud he passed: and from afar He bent against the ships and sped the bolt: And fierce and deadly twanged the silver bow: First on the mules and dogs, on man the last, Was poured the arrowy storm; and through the camp Constant and numerous blazed the funeral fires. Nine days the heavenly Archer on the troops Hurled his dread shafts.[11]

Homer’s picture of the Archer Apollo has inspired one at least of the masterpieces of Graeco-Roman sculpture. Apollo the Avenger sends the pestilence in punishment of sin. Homer sets it as a signal evidence of divine displeasure in the forefront of his epic, as does Sophocles after him in the greatest of his tragedies. Apollo is pictured as the god who spreads the plague by arrows shot from his bow. He swoops down with impetuous onset, like the sudden fall of night in Mediterranean lands, as the ‘pestilence that walketh in darkness’ and ‘the arrow that flieth by day’. The plague is first epizootic, falling on mules and dogs, then epidemic among the Greek host. A council is called, and Achilles advises that some prophet or priest be summoned to say what propitiatory sacrifices have been neglected:

If for neglected hecatombs or prayers He blames us: or if fat of lambs and goats May soothe his anger and the plague assuage.

The seer Calchas shows them that it is sent rather as a punishment for flagrant sin, the sin of Agamemnon in carrying off Chryseis. It is for no neglect of honorific sacrifices nor for neglected prayers that pestilence has come upon them. Chryseis must be sent back, and expiation be made to Apollo with sacrifices, after the whole host has been purified in the doubly cleansing water of the sea. So Chryseis is sent back and

Next proclamation through the camp was made To purify the host; and in the sea, Obedient to the word, they purified: Then to Apollo solemn rites performed With faultless hecatombs of bulls and goats, Upon the margin of the watery waste: And wreathed in smoke the savour rose to heaven.

Thus they offer the sacrifice of atonement for sin, with the ablutions meet for a solemn lustration of the people. Then when the plague is stayed, and not till then, may they join in the glad eucharistic feast of meat-offerings and libations of red wine, the whole assemblage taking it in company with the god, crowning the cups with flowers and chanting hymns of praise.

The Apollo of the Iliad, like the serpent of old, is not only the sender but also the averter of pestilence.

Homer’s plague marks a stage at which prayer and sacrifice have displaced magic in the struggle with pestilence. From this time on the study of pestilence is inextricably blended with that of the evolution of religion. Prayer and sacrifice follow inevitably from the conception of the majestic man-god. He must be approached on bended knee with request for help: his is by right the homage of prayer. His worshipper approaches him as he would an earthly potentate: he cleanses himself, he begs for grace in humble posture, he gives him of his best. Hence arise purification, prayer, and sacrifice. At first, as in Homer, it is the body that is purified: the offering of a clean heart and a right spirit is of later growth. So long as the god is humanly conceived, food and drink will be the meet offerings of sacrifice. Later with the conception of a god dwelling aloft, as in the Homeric verse, the sweet savour of the sacrifice, or of the scented smoke of incense rising to heaven, will find peculiar favour in his sight. Primitive sacrifice is essentially social: it is a banquet in which the worshippers join in communion with the god: it is the true parent of the lectisternium. Early religion has no doubts of the god’s good-will, if duly solicited: hence the joyousness of dance and song attendant on the eucharistic feast, the worshippers being convinced that the sacrifice has restored them to the favour of the god. The stern god, the God of the Old Testament, slow to forgive, has no place in primitive theology. Hymns, such as the Greek warriors sang in jubilant unison to Apollo, are the first dim gropings of language into the domains of literature. Paeans of this kind were chanted in the sanctuaries of Asclepius after successful acts of healing.

In early Indian myth Rudra is the god who lets fly the arrows of pestilence. Read this prayer to Rudra from the Atharvaveda[12]: there are many like it in the older Rig-Veda, which reached near its present form as early as 1500 b.c.

Prayer to Bhava[13] and Sava[14] for protection from dangers.

1. O Bhava and Sava, be merciful, do not attack us: ye lords of beings, lords of cattle, reverence be to you twain! Discharge not your arrow even after it has been laid (on the bow) and has been drawn! Destroy not our bipeds and our quadrupeds.

7. May we not conflict with Rudra, the archer with the dark crest, the thousand-eyed powerful one, the slayer of Ardhaka!

12. Thou, O crested god, earnest in (thy hand) that smites thousands, a yellow golden bow that slays hundreds: Rudra’s arrow, the missile of the gods, flies abroad: reverence be to it, in whatever direction from here (it flies).

19. Do not hurl at us thy club, thy divine bolt: be not incensed at us, O lord of cattle! Shake over some other than us the celestial branch!

26. Do not, O Rudra, contaminate us with fever, or with poison, or with heavenly fire: cause this lightning to descend elsewhere than upon us!

Other gods than Rudra can stem the pestilence. ‘Vayu [the wind] shall bend the points of the enemies’ bows, Indra shall break their arms, so that they shall be unable to lay on their arrows: Aditya [the sun] shall send their missiles astray, and Krandramas [the moon] shall bar the way of the enemy that has not started.’[15] Like the Madonna of the Christian Church Aditya staves off the arrows of pestilence. The Aryan warrior certainly, the primitive Greek probably, used poisoned arrows.

The language of the 91st Psalm reveals the same imagery as do the Homeric epic and the Vedic hymns.

‘I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my stronghold: my God, in him will I trust. For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence. He shall defend thee under his wings, and thou shalt be safe under his feathers: his faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day: For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday. A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee.’

The arrows of pestilence have sunk deep into the tissue of many languages. Practically all the Hebrew words for plague (Maggefah, Negef, Naga, Makkah) indicate a blow. Our English ‘plague’ is derived through the Latin plaga from the Greek πληγή, a blow: so too the German plage. The French fléau—a flail or a plague—embodies the same idea of a blow, and is derived from the Latin flagellum and the Greek θλίβω. To-day even physicians must needs call the poisons of pestilence ‘toxines’, as though they were arrow-poisons discharged from a bow (τόξον from τυγχάνω = I hit). The Arabians speak of being ‘stung ’ or ‘pricked’ with plague, recalling respectively the serpents and the arrows of pestilence.

Passing allusion has been made above to the plagues of Pharaoh: it remains only to be said that there is now pretty general agreement that these ten plagues represent merely the seasonal variations, to which Egypt is peculiarly liable, magnified in Jewish oral tradition. Perhaps the last plague, the death of the first-born, at the April of the exodus (circa 1220 b.c.) may have been a true pestis puerorum, falling with chief severity on those who lacked the immunity afforded by a previous epidemic. It was the incursion of Libyans and of the nations of the Greek seas into Egypt, at least as much as the Biblical plagues, that enabled the Israelitish serfs to make good their escape.

During the period of wandering in the wilderness Korah, Dathan, and Abiram revolted against the ascendancy of Moses and Aaron, and God caused them to be swallowed up with all their households by an earthquake. Some of the children of Israel murmured against their fate. Those that did so were visited with a plague, that carried off 14,700 persons. The plague was stayed by Aaron offering incense as an atonement on the altar—sacrifice still, but the sacrifice only of a sweet savour to a God dwelling in heaven. The juxtaposition, if it be not permissible to say the association, of earthquake and pestilence in this narrative is noteworthy, in view of the widespread belief in their causal relationship, in later times.

All through the Old Testament plague is regarded, as here, as a direct consequence of God’s anger. In the New Testament it figures but little, and then rather as corrective than punitive. The God of the Old Testament is a God of vengeance: only in the later Prophets do we find even a foreshadowing of the God of love and forgiveness, the God of the New Testament. In portraying pestilence Art has retained this conception of God as a stern punisher of wrongdoing, but in the personality of Christ, approached through the mediation of the Madonna and Saints, has recognized the New Testament conception of God.

The entrance into Canaan was the beginning to the Israelites of a long period of warfare with surrounding tribes. At last, in the pitched battle of Eben-ezer, the Philistines crushed the army of Israel, captured the ark of the covenant, and carried it off to Ashdod, where they placed it in the temple of their own national god, Dagon. On two successive nights the image of Dagon was mysteriously thrown down from its pedestal. ‘The hand of the Lord was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the coasts thereof.’ The men of Ashdod made haste to send away the ark to Gath, another Philistine city, but here, too, God ‘smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts’. From Gath it was sent to Ekron with like result: ‘for there was a deadly destruction throughout all the city; the hand of God was very heavy there. And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the cry of the city went up to heaven.’ After seven months of pestilence, the Philistines called for the priests and diviners, to inquire in what way they should send back the ark. These told them that, if they wished for deliverance from the plague, the ark must on no account be sent back empty, but with a trespass-offering of five golden emerods and five golden mice, ‘images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land.’ The ark was to be sent in a new cart, drawn by two milch kine, while their calves were kept at home. If the kine took the straight way by the coast to Beth-shemesh, they would know that it was God that had smitten them, ‘but if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that smote us: it was a chance that happened to us. And the men did so: and took two milch kine, and tied them to the cart, and shut up their calves at home: And they laid the ark of the Lord upon the cart, and the coffer with the mice of gold and the images of their emerods. And the kine took the straight way to the way of Beth-shemesh,and went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left; and the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the border of Beth-shemesh. And they of Beth-shemesh were reaping their wheat-harvest in the valley: and they lifted up their eyes, and saw the ark, and rejoiced to see it. And the cart came into the field of Joshua, a Beth-shemite, and stood there, where there was a great stone: and they clave the wood of the cart, and offered the kine a burnt-offering unto the Lord. And the Levites took down the ark of the Lord, and the coffer that was with it, wherein the jewels of gold were, and put them on the great stone: and the men of Beth-shemesh offered burnt offerings and sacrificed sacrifices the same day unto the Lord ..., which stone remaineth unto this day in the field of Joshua, the Beth-shemite.’ Fifty thousand and seventy of the people of Beth-shemesh were smitten with the plague, ‘because they had looked into the ark of the Lord.’

In its essential features the narrative of this [plague of Ashdod] is a mere replica of the Homeric plague. The manifest cause is God’s displeasure, but when it falls on Israelites, God’s chosen people, as well as on Philistines, it is perplexing, for knowledge of contagion or communicability is as yet unborn. But an explanation is ready to hand—the Israelites also have offended God by looking into the ark. The sin-offerings are to be representations in gold of the disease, akin to the votive offerings of diseased parts dedicated in the sanctuaries of Asclepius, and representations of mice, which then and after were generally associated with pestilence—imitative magic again in its simplest form. The sacrificial stone is left as a commemorative altar for all time. Religion has now appeared to reinforce magic. The Philistine diviners do indeed hazard the thought that the plague may have been a mere ‘chance that happened to us’, and so faintly foreshadow a belief in the natural causation of epidemic disease.

Have we sufficient data to establish the identity of this contagious pestilence? It broke out on the sea-coast among a race of maritime traders, and spread from the coast to other inland towns. It lasted more than seven months. It took on two forms, a severe type with early death, and a less fatal type, in which swellings (so-called emerods) developed in the secret parts, a comprehensive term which habitually included the whole area adjacent to the genitals, and therein the groins. On these data alone it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was true oriental plague, with a proportion of bubonic cases, a disease that throughout its recorded history has hugged this corner of the Levant.

Votive offerings for the healing of disease generally portrayed the part diseased, rather than the actual disease, the latter so often defying plastic representation. But, in the case of a simple swelling, it is natural that the disease itself should be modelled.

It is tempting to assert with confidence a direct causal connexion between the morbid swellings and the mice, for rats and mice were ill distinguished from each other until recent times. The matter is further complicated by the fact that there is considerable doubt as to the authenticity of parts, at least, of the narrative. The composition of the Books of Samuel ranged over some seven centuries, from 900-200 b.c., and the mouse story is believed to be a late interpolation, of which it is impossible to fix the date. But in the text, as it stands, the mice are designated ‘mice that mar the land’, and ancient literature abounds in records of appalling devastation of crops by the agency of field-mice. Aelian,[16] Aristotle,[17] Strabo,[18] Theophrastus, Pliny, and others testify to this. Loeffler[19] gives an account of a Thessalian corn-harvest destroyed by a horde of field-voles, a field being completely devastated in a single night. Mice were, in fact, one prominent cause of the famine-plagues[20] of history. Viewed in this light, it helps us to understand another Biblical pestilence, that fell on the army of Sennacherib, in 701 b.c., at Pelusium. This campaign of Sennacherib was undertaken to quell a general revolt of the western states against Assyrian supremacy and the payment of tribute to the Assyrian king. The revolt was fomented, seemingly, by Merodach-Baladan, whom Sargon had ousted from the kingship of Babylon, and who now drew Hezekiah into the revolt. He sent an embassy with gifts to Hezekiah, nominally to congratulate him on his recovery from a severe illness, which the Bible narrative terms ‘a boil’. This may perhaps indicate true pustular plague, but forms of boil (e. g. Baghdad boil), quite distinct from plague, are familiar occurrences in several regions of the East. Sennacherib first crushed Merodach-Baladan, and then advanced against Hezekiah, who at once called on Tirhaquah, the Ethiopian viceroy of Egypt, for help. At the pitched battle of Altaku Sennacherib defeated Tirhaquah, and shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem, to which he proceeded to lay siege. Meantime Tirhaquah rallied his army and again advanced to the aid of Hezekiah, so that Sennacherib was compelled to march south against him. At Pelusium, on the border of Egypt, Sennacherib’s army was suddenly destroyed by a pestilence, that compelled him to withdraw the remnant at once to Assyria. ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.’[21] Isaiah confirms in detail the narrative of the Book of Kings, and the Chaldaean chronicler, Berosus, in a fragment preserved by Josephus, states also that Sennacherib was driven back by pestilence. The prism inscriptions of Sennacherib are characteristically silent on the subject: they tell only how he shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem, like a bird in a cage.

Pelusium has an evil reputation in the annals of pestilence. Procopius cites it as the starting-point of Justinian’s plague. There, too, one of the Crusading expeditions developed plague; and again, in a.d. 1799, the army of Napoleon was infected there and carried the disease into Syria. The explanation is not far to seek. The eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean, and more particularly Syria, Egypt, and Libya, were the points to which the merchants of the East brought their merchandise for exchange with that of the West. From time immemorial Arab caravans and camels had traversed well-worn trade routes from the East abutting on the Mediterranean at Tyre, Sidon, and Pelusium, and later at Alexandria. In these meeting-places of East and West, as also at Constantinople, plague would most readily, and actually did, find a footing. Possibly the eastern Delta may have been an endemic centre, but more likely, as was believed in the late Chinese plague, a distributing centre was an original source.

Byron in his lines in the Hebrew Melodies on the ‘Destruction of Sennacherib’ has caught the passionate note of fervid patriotism, on which the chosen race celebrated their deliverance from the heathen enemy by the might of their own God, and has retained the imagery and simple diction of the Bible story:

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed on the face of the foe as he passed: And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still.

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.

Herodotus[22] relates that the tradition of this wonderful deliverance lived on in Egypt also. His cicerone in the temple of Ptah at Memphis told him the following tale. ‘The next king was a priest of Vulcan, called Sethos. This monarch despised and neglected the warrior class of the Egyptians, as though he did not need their services. Among other indignities which he offered them, he took from them the lands which they possessed under all the previous kings, consisting of twelve acres of choice land for each warrior. Afterwards, therefore, when Sennacherib, king of the Arabians and Assyrians, marched his vast army into Egypt, the warriors one and all refused to come to his aid. On this the monarch, greatly distressed, entered into the inner sanctuary, and before the image of the god bewailed the fate that impended over him. As he wept he fell asleep, and dreamed that the god came and stood at his side, bidding him be of good cheer, and go boldly forth to meet the Arabian host, which would do him no hurt, as he himself would send those who should help him. Sethos then, relying on the dream, collected such of the Egyptians as were willing to follow him, who were none of them warriors, but traders, artisans, and market people, and with these marched to Pelusium, which commands the entrance into Egypt, and there pitched his camp. As the two armies lay here opposite one another, there came in the night a multitude of field-mice, which devoured all the quivers and bow-strings of the enemy and ate the thongs by which they managed their shields. Next morning they commenced their flight, and great multitudes fell, as they had no arms with which to defend themselves. There stands to this day in the temple of Vulcan a stone statue of Sethos, with a mouse in his hand, and an inscription to this effect: “Look on me and learn to reverence the gods.”’

Strabo[23] has a story of mice eating up the bow-strings, and a variant of it appears also in Chinese annals,[24] so that it may be regarded as merely a figurative expression for some providential deliverance from an enemy, and in the case of Sennacherib the medium of deliverance was pestilence.

It is impossible to say whose was the statue Herodotus ascribes to Sethos, for no king Sethos is known in Egyptian history. Perhaps it was a statue of Horus, the Egyptian equivalent of Apollo, or not impossibly of Apollo himself, for we have abundant evidence of the association of the mouse with Apollo. In the pestilence of the Iliad,[25] Chryses addresses him as Mouse-God (Σμινθεύς). Strabo says that the statue of Apollo Smintheus in Chrysa, a town of the Troad, had a mouse beneath his foot: so also has a bronze coin now in the British Museum. De Witte[26] has figured coins of Alexandria, the more ancient Hamaxitus, in the Troad, in which Apollo Smintheus is represented with his bow, and a mouse on his hand. Aelian[27] says that an effigy of the mouse stood beside the tripod of Apollo. An ancient bas-relief, of uncertain date, illustrating the Homeric plague and the offerings of the Greeks to Apollo Smintheus, also shows a mouse on a tripod. Another shows Apollo with a mouse beneath his chin: so, too, does a coin of Tenedos. White mice were actually kept beneath the altar in the temple of Apollo Smintheus at Hamaxitus, and were fed at the public expense. Strabo[28] says that the worship of Apollo Smintheus extended to the whole coast of Asia Minor and to the neighbouring islands.

Many votive offerings in the form of mice have been found, at Alexandria Troas,[29] in Palestine,[30] and elsewhere, and Strabo suggests that the worship of mice originated in a desire to propitiate mice, so as to induce them not to ravage the cornfields. The propitiation of animals,[31] and particularly of those that infest the crops, is common in the worship of primitive men. The Philistines are said to have made images of the mice that marred their land, and sent them out of their country, so as to induce the real mice to depart also. In a later stage of worship, when a god has supplanted the animal, the god is propitiated instead of the pest itself: hence Mouse Apollo,[32] Locust Apollo,[33] Wolf Apollo,[34] and Zeus Averter of Flies.[35] Even lowlier pests are absorbed into the godhead, so that we have Apollo Erythibius[36] (ἐρυσίβη = mildew), and the Romans personified it and worshipped it as Robigus[37] (robigo = mildew). The Chams of Indo-China offer sacrifices to a rude pillar-idol, called Yang-tikuh (god-rat), when swarms of rats infest the fields.[38] Thus Apollo seems to stand in the same relation to the mouse, as Asclepius to the serpent. He not only sends pestilence, but also wards it off both from man and from crops. And viewing all the facts we may conclude with some certainty that the association of mice with famine-pestilence was well recognized, but of any knowledge at this time of the association of rats with plague there is little evidence.

Plutarch[39] asserts that the Persian Magi killed all their mice and rats, because they and the gods they worshipped entertained a natural antipathy to them, a feeling which, he says, they shared with the Arabians and Ethiopians. One is curious to know what may have been the real ground of this antipathy, for which Plutarch advances the current explanation. More than likely it was that experience had taught these nations the relation of these animals to famine and perhaps to pestilence as well.

Nicholas Poussin (1593-1665) painted a picture, now in the Louvre, of the [plague of Ashdod]. An inferior replica hangs in the National Gallery, and yet another in the Academy at Lisbon. Horror is the dominant note of a composition that is full of movement. High up between the columns of a temple stands the ark of God. Beside it the body of Dagon lies prostrate on its pedestal, with head and hands lying below. A priest points out with his hand the mutilated image to a group of awe-stricken men, who from their air of authority seem to be elders of the people. A swarm of rats has invaded the town. The streets are strewn with dead and dying of each sex and of every age, and bearers carry away the corpses. Broken columns, lying here and there among the plague-stricken, heighten the sense of death and destruction. In the centre of the foreground is a group that Poussin has borrowed from Raphael. A woman with bared breasts lies dead between her two infants: one is dead, the other is approaching the dead mother’s breast. The father stoops down with hand stretched out to hold it back: with his other he muffles his mouth and nose to shut out infection. To the right another man holds back an older child who is coming towards the dead woman. One man is huddled up in a dying convulsion, another lies exhausted on a broken pillar. On the steps a sick man implores assistance from one who hurries past him to avoid infection. To the left a man with pity depicted on his face regards another writhing in agony. The whole scene is set in the centre of the town in an open space surrounded by massive buildings in the classical style that Poussin acquired among the ruined monuments of Rome. None of the bodies show any distinctive signs of plague, the disease clearly indicated by the presence of swarms of rats.

PLATE II PLAGUE OF ASHDOD. BY N. POUSSIN

Photograph by Giraudon, Paris (Face Page 18)

PLATE III PLAGUE OF DAVID. BY P. MIGNARD

(Face Page 19)

One other Biblical[40] pestilence, the [plague of David], presents to us another and more enduring image of pestilence, and represents also a stage at which religion has superseded magic. David, in punishment for his presumption in numbering the people, is given the choice of seven years of famine, three months of fleeing before his enemies, or three days of pestilence. He chose the last, and seventy thousand of his people perished. ‘And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the Angel of the Lord stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem.’ ‘And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it,’ God checked him by the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. ‘And the Lord commanded the angel; and he put up his sword again into the sheath thereof.’ Then the prophet Gad told David to set up an altar in the threshing-floor of Araunah. So David bought it and set up an altar and offered sacrifice to God, and the plague was stayed: on the site of this altar Solomon built the Temple.

Here again pestilence figures as a signal evidence of God’s displeasure. An angel is the agent by which He spreads the plague, and the drawn sword, Israel’s favourite weapon, replaces the bow and arrow. The sheathing of the sword is the sign that the pestilence is ended. This imagery appears again and again in Christian literature and art, and seems to have its origin here. Angels are a beautiful fancy of all religions of the East. So vivid is the primitive conception of pestilence, that we find it personified from earliest times: now as an archer-god: now as one walking in darkness: now as an angel with drawn sword. David offers the same expiatory sacrifice and rears a commemorative altar, as was done in the [plague of Ashdod].

Pierre Mignard (1610-95) has painted the [plague of David]. The original is lost, but an engraving by Audran is to be had at the Chalcographie of the Louvre. As with Poussin, the scene is set with a background of classical architecture, but the rendering of the figures shows little trace of classical feeling. The central theme is the idea of devotion in the presence of suffering. An angel in the sky is pouring forth sulphurous fumes from two vessels, as brimstone and fire were rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah. On the peristyle of a temple King David offers sacrifices of atonement to stay the plague, while the people prostrate themselves in attitudes of supplication around the steps of the temple. In the background is a cascade of water falling into a basin, beside which one man lies dying, while others endeavour to slake their thirst. Two men hasten forward to drive them from the basin, before they pollute its water. This incident is derived with some licence of interpretation from the narrative of Thucydides. In the centre of the picture, reminiscent of Raphael, a young woman lies dying in her husband’s arms, her dead child still stretched across her knees. In the foreground is a charcoal brazier giving off purifying fumes. Near it a doctor, who has just incised a bubo in a woman’s armpit, falls back in a state of collapse, dropping his bistoury and bowl, while his assistant, who is still holding the woman’s arm away from her side, grasps at his master to prevent him falling. A bystander makes off in horrified dismay. Compassion and cowardice are here ranged side by side. To the right two men are distributing food and medicine to the sick. An attendant kneels to offer a stricken man a cup of water, while a torch-bearer follows with a lighted torch to disinfect the air. Close beside them lies a dog dead. To the left one young woman is giving some remedy in a spoon to another stretched on the ground, while behind them stand a woman and child, both in tears. Detached incidents fill in the picture. A woman grasps a delirious man as he escapes from his house. A man carries off a girl in his arms. A woman tears her hair over the dead body of her child. A woman draws up food to her window with basket and cord.

With the exception of the [plague of Ashdod], it is difficult to hazard a guess at the nature of these Biblical plagues. All through the Old Testament, sword, famine, and pestilence are habitually linked together. As plague has followed the flag of commerce, so famine and typhus have followed the flag of war. During the Thirty Years’ War the whole of Central Europe was devastated by famine and typhus. They were rampant in the wake of Napoleon’s armies, and thousands perished of typhus during the retreat from Moscow. In the Crimea typhus decimated the ill-fed army of the French, and only to-day, as it were, have we learnt that the body-louse stands as the connecting link between famine and typhus. The eighteenth century in Ireland, even when war was absent, was an almost unbroken record of famine and typhus, and Ireland was quit of epidemic typhus only when she had so widened her area of supplies as to ensure immunity from famine. For her deliverance from typhus Ireland is beholden to her potatoes, not to her physicians. In the light then of the evidence of modern history, typhus may well have figured prominently in the list of Biblical plagues. Still there are not wanting many instances in which true plague has followed hard on the heels of famine; and in India cholera and dysentery only too often appear, to complete the work that famine has but half done.

CHAPTER II

The conception of pestilence as a punishment for sin is as prominent in Greek as in Hebrew literature. We have seen it in the Homeric story, and we see it again, where we should less expect it, in Sophocles. Pestilence still centres round the personality of Apollo, but whereas in Homer Apollo stays the plague, in Sophocles he is appealed to only for knowledge, whereby to stay it. Homer endows him with special power, Sophocles only with special knowledge. In Homer he is the god of the bright light (φοῖβος), that dispels the darkness of pestilence: in Sophocles his is the light that illumines the dark places of mind.

The Oedipus Tyrannus seems to have been first publicly performed between 429-420 b.c., possibly therefore before the plague of Athens had finally died out. Sophocles is certainly not describing the plague of Athens in the guise of a Theban plague, but it must needs have coloured his thoughts as well as those of his audience. His description of the pestilence blighting the crops, and causing murrain among cattle and disease and death among men, suggests one of the famine plagues common in ancient history. Hesiod[41] was not unaware of them (λιμὸν ὁμοῦ καὶ λοιμόν). Sophocles is the first writer to attempt even in outline a description of pestilence, and in doing so he has drawn the picture of pestilence sent by the gods for the punishment of sin. The way of atonement is sought for at Delphi, and pending this knowledge supplication is made to Athena, Artemis, and Apollo, the deities who control pestilence and have the plague-stricken city in their special keeping. Here is the invocation to Apollo, the Delian Healer:

Shower from the golden string Thine arrows, Lycian King. O Phoebe, let thy fiery lances fly Resistless, as they rove Through Xanthus’ mountain-grove! O Theban Bacchus of the lustrous eye, With torch and trooping Maenads and bright crown, Blaze on the god whom all in Heaven disown.[42]

Set in this archaic atmosphere the Oedipus Tyrannus reads strange beside the realistic record of Thucydides, published only a few years later. But Sophocles has given only in outline what Thucydides has given in arresting detail.

To the historian, the physician, and the man of letters, the account given by Thucydides of the plague of Athens, in the course of the Peloponnesian War, must stand for all time as one of the most remarkable documents in the whole annals of pestilence. In view of the much greater strength of the Lacedaemonian land-force, it was the unwavering policy of Pericles to keep the Athenians within their walls, allowing the Lacedaemonians to exhaust themselves in devastating Attic territory, while retaliating on the coasts of Peloponnesus by the Athenian fleet. Each year, at the approach of the Lacedaemonian army, the inhabitants of Attica flocked within the walls of Athens, bringing with them all their movable property, after sending their sheep and cattle to Euboea and the neighbouring islands, so that the added horror of a great epizootic was averted. The greater number encamped in the vacant spaces of the city and Piraeus, and in and around the numerous temples. Some housed their families in the towers and recesses of the city walls, or in sheds, cabins, tents, or even tubs, disposed throughout the course of the long walls. This was the overcrowded state of beleaguered Athens, when pestilence broke out in the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430 b.c.), putting the policy of Pericles to a crucial test.

After ravaging the plain, the Peloponnesians devastated the coastlands of Attica, first on the south coast, and then on the north. Pericles forthwith equipped an Athenian naval squadron, and launched his counterstroke against the Peloponnese. This fleet carried 4,000 hoplites and 300 cavalry, who ravaged the district round Epidaurus, and other towns on the adjacent coast. It seems, however, despite the rumour to the contrary, which Thucydides faithfully records, that neither the pestilence nor the operations of this expeditionary force actually accelerated the departure of the Lacedaemonians, for they stayed 40 days, which was longer than any other stay. Pestilence broke out in this expeditionary force, and is doubtless the reason that it returned without accomplishing more. Plutarch indeed says that the Athenians would have captured Epidaurus, but for this outbreak of sickness.

The Athenians also sent another fleet this same summer against Potidaea in Thrace, which was already undergoing a siege at the hands of an Athenian army. Pestilence worked fearful havoc in this supplementary force and spread from it to the troops who were already there, involving a mortality of 1,050 out of a total of 4,000 hoplites, so that the expedition was compelled to return and leave the siege to the troops that were there before them.

In their despair the Athenians vented their angry feelings on Pericles, just as persons in a delirium, says Plutarch,[43] turn on their physician or their father. They urged that the pestilence was due to cooping up in the city in stifling huts a rural population accustomed to an open-air existence, so that they conveyed infection to one another. But popular resentment subsided as quickly as it arose. In a noble speech, which Thucydides reproduces at length, Pericles weaned them to a better mind. His own domestic sufferings may have stirred their sympathy. He lost of the pestilence his only two legitimate sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, his sister, and many relatives and friends. The death of his favourite son, Paralus, left him with no legitimate heir to maintain the family and the hereditary sacred rites. ‘That blow’, says Plutarch,[44] ‘crushed him to earth. He struggled indeed to preserve his wonted impassiveness and to maintain his serene composure. But, as he laid a wreath upon the body and looked upon his dead, the anguish of it all overwhelmed him, and he burst out wailing and sobbing bitterly—a thing which in all his life he had never before done.’ The spectacle of this proud, reserved man, this man who had stood firm as a rock amid the rising tide of popular resentment, humbled before God, humiliated before man, as the iron seared his innermost soul, is one of the most moving pictures in all history and literature.

My God has bowed me down to what I am, My solitude and grief have brought me low.

‘Shortly after this, it appears, the pestilence laid hold on Pericles. The attack was not, as in other cases, sharp and severe. It took the form of an ailment, slight but protracted through a variety of phases, which slowly wasted his strength and undermined the vigour of his mind.’ But if we may judge by the accounts of his death-bed given by Plutarch himself, and by Theophrastus in his Ethics, his mind was free from any taint of insanity.

The first outbreak of pestilence lasted for two years, from the spring of 430 b.c. to that of 428 b.c., then came a partial, but not complete, abatement for one and a half years, followed by another outbreak in 427 b.c. which lasted a year. ‘To the power of Athens’, says Thucydides, ‘certainly nothing was more ruinous. Not less than 4,400 Athenian hoplites, who were on the roll, died, and also 300 horsemen, and an incalculable number of the common people’, estimated by Diodorus Siculus[45] at 10,000 freemen and slaves. Bury[46] puts the total number of Athenian burghers (of both sexes and all ages) at the commencement of the Peloponnesian War at 100,000, and this total was reduced by the pestilence to some 80,000 or less. The metic class and the slaves he estimates roundly at 30,000 and 100,000 respectively, but beyond the unreliable statement of Diodorus Siculus, we have no index of their reduction. In accepting the verdict of Thucydides on the disastrous effects of the pestilence on the power of Athens, we must not forget that there were other influences at work, conspiring to this same result, the consequences of which Pericles had pointed out clearly in his speech before the war. Had it not been for these, Athens would beyond doubt have rallied quickly from the blow, as we shall see that other cities have habitually done in like case with hers.

The circumstances under which the epidemic broke out a second time in Athens cannot have differed greatly from those prevailing at its first onset, for though it was winter and the Lacedaemonian army was not in the field, the surrounding country had been devastated, and most of the peasantry must still have been cooped up, in a state of overcrowding, within the walls. As the pestilence lingered on in Athens, superstition laid fast hold on the populace, under the stress of their protracted sufferings. On the advice of the oracle, they decided to purify the island of Delos, which formerly had been dedicated to Apollo, but latterly had been used as a burial-ground. All the dead were transferred to a neighbouring island Rhene, and a law was passed forbidding henceforth the burial of a corpse or the birth of a child in Delos. The neglected panegyric festival of Apollo was also revived in the island. No stone was left unturned to appease the god, who, the Athenians now were persuaded, had sent them the distemper.

Earthquakes and inundations lasted, as did the pestilence, throughout the summer of 426 b.c. Diodorus Siculus seems to suggest that the earthquakes were sent by Apollo, who had been duly propitiated, to divert the Lacedaemonians from the invasion of Attica. Actually they did effect this, for Agis, King of Sparta, though already arrived at the isthmus, accepted the omen and led his army back. Neither Thucydides nor Diodorus Siculus asserts any direct causal relation between the earthquakes and the pestilence—a belief, which if now vaguely foreshadowed, took definite form only at a later date.

The following is the full narrative[47] of the pestilence, as given by Thucydides:

‘As soon as summer returned, the Peloponnesian army, comprising as before two-thirds of the force of each confederate state, under the command of the Lacedaemonian king Archidamus, the son of Zeuxidamus, invaded Attica, where they established themselves and ravaged the country. They had not been there many days when the plague broke out at Athens for the first time. It is said to have previously smitten many places, particularly Lemnos, but there is no record of so great a pestilence occurring elsewhere, or of such a destruction of human life. For a while physicians, in ignorance of the nature of the disease, sought to apply remedies; but it was in vain, and they themselves were among the first victims, because they oftenest came into contact with it. No human art was of any avail, and as to supplications in temples, enquiries of oracles, and the like, they were utterly useless, and at last men were overpowered by the calamity and gave them all up. The disease is said to have begun south of Egypt in Ethiopia: thence it descended into Egypt and Libya, and after spreading over the greater part of the Persian empire, suddenly fell upon Athens. It first attacked the inhabitants of the Piraeus, and it was supposed that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns, no conduits having as yet been made there. It afterwards reached the upper city, and then the mortality became far greater. As to its probable origin or the causes which might or could have produced such a disturbance of nature, every man, whether a physician or not, will give his own opinion. But I shall describe its actual character, and the symptoms by which any one who knows them beforehand may recognize the disorder, should it ever reappear. For I was myself attacked, and witnessed the sufferings of others.

The season was admitted to have been remarkably free from ordinary sickness; and if anybody was already ill of any other disease, it was absorbed in this. Many who were in perfect health, all in a moment, and without any apparent reason, were seized with violent heats in the head and with redness and inflammation of the eyes. Internally the throat and the tongue were quickly suffused with blood, and the breath became unnatural and fetid. There followed sneezing and hoarseness; in a short time the disorder, accompanied by a violent cough, reached the chest; then fastening lower down, it would move the stomach and bring on all the vomits of bile to which physicians have ever given names; and they were very distressing. An ineffectual retching producing violent straining attacked most of the sufferers; some as soon as the previous symptoms had abated, others not until long afterwards. The body externally was not so very hot to the touch, nor yet pale: it was of a livid colour inclining to red, and breaking out in pustules and ulcers. But the internal fever was intense: the sufferers could not bear to have on them even the finest linen garment. They insisted on being naked, and there was nothing which they longed for more eagerly than to throw themselves into cold water. And many of those who had no one to look after them actually plunged into the cisterns, for they were tormented by unceasing thirst, which was not in the least assuaged whether they drank little or much. They could not sleep: a restlessness which was intolerable never left them. While the disease was at its height the body, instead of wasting away, held out amid these sufferings in a marvellous manner, and either they died on the seventh or ninth day, not of weakness, for their strength was not exhausted, but of internal fever, which was the end of most; or, if they survived, then the disease descended into the bowels and there produced violent ulceration; severe diarrhoea at the same time set in, and at a later stage caused exhaustion, which finally with few exceptions carried them off. For the disorder which had originally settled in the head passed gradually through the whole body, and, if a person got over the worst, would often seize the extremities and leave its mark, attacking the privy parts and the fingers and the toes; and some escaped with the loss of these, some with the loss of their eyes. Some again had no sooner recovered than they were seized with a forgetfulness of all things and knew neither themselves nor their friends.

The malady took a form beyond description, and the fury with which it fastened upon each sufferer was too much for human nature to endure. There was one circumstance in particular which distinguished it from ordinary diseases. The birds and animals which feed on human flesh, although so many bodies were lying unburied, either never came near them, or died if they touched them. This was proved by a remarkable disappearance of the birds of prey, who were not to be seen either about the bodies or anywhere else: while in the case of the dogs the fact was even more obvious, because they live with man.

Such was the general nature of the disease: I omit many strange peculiarities which characterized individual cases. None of the ordinary sicknesses attacked any one while it lasted, or if they did, they ended in the plague. Some of the sufferers died from want of care, others equally who were receiving the greatest attention. No single remedy could be deemed a specific: for that which did good to one did harm to another. No constitution was of itself strong enough to resist or weak enough to escape the attacks: the disease carried off all alike and defied every mode of treatment. Most appalling was the despondency which seized upon any one who felt himself sickening: for he instantly abandoned his mind to despair and, instead of holding out, absolutely threw away his chance of life. Appalling too was the rapidity with which men caught the infection: dying like sheep if they attended on one another: and this was the principal cause of mortality. When they were afraid to visit one another, the sufferers died in their solitude, so that many houses were empty because there had been no one left to take care of the sick; or if they ventured they perished, especially those who aspired to heroism. For they went to see their friends without thought of themselves and were ashamed to leave them, even at a time when the very relations of the dying were at last growing weary and ceased to make lamentations, overwhelmed by the vastness of the calamity. But whatever instances there may have been of such devotion, more often the sick and the dying were tended by the pitying care of those who had recovered, because they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehension. For no one was ever attacked a second time, or with a fatal result. All men congratulated them, and they themselves, in the excess of their joy at the moment, had an innocent fancy that they could not die of any other sickness.

The crowding of the people out of the country into the city aggravated the misery; and the newly-arrived suffered most. For, having no houses of their own, but inhabiting in the height of summer stifling huts, the mortality among them was dreadful, and they perished in wild disorder. The dead lay as they had died, one upon another, while others hardly alive wallowed in the streets and crawled about every fountain craving for water. The temples in which they lodged were full of the corpses of those who died in them: for the violence of the calamity was such that men, not knowing where to turn, grew reckless of all law, human and divine. The customs which had hitherto been observed at funerals were universally violated, and they buried their dead each one as best he could. Many, having no proper appliances, because the deaths in their household had been so frequent, made no scruple of using the burial-place of others. When one man had raised a funeral pile, others would come, and throwing on their dead first, set fire to it; or when some other corpse was already burning, before they could be stopped would throw their own dead upon it and depart.

There were other and worse forms of lawlessness which the plague introduced at Athens. Men who had hitherto concealed their indulgence in pleasure now grew bolder. For seeing the sudden change—how the rich died in a moment, and those who had nothing immediately inherited their property—they reflected that life and riches were alike transitory, and they resolved to enjoy themselves while they could, and to think only of pleasure. Who would be willing to sacrifice himself to the law of honour when he knew not whether he would ever live to be held in honour? The pleasure of the moment and any sort of thing which conduced to it took the place both of honour and of expediency. No fear of God or law of man deterred a criminal. Those, who saw all perishing alike, thought that the worship or neglect of the Gods made no difference. For offences against human law no punishment was to be feared: no one would live long enough to be called to account. Already a far heavier sentence had been passed and was hanging over a man’s head: before that fell, why should he not take a little pleasure?

Such was the grievous calamity which now afflicted the Athenians: within the walls their people were dying, and without, their country was being ravaged. In their troubles they naturally called to mind a verse which the elder men among them declared to have been current long ago:

A Dorian war will come and a plague with it.

There was a dispute about the precise expression: some saying that limos, a famine, and not loimos, a plague, was the original word. Nevertheless, as might have been expected, for men’s memories reflected their sufferings, the argument in favour of loimos prevailed at the time. But if ever in future years another Dorian war arises which happens to be accompanied by a famine, they will probably repeat the verse in the other form. The answer of the oracle to the Lacedaemonians when the God was asked “whether they should go to war or not”, and he replied “that if they fought with all their might, they would conquer, and that he himself would take their part”, was not forgotten by those who had heard of it, and they quite imagined that they were witnessing the fulfilment of his words. The disease certainly did set in immediately after the invasion of the Peloponnesians, and did not spread to the Peloponnesus in any degree worth speaking of, while Athens felt its ravages most severely, and next to Athens the places which were most populous. Such was the history of the plague.’

A careful study, line upon line and word by word, of the description which Thucydides has given of the clinical features of the Athenian pestilence, viewing it on the one hand in the light of the medical knowledge of the time, and on the other in the light of the revelations of modern pathology, can hardly fail to bring home to an unbiased judgement the conviction that we have to do with typhus fever. It is true that it bears a close resemblance to Oriental plague, but whereas the objections to this diagnosis seem to us to be insuperable, we shall hope to show that those which hitherto have appeared obstacles to the diagnosis of typhus fever, are either artificial or based upon an incorrect interpretation of the text. The confusion of typhus fever and Oriental plague prevailed down to comparatively modern times even among medical writers; not only is there a striking resemblance in the clinical picture of the two diseases, but they have been constantly commingled in one and the same epidemic. This is no matter for surprise, when we remember that the flea is the chief agent in the propagation of one disease, and the body-louse of the other.

There is scarcely a single writer of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries on the subject of fevers, who has not commented on the concurrence of malignant fevers with epidemics of Oriental plague. It is true that they do not all identify the malignant fevers as typhus, simply because typhus, though distinguished as a morbid entity by Fracastorius as early as 1546, did not become generally recognized throughout Europe until the eighteenth century, and even then its identity was obscured under a multiplicity of synonyms. Ambroise Paré, in 1568, described a pestilential fever as prevailing in France along with true plague, in which the skin was marked with spots, like the bites of fleas or bugs. Vilalba says that on several occasions during the sixteenth century a spotted fever called Tabardiglio, which is now known to have been typhus, was rife in Spain at the same time as plague, and was much confused with it. According to Lotz a malignant spotted fever was present in London in 1624, which turned to plague in 1625, and back again to spotted fever in 1626. Similarly Sydenham states that the Great Plague of London was preceded and followed by a pestilent fever, which from his description was clearly typhus, and he remarks that it differed from the plague only in the milder character of its symptoms. According to Diemerbroeck spotted fever (typhus) preceded plague in Holland in 1636, and its malignity increased progressively, until finally it became converted into true plague. The same is true of the [plague of Marseilles] in 1720, of the plague of Aleppo in 1760, and of the plague of Moscow in 1771. Hancock, in 1821, asserted that nearly all the most remarkable plagues of the last two centuries had been preceded by typhus. So much for the confusion of these two diseases, due to their concurrence.

Murchison, whose treatise on typhus stands out as a monument of acute and accurate observation, traces out in detail the resemblance of the two diseases. It is no matter only of a general clinical resemblance, such as is common to most acute infectious fevers, though that is striking enough, but beyond this there is a remarkable similarity in particular symptoms, in clinical course, and in complications. There is a tendency to regard buboes as a distinctive feature of plague, but these are found in a small moiety of cases of typhus fever. On the other side of the picture, the petechial eruptions of typhus, its most distinctive feature, are common enough in plague.

It is tempting to shirk the difficulty of a differential diagnosis by assuming that in Athens, as so often elsewhere, there was a simultaneous outbreak of typhus and plague, but the whole evidence points strongly to the presence of typhus, and typhus only. We will endeavour to present the evidence fairly and simply, so that every reader may form his own conclusion, by reference to the appended narrative of Thucydides.

Starting in Ethiopia rumour had it that the disease spread northwards to Egypt and Libya, and thence over the greater part of the Persian Empire, which at that time included almost all of Western Asia, then suddenly it swooped down upon Athens. The same disease was said to have previously attacked Lemnos and many other places, but with much less severity. With Lemnos Thucydides will have had close acquaintance, for it lay in the direct route to Thrace, where he owned property. He is careful to say that he gives this information as well as that of its starting-point and lines of extension only on hearsay evidence. If it were really part of one vast pandemic, it is surprising that he should have no more certain knowledge of its incidence. True, pestilence was raging this self-same year in Rome, but it must not be assumed that it was necessarily of the same character as that at Athens. All through the fifth century Rome was seldom without pestilence, and Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus record a succession of epidemics, some of several years’ duration, following hard one upon another. If the origin in Ethiopia and the subsequent lines of advance are to be accepted, this would certainly constitute a weighty argument in favour of Oriental plague. Of late years an endemic focus of plague has been located in Central Africa, and in its spread the disease was following established routes of commerce, as has habitually been the case. Pandemicity too is an inherent tendency of plague. Typhus has followed for the most part the march of armies, and in the wake of famine, and has shown but little tendency to adhere to the beaten routes of commerce. Typhus has in some instances extended at one and the same time over a wide region, but for the most part it has been over contiguous tracts of land. Thus Hildebrand recorded an epidemic spreading to the whole of Germany, Galicia, Hungary and the Austrian crown-lands.

Thucydides has laid it down that the plague of Athens was an unknown disease. Now there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that bubonic plague was recognized, in its sporadic form, as a clinical entity at the time of Thucydides. The language of a passage in the 2nd Book of the Epidemics, a treatise of the Hippocratic school, seems hardly susceptible of any other interpretation: ὁι ἐπὶ βουβῶσι πυρετοὶ κακόν, πλὴν τῶν ἐφημέρων, καὶ οἰ ἐπὶ πυρετοῖσι βουβῶνες κακίονες (‘fever supervening on buboes is a bad sign, except they be ephemeral: but buboes supervening on fever still worse’). The allusions also to buboes in Aristophanes are so numerous as almost to preclude any other conclusion: and it cannot be argued that these were an aftermath of the epidemic, for Thucydides[48] implicitly asserts the complete disappearance of the disease.

The outbreak of the pestilence first in the Piraeus suggests importation by sea. Sea-carriage is far more characteristic of plague than of typhus, though typhus has been imported often enough from Ireland into England, and was also brought back to England by the troops from Corunna, and to France by the French troops from the Crimea. On the other hand, it was in Piraeus chiefly that the displaced peasantry were crowded together promiscuously in small stifling habitations, affording just those conditions in which typhus has habitually arisen and become epidemic.

Among those epidemic diseases, that in past times have devastated beleaguered cities, typhus unquestionably holds pride of place. Granada in 1489, Metz in 1552, Montpellier in 1623, Reading in 1643, Genoa in 1799, Saragossa in 1808, Dantzig and Wilna in 1813, and Torgau in 1814 all tell the same tale. With our lately acquired knowledge of the transmission of typhus fever by the agency of body-lice, it is easy to understand the prevalence of the disease in epidemic virulence among a beleaguered and overcrowded garrison. Murchison, whose knowledge and experience of typhus were unequalled, unhesitatingly identified the plague of Athens as typhus, both because of this special circumstance of its occurrence and because of the clinical picture as a whole.

The passing remarks of Thucydides on the causation of the pestilence show him not only superior to the superstitious credulity of some of his fellow countrymen, but far in advance of the most enlightened medical opinion of his day. There were still some in Athens, who put their faith in supplications in temples and inquiries of oracles: but these measures were now weighed in the balance and found wanting. The stern probation of the Persian wars had taught the lesson, that victory was the reward of the strong, not the recompense of the devout; and with this knowledge perished the whole fabric of Greek polytheism. So now most of the populace ascribed the pestilence to natural causation: the Lacedaemonians surely had poisoned the wells. From this day onwards, right down to modern times, this phantom of poison dogs the footsteps of pestilence.

Thucydides leaves no doubt whatever as to his own views: he has done for good and all with supernatural causation, though he confesses his inability to identify the precise cause, leaving that for others to speculate about. He states and accepts without reserve contagion from man to man. In this his great contemporary, Hippocrates, lags far behind him. The mind of the Father of Medicine was still in bondage to the early Greek physicists. Conceiving disease to be caused in man by bodily disturbance, referable either to the character of the air inspired or of the food and drink ingested, it was inevitable that, in the causation of epidemic disease, Hippocrates should assign chief importance to changes in the atmosphere, to which all alike would be equally exposed. He does indeed recognize the possibility of its contamination with alien putrid effluvia, but for all that it is the mere physical changes in its constitution, which in his view are of paramount importance. Of contagion from man to man he had not the vaguest conception, and to him, as well as to Galen, and even to our own Sydenham, the sole criterion of epidemicity was the incidence of disease on a large number of persons at the same time.

To the student of the history of medicine it will be no matter for surprise that Thucydides should have seen with undimmed vision, what Hippocrates saw as yet only through a glass darkly. Medicine in every age has been the bond-servant of plausible preconceptions, and it is humiliating to professional self-complacency to scan the long array of lay writers from Thucydides onwards, who accepted contagion as a proven fact, before the scales fell from the eyes of obscurantist Science. Out of many we may enumerate Aristotle, Lucretius, Diodorus Siculus, Vergil, Ovid, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy, Seneca, Silius Italicus, the elder Pliny, and Plutarch: while not till Aretaeus of Cappadocia, in the second century after Christ, do we meet clear and unequivocal acceptance in any medical author. Science, untempered by letters, is apt to induce a mental myopia, and we men of medicine would do well to reflect on the story of Archimedes, who, while drawing mathematical figures in the sand, overlooked to the cost of his life the fact, that the city had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

Though Thucydides was the first of extant writers to enunciate clearly the doctrine of contagion, there is reason to think that Oriental medicine had already grasped the idea. The Levitical ordinances seem to recognize it in the case of leprosy. It is true that these had not reached their final recension till after the time of Thucydides, but at the same time they represent a body of much older tradition.

Thucydides is careful to state that the season was not a sickly one, for Hippocrates himself attributed pestilence to heat and south winds distempering the atmosphere, and following the example of Acron and Empedocles of Agrigentum, essayed to alter the constitution of the atmosphere, in a season of pestilence, by kindling large fires. Acron aimed only at reducing its humidity, but Hippocrates may have sought to destroy by fumigation putrid effluvia, engendered by the heat in the air. His example was scrupulously followed in the Plague of London in 1666, and in that of Marseilles in 1720. A comparison of Thucydides with Diodorus Siculus redounds but little to the credit of the latter. Diodorus submits three distinct agencies as producing the plague of Athens by their concerted action. First, that so much rain had fallen in the preceding winter, that the soil had become saturated and waterlogged: following upon this an unusually hot summer led to the exhalation from the soil of putrid effluvia, that contaminated the air. In fact pestilence was a product of the marsh miasma. Empedocles of Agrigentum was reputed to have delivered Selinus from a pestilence, in the fifth century b.c., by draining its marshes, and an extant coin commemorates the event: and Hippocrates clearly recognized the association of periodic (i. e. malarial) fevers with marshes.

Secondly, he cites lack of good food as a contributory cause, for the rain had also damaged the grain. This was not an unreasonable proposition, for the prevalence of the ergot fungus in rye grain after a wet season has given rise to many and widespread epidemics of ergotism.

Thirdly, the Etesian winds did not blow, so that the air became superheated, inflaming men’s bodies with all sorts of burning distempers. It is enough for Diodorus that Hippocrates, Lucretius, and others had postulated these causes of pestilence, to secure for them acceptance in the sober record of his history. Thucydides declines even to discuss such vague hypotheses, and chooses for himself the better part of describing the actual symptoms of the disease, as he had experienced them in his own person, and witnessed them in the sufferings of others, so that any one familiar with them might be able to recognize the disorder at once, in the event of its reappearance.

To Thucydides then is due the credit not only of the first detailed description of an actual visitation of pestilence, but of a description that breathes in every line the true spirit of history, the recording of past events as a medium for the surer forecasting of the future—the spirit that animates him in all his historical writing to give ‘a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things’—the whole duty of the historian, which not even Herodotus had recognized to the full before him. So anxious is he that his readers shall see things as he saw them, and learn the same lessons from them as he has learnt, that he is willing on occasion to manipulate his narrative, as when he brings forward the great Funeral Speech of Pericles into immediate juxtaposition to the narrative of the pestilence, assuredly so as to heighten the dramatic effect. So vivid and so forcible is his picture of the plague, that it is difficult to believe that some ten years had elapsed before he set pen to paper, and some thirty or more before the whole attained its present form. It is no matter for surprise that Lucretius, Procopius, Boccaccio, and Froissart should have paid the homage of conscious imitation to this virile narrative. ([See Appendix].)[49]

Thucydides was the first to draw a picture of the demoralization of society in the presence of pestilence—a theme that became a commonplace with later historians of plague. The futility of the physicians, the merciless march of the pestilence, the sufferings of the sick, the neglect of the dead, the pollution of temples, the sacrilegious funeral rites, these scenes and the like throng the kaleidoscope of human misery. The sacred ties of kinship yielded under the cruel emotion of fear. Lawlessness prevailed everywhere, for men seeing the uncertainty of life and riches resolved to enjoy themselves, while they could. Those who saw all perishing alike thought that worship or neglect of the gods made no difference.

It is difficult to determine what traces of the pestilence are to be found in contemporary Greek art and architecture. By some the statue of Health Athena, set up by the Athenians just outside the eastern portico of the Propylaea, is believed to have commemorated the passing of the plague of Athens. Her cult was much older than this, and perhaps derives from some primitive conception of an Earth Mother, the great protectress of all her children, as in Christian hagiology the Madonna of Health shelters them from plague and pestilence.

Pausanias[50] regards the romantic temple of Apollo at Bassae as a memorial of the deliverance of Phigalia from an offset of this plague of 430 b.c. He seems to infer this from the dedication of the temple to Apollo, under his surname the Helper (Ἐπικούριος). On the other hand, we know from Thucydides[51] that the plague scarcely touched Peloponnesus. It is unlikely also that an Athenian architect, Ictinus, who as Pausanias says built it, would have worked for the Peloponnesians during the war with Athens.

The same doubt attaches to the attribution of the temple of Apollo the Helper at Elis, and that of Pan the Deliverer in Troezen, and the tradition appears in each case to be referable to the surname of the god, coupled with the dates at which they were erected.

Pausanias[52] says that a statue of Apollo, Averter of Evil (Ἀλεξίκακος), by Calamis, was erected in Athens as a memorial of deliverance from the plague, but this cannot be the case, as Calamis was dead before the plague commenced.

Such dedications were, however, common enough. When Epimenides freed Athens from pestilence he cleansed the city and set up a shrine to the Eumenides, and the people of Tanagra[53] similarly showed their gratitude to Hermes the Ram-bearer (Κριοφόρος) by entrusting to Calamis the erection of a statue in his honour.

Poussin painted a ‘Plague of Athens’, a much cherished picture now in the gallery of Sir Frederick Cook at Richmond. It is a dull wooden composition, and compares most unfavourably with his ‘[Plague of Ashdod]’, in spite of the close similarity of incident and episode that it depicts.

CHAPTER III

Unlike Greece, young Rome was subject to repeated pestilence: plagues punctuate the pages of her history. We shall see how deep an imprint they left on the nascent religion, literature, and art of Rome.

At first these plagues must needs have been endemic, and bred no doubt in the extensive swamps that lay within the city and around it for many miles, for Rome was not then a commercial city. Her corn she derived from Italy and Sicily, and held little or no intercourse with Egypt, until after the conquest of Carthage. Yet, in spite of the numerous records of her pestilences that have survived, there is not one the nature of which can be identified before the true Plague of Gregory the Great.

According to Plutarch[54] there was pestilence in Italy and Rome in the eighth year of Numa Pompilius (707 b.c.), forty-six years after the foundation of the city: the legend of it is full of interest. During its course a brazen buckler fell from heaven into the hands of Numa. Egeria and the Muses told him its meaning. It had been sent from heaven for the preservation of the city, and to prevent its theft eleven more were to be made so exactly like it, that no thief should be able to distinguish it from the rest. The immediate cessation of the pestilence seemed to verify this interpretation. One Veturius Mamurius successfully produced the eleven copies, and Numa gave charge of all the bucklers to the Salii, so-called from the dance they led up the streets, when, in the month of March, they carried the sacred bucklers through the city. ‘On that occasion’, says Plutarch, ‘they are habited in purple vests, girt with broad belts of brass: they wear also brazen helmets, and carry short swords, with which they strike upon the bucklers, and to those sounds they keep time with their feet. They move in an agreeable manner, performing certain involutions and evolutions in a quick measure, with vigour, agility, and ease.... The reward that Mamurius had for his art was, we are told, an ode, which the Salii sung in memory of him, along with the Pyrrhic dance. Some, however, say that it was not Veturius Mamurius, who was celebrated in that composition, but vetus memoria, the ancient remembrance of the thing.’ The legend affords unmistakable evidence of some expiatory ceremony, first introduced for relief of a definite plague, but subsequently, in view of the constant recurrence, performed twice a year. Plutarch omits one significant feature of the Salic ritual, the driving of a skin-clad man, called Mamurius Veturius (the old Mars), through the streets, while the Salii showered blows on him, and drove him out of the city. The examples in ancient folk-lore[55] of animal and human scapegoats, for the exorcising of pestilence are so numerous, that we may well seek the interpretation of this Salic ceremony in the persistence of this conception. The dancing, singing, and clashing of shields was perhaps intended to drive out the evil demon from the city as a preliminary to transferring it to the scapegoat Mamurius. At Tanagra, the youth who annually carried a ram on his shoulders round the walls of the city, did so as a representative of the Ram-bearing Hermes, who averted a plague in this same fashion.[56]

Plutarch discusses the meaning of these bucklers, called Ancilia, so it was said, from their curved form (ἀγκύλον). He suggests as alternative derivations, ἀνέκαθεν = from on high: or ἄκεσις = healing of sick: or αὐχμῶν λύσις = putting an end to drought: or ἀνάσχεσις = deliverance from calamities. But whatever the etymological significance, their ritual purpose would seem to have been to ward off the darts and arrows of pestilence, and the Salic ceremonial was dedicated to the honour of the sender. God he was not, for the religion of Numa’s Rome knew no gods of human form: these were a later importation from the anthropomorphic religion of Greece. He was some numen, some power less personal than a god, but more personal than a spirit. It was he that engendered pestilence by his evil machinations. The legend brings us back again close to the confines of imitative magic. True, it is not the agent of pestilence that is fashioned, not the brazen serpent, not the mice, not the emerods, but the agent of deliverance, ‘thy shield and buckler.’

In later years the Salii figure as colleges of priests, dedicated first to the worship of Mars, and later of Quirinus as well. The transformation served to obscure their true origin, which Plutarch asserts and which there is every reason to accept. Mars was not originally a god of war, but an agricultural god, and, like Apollo, a guardian of the crops. Coincidently with the transformation the ritual assumed a more martial character, the Salii performing the war-dance in full fighting panoply, as the procession moved through the city twice a year, in March and October. The beginning and end of the season of pestilence had faded insensibly into the beginning and end of the campaigning season. Horace[57] recounts the aldermanic magnificence of their festive repast.

The hymn of the Salii was written in archaic Saturnian verse, fragments of which have come down to us. Quintilian[58] says that, by the first century b.c. the primitive language, passed down with verbal exactitude from generation to generation, had become unintelligible to those who ceremoniously recited it. One fragment is instructive in its significance:

Cumé tonas, Leucésie, prae tet tremonti, Quom tibei cunei dextumúm tonárent.

(‘When thou thunderest, thou god of Light, they tremble at thy presence, when the lightning shafts have thundered from thy right hand.’) These lines recall the figure of Apollo the Far-Darter in the Iliad, and his invocation in the Oedipus Tyrannus.

Pestilence was in Rome again just before the death of Tullus Hostilius[59] in 640 b.c. Tullus himself fell ill, and in his illness revived every superstitious usage, though when in health he had affected to scorn religion. The people also cherished the conviction that only by obtaining pardon of the gods would they be rid of the pestilence. So Tullus consulted the commentaries of Numa, and finding that certain sacrifices should have been paid to Jupiter Elicius (elicere = to elicit information), he set about their performance. But as he failed to conduct them in due form, he not only failed of his purpose, but so roused the anger of Jupiter, that he struck him with lightning and reduced him and his whole household to ashes. Livy’s story of Tullus illustrates well the relation of a Roman to his god: it was a practical, not a spiritual relation, a bargain, not an act of grace. If the Roman paid all his dues of worship to the god he had a claim to repayment in full. Again and again, under the stress of pestilence, failure of the god to honour his bond drove the Roman to try his luck with alien gods. This is the spirit in which Tarquinius Superbus,[60] during another plague, in 514 b.c., sent his sons to Greek Delphi to inquire of the god how to be rid of it. Pestilence, in this manner, was destined to forge many a link in the chain that bound Rome to Greece.

In the fifth century b.c., Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus record a constant succession of plagues in Rome. Eight visitations, at least, are mentioned, and as some of these lingered over several years, Rome, in the fifth century, can seldom have been free from pestilence. And yet all this time she was not only growing, but actually sending out colonies.

Of a plague in 473 b.c. we have an interesting recital by Dionysius of Halicarnassus.[61] ‘In the beginning of the year’, he writes, ‘many prodigies and omens happened, which filled the city with superstition and fear of the gods: and all the augurs and the interpreters of holy things declared that these were signs of divine anger, because some rites had not been performed with sanctity and purity. Not long after, a distemper, supposed to be pestilential, attacked the women, particularly such as were with child, and more of them died than had ever been known before. For as they miscarried and brought forth dead children, they died together with their infants. And neither supplications at the statues and altars of the gods, nor expiatory sacrifices performed on behalf of the public and of private families gave the women any relief.’ Thereupon a slave came forward and denounced Urbinia, one of the Vestal Virgins, who tended the perpetual fire, for impurity. The pontiffs at once removed her from her ministry, brought her to trial, convicted her, and condemned her ‘to be whipped with rods, to be carried through the city, and buried alive’. One of her guilty lovers killed himself: the other was ordered to be publicly whipped like a slave, and then put to death. After this, ‘the distemper, which had attacked the women and caused so great a mortality among them, presently ceased.’ Again, the pestilence is attributed to the imperfect performance of some detail of ritual, which must be expiated forthwith, if the sender of the pestilence is to be appeased. Its special incidence on women seemed to bring home the guilt to them. It was meet therefore that a woman’s life should be its expiation. Such is the earliest detailed record of human sacrifice for deliverance from plague, but we shall meet it again and again in the history of epidemic pestilence. Surely the tiger in man is but lightly prisoned in his human cage.

Human sacrifice was probably world-wide in the earliest ages of nations. The Phoenicians[62] resorted to it in times of national calamity, such as epidemic pestilence. There is abundant evidence from the Bible[63] and elsewhere, that human sacrifice was habitual in primitive Semitic religion. The Israelites were apt to assert that they learnt these practices from the peoples whom they superseded in the land of Canaan, but it must be remembered that they came of the same stock as these races. Pausanias[64] refers to the legend of Leos, who is said to have sacrificed his daughters, at the bidding of the oracle, to save Athens from a famine; and in speaking of the ruined city of Potniae[65] he says that the oracle of Delphi told them that they would get rid of a pestilence only by the sacrifice of a blooming boy to Dionysus, who had sent it for the murder of his priest. At the Athenian feast of Thargelia in May, a man and a woman were led through the city and stoned to death outside its walls, a man for the men, and a woman for the women: and a similar practice maintained in the Saturnalia at Rome. But with the advance of civilization animal substitutes came to replace the human victims.

Philostratus[66] cites another notable instance of human sacrifice for deliverance from pestilence. The Ephesians had summoned Apollonius (first century a.d.) to come and check the plague. On his arrival he at once set himself to encourage the citizens, and gathered them together to the theatre ‘where now stands the statue of Averruncus. Here they found an ill-looking old beggar, whom Apollonius ordered them to stone to death, as being the enemy of the gods. As soon as they set to stoning him, fire darted from the old beggar’s eyes, so that they knew him for a demon. After they had killed him, Apollonius ordered them to remove the stones from the corpse, and they found instead of a human body a fierce dog vomiting foam, as if mad.... The form this dog assumed was like that given to the statue of Averruncus.’

The blood-lust of panic terror, which found its gratification in the slaying of Urbinia, is the lineal descendant of the cold-blooded ritual of human sacrifice: no human passion is so cruel as fear. But we shall fail to find even this palliation for the torture and killing of the ‘unctores’, both in Genoa and Milan, and for the wholesale massacre of Jews at the time of the Black Death, carried through by legal process far more deliberate, far more lengthy, far less impassioned than any rite of human sacrifice.

In the pestilence of 461 b.c. the mortality was so great that it became necessary to throw the dead bodies into the Tiber. Livy[67] says that a cattle epizootic preceded the epidemic, and that the necessity of admitting the cattle within the walls, owing to the invasion of Roman territory by the Aequans and Volscians, increased the malignity of the distemper. In this crisis of calamities, the Senate ordered the people to supplicate the protection of the gods. These ‘supplications’ took the form of expiatory processions, and seem to have been introduced from Greece to Rome. Like the Salic processions they moved to the sound of music and singing, as they visited the sanctuaries of the gods, prostrating themselves before their statues, clasping their knees and kissing their hands and feet. Livy[68] holds that the guardian gods and the city’s good fortune saved Rome at this juncture, as fear of the pestilence induced the enemy to divert their attack to the richer and healthy Tusculan territory. Just before this outbreak Livy[69] says that the sky seemed to be lit up by an exceeding bright light. It is not clear what celestial phenomenon he has in mind, but it is noteworthy as perhaps anticipating the fixed belief of later days in comets, as harbingers of pestilence.

The belief in astral influence over terrestrial phenomena and on the affairs of humanity was general and dates from prehistoric times. Hippocrates held that every physician should be versed in astrology. The dependence of season on the heavenly bodies, and the seasonal prevalence of epidemic disease were facts patent to every one, so that it was seemingly reasonable for the ancients to assert the influence of the heavenly bodies on disease, though when pushed to excessive lengths it became absurd. When pestilence was seldom absent, it must needs at times coincide with certain conjunctions of planets. How deeply the belief took root in medicine is shown by the words of the preface of the German Herbarius,[70] first published in a.d. 1485.

‘Many a time and oft have I contemplated inwardly the wondrous works of the Creator of the universe: how in the beginning He formed the heavens and adorned them with goodly, shining stars, to which He gave power and might to influence everything under heaven. Also how He formed afterwards the four elements: fire, hot and dry—air, hot and moist—water, cold and moist—earth, dry and cold—and gave to each a nature of its own: and how after this the same Great Master of Nature made and formed herbs of many sorts and animals of all kinds, and last of all Man, the noblest of all created things. Thereupon I thought on the wondrous order, which the Creator gave these same creatures of His, so that everything, which has its being under heaven, receives it from the stars, and keeps it by their help.’

Dionysius of Halicarnassus[71] records another fearful pestilence in 451 b.c., which carried off all the slaves and half the citizens of Rome. The pollution of the Tiber by the dead bodies seemed to intensify its ravages. Men and cattle perished alike, in and around Rome, and famine followed, because the land was left untilled. As long as the people had any hopes in the assistance of their own gods, they approached them with sacrifices and all manner of expiation. But when these proved of no avail, they set themselves to introduce foreign innovations into the established religion of Rome. We shall see in the succeeding visitation, in what direction the disillusioned Romans first cast their eyes.

From 435-430 b.c. pestilence,[72] following on a drought and cattle epizootic, raged in Rome and the surrounding country beyond the power of human endurance. Frequent earthquakes preceded a great access of virulence in 431 b.c.: the very powers of nature seemed to have declared war on Rome. The people offered a general supplication to the gods, repeating the formulas word for word after the duumvirs, so that no mistake of word or syllable might invalidate the office: but in vain. So the worship of Apollo was brought from Greece to Rome, and a temple erected in his honour in 431 b.c. Apollo cannot have been a wholly unfamiliar god, for the Sibylline books must at least have introduced his name to Rome. But from this time he becomes naturalized as a leading Roman god. From his temple, in times of pestilence, expiatory processions paraded the streets of the city; and as plague succeeds plague, he supplants step by step the older native gods.

In 395 b.c. pestilence[73] worked such havoc, that the Senate ordered the Sibylline books to be consulted. This collection of oracular utterances in Greek, given forth by inspired prophetesses or Sibyls (Σίβυλλα = Doric Σιὸς βόλλα = Διὸς βουλή = will of the god), had found its way from the Troad to Cumae. Thence Tarquinius Superbus transferred part to Rome, and laid it up in sacred custody, to be used by order of the Senate, in times of national emergency. As these books recognized the gods and ritual of the Asiatic Greeks, they played a leading part in the introduction of Greek gods and Greek ritual into the religion of Rome. On this occasion the Sibylline books prescribed the celebration of a lectisternium.

The lectisternium, which now first appeared in Rome, was a festival of Greek origin. A public banquet of great magnificence was set before the deities, whose images were placed on couches. The exhibition of three pairs of alien gods, Apollo and Latona, Diana and Hercules, Mercury and Neptune, betrayed its foreign origin. The imaginative populace saw them accept the food or turn away from it in anger. Meantime domestic feasts were spread throughout the city, to which strangers and friends alike, and even liberated prisoners, came each to have his share. Doors lay open everywhere, offering a home to every casual comer. All things were had in common. No sound of discord marred the perfect peace. The people were admitted to solemn communion with the gods, as the Greek warriors before Troy shared with their gods in the eucharistic feast, in token that the plague was stayed.

Coincidently with this epidemic at Rome, Diodorus Siculus[74] describes with some clinical detail a pestilence that attacked the Carthaginian army, while besieging Syracuse. The Lacedaemonians were assisting Dionysius and the Syracusans against the Carthaginians. The record is of interest as exhibiting Diodorus in the rôle of a flagrant plagiarist of Thucydides.

‘But as to the Carthaginians, after they had ruined the suburbs and rifled and plundered the temples of Ceres and Proserpine, a plague seized upon the army, and to intensify and sharpen the vengeance of the gods upon them, both the season of the year and the multitudes of men crowded together contributed greatly to the aggravation of their misery: for the summer was hotter than ordinarily, and the locality itself occasioned the distemper to rage beyond all control. Not long before the Athenians were swept away in the self-same place by a plague, for it was marshy and low-lying ground. At the commencement of the distemper, before the sun rose, their bodies would fall a-shaking and trembling, through the coldness of the air that came off the water: but about noon they were stifled with the heat, because they were pent up so closely together. The south wind brought in the infection among them, and swept them away in heaps, but for a while they buried their dead. But when the number of the dead increased to such an extent that even those in attendance on the sick were cut off, none durst approach the infected, for the distemper seemed to be incurable. For first catarrhs and swellings about the neck (περί τὸν τράχηλον ὁἰδήματα) were caused by the stench of the bodies that lay unburied, and by the putrefaction of the soil. Then followed fever, pain in the muscles of the spine, heaviness of the limbs, dysentery and pustules (φλύκταιναι) over the surface of the whole body. The majority suffered in this manner, but others became raving mad and forgot everything, and rushing about distracted struck every one that they met. All the help of the physicians was in vain, both by reason of the violence of the distemper and the suddenness with which it carried many off: for in the midst of terrible suffering they commonly died on the fifth or at latest the sixth day: so that those who died in battle were accounted fortunate by all. And it was further a matter of observation, that all who attended on the sick died of the same distemper, and what aggravated the misery was that none would willingly come near the distressed and exhausted, to minister to them. For not only strangers, but even brothers and familiar friends were driven by fear of infection to forsake one another.’

Diodorus seems to have drawn on the clinical symptoms of several different diseases, to heighten the effect of his description. The combination of pustules on the body with swellings about the neck suggests true plague, but there the likeness ends. There are other descriptions of pestilence in Diodorus Siculus, that exhibit this same eclectic tendency.

In 363 b.c., after one or two intervening milder outbreaks, another period of pestilence[75] set in in Rome. Plutarch says that it carried off a prodigious number of the people, most of the magistrates and Camillus himself. When all else failed to appease the gods, scenic plays were imported from Etruria. Hitherto the Roman people had had only the games of the circus. Livy describes their introduction to Rome in minute detail, tracing the development of regular stage plays from these rude scenic shows. ‘Actors’, he says, ‘were sent for from Etruria, who without any song or imitative gestures regulated their movements by the measures of the music, and exhibited in Tuscan fashion by no means ungraceful dances.’ To the ancients the movements of the body spoke a language as familiar as the movements of the tongue. ‘It seemed to me’, he continues, ‘that the first origin of plays should be noticed, that it might appear how from a modest beginning they have reached their present extravagance. However, the first introduction of plays, intended as a religious expiation, neither relieved their minds from religious awe, nor their bodies from disease.’ Indeed the Tiber inundated the circus and interrupted a performance, as though the gods despised their efforts at atonement. So popular amusement had come at last to supplant popular atonement, giving birth in the process to dramatic entertainment. In this respect we shall find history repeat itself with striking similarity in the plague times of the Middle Ages.

Such was the origin and the evolution of the scenic plays (ludi scenici), introduced in the first place to divert the mind and distract the spirit from the crushing catastrophe of pestilence. The visitation was followed by an earthquake, which is said to have opened a gaping abyss in the Forum, into which Manlius Curtius hurled himself in full armour—a willing human scapegoat sacrificed to the angry gods.

When these various measures failed to allay the pestilence, an old custom of driving a nail into the temple of Jupiter was solemnly revived. This practice in its inception purposed to make a calendar of years. But once when a dictator had driven in the nail, forthwith a pestilence had ceased. So now it was urged that, if a dictator and no common magistrate drove in the nail, the pestilence would cease. So says Livy, but there is abundant evidence, both from ancient literature and from modern folk-lore, that he has missed the real significance of the act. We find traces of a world-wide belief in the possibility of transferring the evils of the body, as well as the evils of the soul, to some other being or animal, or thing. The scapegoat is familiar to all, and we know from Leviticus,[76] that at the cleansing of a leper the Jews let a bird fly away. Pliny[77] too tells us, that a Roman cure for epilepsy was to drive a nail into the ground, where the epileptic’s head had struck it on falling: a similar cure for toothache was practised in France and Germany, and for ague in Suffolk.[78] In each instance the idea was to nail fast the evil thing, and so hinder it from returning to trouble its former host. A story given by L. Strackerjan,[79] and quoted by Frazer, comes even more closely to the point. During the Thirty Years’ War pestilence came from Neuenkirchen, in Oldenburg, to a neighbouring farmhouse in the semblance of a blue vapour, and entering the house found its way into a hole in the door-post. The farmer seized a peg and hammered it into the hole, so that it should not come out. After a time he drew out the peg, believing the danger was past, but out came the blue vapour once more. Every member of the unhappy household fell a victim to the pestilence.

In 348 b.c. pestilence[80] was again rife, and a lectisternium was observed at the instance of the Sibylline books.

In 331 b.c. Rome was again in the grip of a devastating pestilence.[81] Numbers of the Senate had already perished, when a female slave came to the aediles and declared that the victims had died of poison. She would show them matrons actually engaged in compounding poisons, and a store laid up in readiness for use. Sure enough, drugs were found in the possession of two women of patrician rank, Cornelia and Sergia, and in spite of their protest that these were harmless, they were compelled to swallow them, and fell victims to their own nefarious devices. One hundred and seventy matrons were implicated in their guilt, and paid the penalty with their lives. Rome offered a human holocaust to the spirit of panic fear.

The grim suspicion of poison was not now formulated for the first time, for the Athenians had suspected the Lacedaemonians of poisoning their wells. But now the charge appears as a deadly and insidious weapon, ready to the hand of every infamous or ill-disposed informer. The hideous catalogue of cruelties inflicted on innocent victims, under the spell of this illusion, forms a dark chapter in the history of epidemic pestilence.

In the face of another pestilence[82] in 312 b.c., a dictator was again appointed to drive a nail into the temple of Jupiter.

We have seen the succession of Rome’s epidemics almost unbroken throughout the fourth and fifth centuries. We are accustomed to think of Roman character as trained in the school of interminable warfare, but we are apt to forget that there was another, a sterner and more desolating enemy, almost always alert within her gates, ‘the pestilence that walketh in darkness.’ In the perpetual struggle for existence on the stricken fields of battle and of pestilence, young Rome had found, as yet, no leisure for the loftier pursuits of the human intellect, and had developed no literature and no art of her own, worthy of either name. As Greek and Roman were alike children of one common stock, some strong abiding influences must have been at work, leading development along widely divergent paths: and perhaps in epidemic pestilence, with which Greece was but little familiar till the end of the fifth century at least, we may look for one such agency.

In 295 b.c., during a fierce pestilence, Livy[83] says that the consul’s son built a temple to Venus, close to the circus out of fines inflicted on some matrons convicted of adultery, as though their sin was believed to be its cause. In the Middle Ages likewise we shall find many churches built in commemoration of particular plagues.

Only two years later a violent pestilence[84] drove the magistrates to consult the Sibylline books, and in obedience to their instruction ambassadors were sent from Rome to Epidaurus to demand the serpent of Aesculapius, in which the god seemed to be incarnate. At first nothing was done beyond devoting one day to the supplication of Aesculapius. But in the following year ambassadors set out under the leadership of Quintus Ogulnius[85] and on arrival at Epidaurus were taken to the temple of Aesculapius, and invited to carry away whatever was needed to rescue their city from pestilence. Thereupon the serpent, which rarely appeared to the Epidaurians, presented itself for three days in the most public parts of the city, and then of its own accord made its way to the Roman galley, in which it was transported to Antium, after the ambassadors had been instructed how to pay honour to the god. After a brief sojourn there it re-entered the Roman galley, and scarce had they reached the Tiber, when it swam to the island in mid-stream, where a temple was dedicated afterwards to Aesculapius. A coin of Commodus[86] and a medallion of Antoninus ([see Plate I, p.4]) survive to commemorate the event. To this day there may be seen on some large blocks of stone, moulded to the shape of the poop of a ship, on the Isola Tiberina, the head of an effigy of Aesculapius in relief, with the serpent twined round his staff.

So it was pestilence that brought Aesculapius to Rome, as it had brought Apollo before him. In this temple in the Tiber the healing ritual of the god flourished for some centuries, and in recent excavations many votive emblems of diseased parts of the body have been brought to light. With few intervals, and those of no long duration, the island has been dedicated to works of healing down to the present day. Claudius ordained that sick slaves should be exposed on the island, and those that recovered were to receive their freedom. The hospital of S. Giovanni Calabita, founded in 1575, stands there still. In 1656 the whole island was converted into a lazaretto for the victims of the plague.

It was the constant custom of the priests of Epidaurus, in founding a new shrine to send out one of the sacred snakes from the sanctuary. Pausanias[87] describes the coming of Aesculapius from Epidaurus to Sicyon, in the form of a snake, in a car drawn by a pair of mules.

Before his transference to Rome, Aesculapius had already attained all the attributes of divinity. He had ceased to be a mere god-man by the time that his worship reached Athens from Epidaurus (420 b.c.). So far was his serpent origin forgotten, that the Greeks explained his association with the serpent by the suggestion that medicine, like the serpent, reappeared annually in a fresh integument.

In computing the number of epidemics that visited Rome Livy is the chief authority, and in doing so it must be borne in mind that his work is incomplete. Epitomes only survive of the books dealing with the years from 293 to 219 b.c., and of those again from 167 b.c. to the end of his history in the middle of the reign of Augustus. That there was no cessation of the frequent recurrence of pestilence may reasonably be inferred from the regularity of appearance in those intervening years, of which his complete histories survive.

In 212 b.c. Livy[88] describes simultaneous pestilence at Syracuse and at Rome. The Roman general, Marcellus, was besieging Syracuse, when pestilence fell both on besiegers and besieged. The Carthaginian and Sicilian armies, however, suffered more than the Romans, who retired within the walls to recruit their health. The Sicilians also shook it off by dispersing to their cities, but it continued to rage among the Carthaginians, who had no place to which to retire. Livy’s description of the neglect of the dead recalls that of Thucydides, but the similarity of expression is not so close as to make it certain that he has borrowed directly from Thucydides. He writes: ‘At last their feelings had become so completely brutalized by being habituated to these miseries, that they not only did not follow their dead with tears and decent lamentations, but they did not even carry them out and bury them: so that the bodies of the dead lay strewn about, exposed to the view of those who were awaiting a similar fate. And thus the dead were the means of destroying the sick, and the sick those who were in health, both by fear and by the filthy state and the noisome stench of their bodies. Some, preferring to die by the sword, even rushed upon the outposts of the enemy.’ Livy might well have been describing the scenes in the streets of Marseilles during the plague of a.d. 1720. Silius Italicus[89] has described this pestilence, as well as Livy, but his is a mere poetic picture of its fancied incidence first on dogs, next on birds, then on wild beasts, and finally on man.

The Ludi Apollinares also were instituted in 212 b.c., but Livy states that they were instituted in commemoration of the victory in arms, and not because of the restoration of a state of healthiness, as is commonly supposed. In the circumstances the one proposition need hardly exclude the other.

For three full years, from 183 to 180 b.c., pestilence[90] raged in Rome, carrying off both high and low. The people saw in it a sign of celestial anger, and the Pontifex Maximus ordered that the Sibylline books should be consulted. Gilded statues and offerings were duly vowed to the healing deities, Apollo, Aesculapius, and Hygieia, who for long years in the person of Athena had stood as protectress of the health of Athens. Pestilence had now brought her to Rome. A supplication was celebrated in town and surrounding country by all above the age of twelve, the suppliants wearing chaplets on their heads and carrying in their hands boughs of the laurel, sacred to Apollo. Suspicions of poison were freely bruited in the city, and Valerius of Antium says that an investigation actually resulted in the condemnation of two thousand persons, and among them Quarta Hostilia, wife of the consul who had died of the pestilence. So splendid an atonement must needs appease the angered gods.

In 176-175 b.c. pestilence was again severe in Rome. Livy’s[91] account of it is interesting, because he states that, in spite of the great mortality among cattle and men, there were no vultures to be seen in either year of the pestilence. Taking the observation in its context it reads as though the vultures were the first to suffer, so that they were exterminated locally, then the cattle, and afterwards man, and with him probably his dog. Thucydides had already drawn attention to the absence of vultures during the plague of Athens, and with the passage of years the observation crystallized into an article of faith pertinent to all and every pestilence. In the case of the plague of Aleppo Russell definitely negatives the observation.

With the conclusion of Livy’s history we enter on a barren period in the history of Roman pestilence, and we may turn for a while to some aspects of pestilence presented by ancient Latin poetry.

CHAPTER IV

Into his great poem ‘On the Nature of Things’ (De Rerum Natura) Lucretius has grafted a description of the plague of Athens, converting the record of Thucydides into Latin hexameter verse. His prime motive in its introduction is to show that the chief phenomena of nature, and pestilence as one of these, all harmonize with the atomic theory, that he has adopted from Democritus and Epicurus. Lucretius indeed propounds an atomic explanation of pestilence, consonant in its main features with the doctrines of his contemporary Asclepiades. We can reason of the imperceptible, he argues, only from our knowledge of the perceptible. Our eyes see clouds descend from the sky, and noxious vapours rise as mists from the land. Our minds then may not unreasonably infer, that pestilence also either comes down from heaven by the medium of clouds, or rises up from the rain-sodden earth by the medium of mist. In each manner the atmosphere becomes impregnated with noxious atoms that distemper it. These particles enter our bodies, either by the air we breathe, or by the food and drink they have contaminated, and thus provoke infection. Such, he holds, was the cause of the plague of Athens.

The views of Lucretius as to the proximate causes of pestilence are almost identical with those of his contemporary, Diodorus Siculus. With each of them moisture, as cloud or mist, distempers the air or damages food, and so finds entry into lungs or stomach. With each an ill wind may engender pestilence: with Lucretius, by bringing a harmful to replace a beneficent atmosphere: with Diodorus Siculus, by failing to cool the air to an appropriate temperature, thus causing fever. To Lucretius clouds, mists, and winds are carriers of noxious particles. In this atomic theory of infection he faintly foreshadows the doctrine of particulate poisons, that held the field of scientific speculation within the memory of living men. But even so Lucretius came less near the truth than his great contemporary Varro,[92] who actually ascribes disease in animals to living organisms beyond the range of human vision (‘crescunt animalia quaedam minuta, quae non possunt oculi consequi, et per aera, intus per os ac nares perveniunt atque efficiunt difficiles morbos’).

To Lucretius pestilence is a purely natural process, in which there is no place for the handiwork of gods. Of this theme, in varying applications, he is a fierce exponent throughout the length and breadth of his poem. Perhaps it is for this reason that he chose the narrative of Thucydides as the basis of his poem, for Thucydides, too, referred epidemic pestilence to natural causation, not to the special act of any god. Like Thucydides, too, Lucretius accepts without reserve the doctrine of contagion:

Qui fuerant autem praesto contagibus ibant Atque labore.

(Those who had stayed near at hand would die of contagion and the toil.)

Pestilence, too, affords Lucretius a rare text for the exposure of the hollow sham of state-worship, which represented now all that survived of religion in Rome. We have seen how much of Roman religion had its origin from time to time in the necessity of exorcising pestilence: and we have seen how popular superstition revivified the ritual of popular atonement. Now the Sibylline books are consulted. Now a nail is driven into the temple of Jupiter. Now Apollo is brought to Rome, and a temple erected in his honour. Now Aesculapius comes in the form of a serpent to deliver Rome: now Hygieia. Now sacrifices are offered and feasts set out before the statues of the gods. This is the fabric that Lucretius, fired with iconoclastic zeal, would fain demolish, not as the enemy of religion, but as the ruthless enemy of religious sham.

In literary form this part of the great Lucretian poem falls far below the rest. The poem as a whole possesses a rugged grandeur of its own, but this terminal portion, while retaining all the ruggedness, has lost most of the grandeur. It gives the impression of having been merely rough cast, to await the polishing, which, owing to the premature death of the poet in 55 b.c., it never received. Fault also may be found with the literary substance, for in places he misunderstands the language of Thucydides, and misrepresents his meaning. Again, he incorporates here and there fragments of Hippocrates and fancies of his own into the record of Thucydides, as though all disease presented a single clinical facies. For example, he reproduces as cor the καρδία of Thucydides, which the latter used, as did Hippocrates, for the cardiac end of the stomach. Again, he misinterprets Thucydides with regard to the effect of the disease on the extremities. He represents στερισκόμενοι τούτων as ferro privati, whereas clearly Thucydides means that the parts sloughed off, not that they were amputated. It would seem that Lucretius was versed in the Greek language of his day, but that language was no longer the Greek of Thucydides and Plato. Nor does Lucretius scorn the full licence that Horace accords to the poet, and exigencies of metre sometimes compel him not to adhere strictly to his model: thus he transforms the critical days into the eighth and ninth. One long passage beginning

Multaque praeterea mortis tum signa dabantur

consists of various excerpts from Hippocrates turned into Latin verse. These are gathered from such diverse parts of the Hippocratic writings, as to indicate considerable acquaintance with them. The lineaments of the Hippocratic facies are reproduced in detail. The fact is that Lucretius was more anxious for the picturesqueness than for the accuracy of his description, provided always that the logical soundness of the main thesis and its didactic purpose were not compromised thereby.

In his picture of the mythical plague that afflicted the people of Aegina, Ovid[93] exacts contributions alike from Thucydides, Lucretius, and Vergil, while there are certain features that bear a strong resemblance to Diodorus Siculus. His story is that Minos, King of Crete, the second king of the name, goes in quest of allies to the island of Aegina, and courts unsuccessfully the aid of its king Aeacus. As soon as he has departed, Cephalus comes as ambassador from Athens and obtains help from Aeacus, who gives him an account of the pestilence that had formerly raged in Aegina, and dwells on its marvellous repeopling. Ovid maintains sufficient independence of his models for us to be able to gather something at least of current ideas of pestilence, set though it is in an atmosphere of antiquity. At first the disease was referred to natural causation and so was combated by medicines:

Dum visum mortale malum tantaeque latebat Causa nocens cladis, pugnatum est arte medendi. Exitium superabat opem, quae victa iacebat.

The tendency was now to regard pestilence as a natural process, until it overstepped habitual limitations, and triumphantly defied the resources of orthodox medicine. Then popular imagination saw in it the hand of a god, and forthwith set it outside the confines of recognized pathology. So now Ovid ascribes the Aeginetan plague to the anger of Juno, because the island was named after her adulterous rival Aegina, who was carried there by Jupiter, and by him became the mother of Aeacus, King of Aegina. But side by side with this Ovid lays stress on various meteorological phenomena, that accompanied or preluded the pestilence—the earth encompassed with gross darkness, a drowsy heat in the clouds, and persistent hot winds, as though he believed in some close causal connexion. He conceives the virus to be communicable in water, for fountains and lakes were deemed to be infected, and the rivers tainted with the venom of innumerable snakes. He dwells at length on the epizootic, and elaborates this feature far more even than Livy, and true to the habitual character of Roman pestilence, he makes it precede the human epidemic. He holds fast the doctrine of contagion, which he conceives to be transmitted by the dead as well as the living. Ovid’s description of pestilence unmasks his shallow nature. He shows himself to be no more and no less than an elegant literary trifler. One feels in the easy flow of his verse and the light vagaries of his picturesque imagination an unconcern and indifference to the horrible realities he handles. He has no power, like Thucydides, to plumb the depths of pathos, and the reader turns from his catalogue of sufferings with no emotion of horror, still less with one of sympathy. One looks in vain for some vestige of the moral earnestness of Lucretius. Even for his deities the springs of action reside in the lowlier human passions. Caprice and jealousy move Juno to send the pestilence: humanity is the sport of these infirmities. When man’s conception of Divine Providence had sunk so low, it was well that Imperial Rome should be without religion.

Manilius,in his Astronomica,[94] composed about the Christian era, asserts with confidence, that comets presage pestilence. The belief is probably far older than Manilius, though it is difficult to cite exact authorities. Livy[95] speaks of a bright light in the sky before the plague of 462 b.c.; ‘coelum ardere visum est plurimo igni’: and Dionysius of Halicarnassus[96] recounts the lighting up of a fire in the heavens before that of 450 b.c.: ἐν οὐρανῷ σέλα φερόμενα καὶ πυρὸς ἀνάψεις. Allusions such as these would seem to signify the appearance of a comet. Vergil[97] is even more explicit:

Non secus ac liquida si quando nocte cometae Sanguinei lugubre rubent, aut Sirius ardor, Ille sitim morbosque ferens mortalibus aegris Nascitur, et laevo contristat lumine coelum.

Of their supposed malign influence on human affairs in general there is no doubt. Tacitus[98] assigns to them even a political significance, for he says that in popular opinion they always portend a revolution to kingdoms.

Seneca,[99] in his Physical Science, makes the specific statement that ‘after great earthquakes it is usual for a pestilence to occur’. The concurrence of the two had been mentioned previously by Thucydides, Diodorus Siculus, Livy, and others, but Seneca would seem to be the first to attempt to define the exact relation of the one to the other. In the Campanian earthquake of a.d. 63 a flock of 600 sheep had perished mysteriously, near Pompeii. Seneca conceives that earthquakes liberate poisonous fumes imprisoned in the earth, or pent up in marshes, which serve to taint the air. Flocks suffer most, he thinks, because they live in the open, and also drink the poison-laden water. They feed too with heads close to the ground and so receive the concentrated venom, before it has become diluted: and then he adds: ‘If it had issued in greater volume, it would have injured man too, but the abundant supply of pure air counteracted it, before it could rise high enough to be breathed by any human being.’ And he proceeds: ‘The better is ever conquered by the worse. Even that pure air of heaven changes then to pestilential. Thence come sudden and continuous deaths, and portentous forms of disease, that spring from unexampled causes. The disaster is long-or short-lived according to the strength of the sources of infection. Nor does the plague cease, until the freedom of heaven and the tossing of the winds have banished that fatal air.’

Seneca had probably stumbled on the true explanation of the death of the Campanian sheep, for Geikie says that after an eruption of Mount Vesuvius the escape of carbonic acid gas has been known to suffocate hundreds of hares, partridges, and pheasants. Seneca, in conformity with the learned opinion of his time, regards volcanoes and earthquakes as closely allied phenomena. Earthquakes were regarded as the product in the main of violent commotion of the air. Niebuhr, like Seneca, expressed a firm belief in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as causes of pestilence, a thesis that many writers have sought to substantiate. It is tempting, even to-day, to speculate on migrations of rats set in motion by subterranean activity. But a careful survey of a sufficient series of earthquakes and plagues lends little support to such a proposition. Each may occur alike before or after, with or without the other, and their frequent concurrence in ancient history denotes no more than that the eyes of historians were focused, almost exclusively, on a narrow tract of land around the shores of the Mediterranean, in which earthquakes were and are notoriously of frequent occurrence. Two years after the great earthquake Campania was devastated by a hurricane, and Rome desolated by pestilence. Tacitus[100] says that the pestilence swept away ‘all classes of human beings without any such derangement of the atmosphere as to be visibly apparent. Yet the houses were filled with dead bodies and the streets with funerals.’ Tacitus declares unhesitatingly for the production of pestilence by natural and not by supernatural agency.

The year a.d. 79 is ever memorable for the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii. It was followed by pestilence, which Dion Cassius attributes to ashes from Vesuvius. Dust had been suspect from the remotest ages of antiquity. At the time of the Exodus Moses was told to sprinkle dust before heaven. ‘And it shall become dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man.’ Livy and Plutarch each attributed the plague that broke out among the Gauls, when besieging Rome under Brennus, to the dust and ashes of the houses they had burnt. Philo, too, ascribes a pestilence of about the year a.d. 92 to hot dust irritating the skin.

Dion Cassius[101] mentions a plague that broke out in the reign of Domitian (a.d. 81-96), and which may be the same as that mentioned by Philo. ‘Certain individuals’, he says, ‘poisoned needles and set to work to prick whomsoever they wished: several who were pricked died without knowing anything about it: but some of the scoundrels were denounced and punished; and that happened not only in Rome, but over all the world so to say.’ Some initial punctiform eruption may perhaps have simulated a needle-prick. Belief in the dissemination of pestilence by the cutaneous inoculation of poison was destined to flourish for many centuries. Dion Cassius[102] himself repeats the statement in the case of another pestilence in the reign of Commodus (a.d. 187): ‘In the reign of Commodus occurred the most violent sickness I have ever known: at Rome two thousand persons often died in a single day. But many died, not only in Rome, but in all parts of the empire, in another manner: scoundrels, poisoning little needles with certain noxious substances, transmitted the disease in this way for pay: this had been done already in the reign of Domitian.’ For three years then famine and pestilence worked hand in hand to ruin Rome, and the people in their fury clamoured for a victim. A pleasant sacrifice was handy in the Phrygian freedman Cleander, the greedy and infamous minister of Commodus. It was eagerly bruited that Cleander had hoarded wheat, and the maddened populace, surging to the palace of Commodus, clamoured for the head of the hated favourite. The Emperor, fearful for his own life, at the instance of the women of his court demanded that the head of Cleander should be thrown from the palace to the people. The spectacle of this bloody expiation appeased the fury of the rabble. On the advice of his physicians[103] Commodus himself beat a hasty retreat to Laurentum, to seek an antidote in the scent of its abundant laurels. Those who remained in Rome filled their noses and ears with sweet ointments, to neutralize the pestilential exhalations from infected bodies and from the contagious atmosphere. At last a Roman emperor is found, in presence of pestilence, consulting—not the Sibylline books, not the oracle, not the omens—but a physician, and obeying his instruction. Medicine has tardily come into her own, and Pliny’s sarcasm, that Rome prospered for 600 years without physicians, has lost its sting. But we shall see presently that the hour for professional exaltation is not yet.

The great Antonine plague—the long plague, as Galen calls it, for it lasted no less than fifteen years[104]—was brought to Rome from the East by the Syrian army of Verus, about a.d. 165. Ammianus Marcellinus[105] sets its commencement in the sacrilegious folly of some Roman soldiers at the sack of the city of Seleucia. These men wrenched from its site a statue of Apollo, and from a narrow aperture beneath its pedestal the pestilence escaped, carrying death wherever it went. Julius Capitolinus (c. a.d. 300) confirms the statement of Ammianus Marcellinus, except in that he traces the source of origin to a small golden coffer in this same temple of Apollo. Carried thence by the victorious army to Rome, it found there conditions favourable to its propagation in an already existing famine, in the accumulation of the soldiery, and in the concourse of spectators, who had come to see the triumph of the joint emperors duly celebrated. Of the mortality at Rome no figures exist, but it is said to have been very great. Dead bodies were so numerous, that they were carried to burial heaped up in carts. Aurelius[106] paid the dead the tribute of a public funeral, and erected statues to the memory of many men of high estate. His philosophy, though proof against religious belief, showed itself not proof against religious superstition. The whole pagan ritual of expiation was paraded on behalf of the distracted city. The neglected worship of the gods was revived with renewed vigour, and the aid of those most powerful to help in such circumstances was eagerly invoked. A lustration was solemnly performed for the purification of the city, and a lectisternium celebrated for seven whole days. The people were readily infected with the contagion of their sovereign’s superstition, and from this time may be dated a brief revival of the worship of the effete pagan deities. Aurelius sought even to appease the anger of the national gods by a persecution of the Christians, whose religion was an insult to their majesty. The Christian chronicler, Orosius,[107] attributes the pestilence actually to the persecution of the Christians that had broken out in Asia and Gaul before its commencement. All that is known for certain is, that such a persecution was a consequence, if not a cause as well. An engraved blood-coloured jasper, preserved in Paris, and figured in the Histoire de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, survives to commemorate the sacrifices by which Marcus Aurelius sought to charm away the plague. Duruy[108] describes its features:

‘Marcus Aurelius as sovereign pontiff: on his veiled head a globe, symbol of his sovereign power: behind him an augur’s staff: facing the Emperor Rome helmeted and Aesculapius with horns: under Aurelius, Hygieia or Health: lastly the head of Faustina. The Sagittarius, who occupies the centre, marks the time of the sacrifices, offered in November or December.’

Some have inferred from a passage of Julius Capitolinus that Marcus Aurelius himself died of this pestilence in a.d. 180. In describing his death-bed, Capitolinus says that he took a hasty farewell of his son, for fear of communicating his malady to him.

Niebuhr considers that the ancient world never recovered from the havoc of this pestilence. To it he traces the decadence of Roman literature and art in the years that followed, and points to analogous results in Greece from the plague of Athens, and in early German and early Florentine literature from the Black Death of a.d. 1348. But the seeds of decay in the empire of Rome had already been sown, as they had been in the empire of Athens before the Peloponnesian War. Pericles himself had warned the Athenians at the outset of the far-reaching consequences of failure. We shall see too hereafter that in the case of the early Florentine literature other more potent influences than pestilence were concerned in its temporary effacement. The lesson to be learnt from a comprehensive survey of the history of pestilence would seem rather to be this, that with the community, as with the individual, the sound constitution throws off the effects of a sickness that strikes right home, when the resisting power is impaired. Such was assuredly the case with the interminable sequence of plagues that assailed Rome in adolescence as well as in adult life. But as decadence and decrepitude beset the body politic, the wounds of pestilence went deeper and left abiding scars.

The Antonine plague bequeathed one ill-starred legacy to the profession of medicine. Every sovereign has the physicians he deserves, and Galen was physician to Marcus Aurelius. At the first onset of the pestilence Galen made off to Campania, and finding no safety there took ship to Pergamus. Thence, after two years’ absence, he returned at the summons of the emperors, and after a brief stay in Rome joined them at Aquileia, where pestilence tracked him down again.

Cowards die many times before their death.

Courage, however, and medical acumen are by no means constant companions, and for many centuries, in face of pestilence, physicians, and among them Morgagni and Sydenham, were doomed to follow the example of Galen as faithfully as they cherished his precepts.

Galen has been regarded generally as the leading authority on the medical aspects of the Antonine plague, but the value of Galen’s testimony is not enhanced by the investigation of these attendant circumstances. The physician who takes flight at the outset is little likely subsequently to observe the disease carefully, constantly, and at close quarters: nor is it surprising to find that much of his symptomatology is borrowed directly either from Thucydides or Hippocrates. The striking picture of Thucydides must needs dominate the mind of the man who studies medicine in his arm-chair, so that we are prepared to find Galen asserting the identity of the Antonine pestilence with the plague of Athens. Here and there passages are lifted almost verbatim from Thucydides. For example, Galen[109] says that the sick man’s body did not seem hotter than normal to the touch, but that he suffered an intolerable inward burning. The skin was not yellow, but reddish and livid. The transference of οὔτε χλωρόν from Thucydides shows that he is copying Thucydides, and is not describing what he himself saw. Again, the description of the eruption, though far more precise and complete than that by Thucydides, shows his influence closely, and now and again falls into his actual words, as in ἐξήνθησεν ἕλκεσιν ὅλον τὸ σῶμα. The same also is true of the more general symptoms[110] of the disease, such as the insistence on the characteristic appearance of the inflamed eyes, and the redness of mouth, tongue, and fauces.

There is the ring of the charlatan, too, in Galen’s use and advocacy of Armenian bole as an antipestilential specific, in striking contrast to the crude disavowal of all remedies by Thucydides. Galen[111] says that ‘all those who used it were promptly cured’—one wonders at Galen’s flight—‘those who felt no effect from it died: no other remedy could replace it’—and then he sublimely concludes, ‘that those, with whom the remedy failed, were incurable.’ This Armenian bole was merely an argillaceous earth brought from Persia and Armenia, which owed its red colour to oxide of iron. Galen used it as an astringent for wounds and ulcers before he vaunted it as a specific for pestilence. Internally, at any rate, it must have been almost inert in medicinal doses, and as Galen adduces no evidence in support of his crude dictum, we need be at no pains to justify our incredulity.

There is reason to think that the Antonine plague was not one and the same disease throughout its course. Had it been so, we should have expected from Galen something in the nature of a single clinical picture, rather than casual references scattered throughout his voluminous writings.

In describing the character of the eruption and its transformations, Galen[112] certainly seems to have small-pox in mind. At a certain stage the eruption broke out all over the body in the form of ἐξανθήματα μέλανα (a dark efflorescence), probably of haemorrhagic type. When it ulcerated, a crust (ἐφελκίς) formed on the surface, which became detached, and then everything proceeded to a cure. A scar remained after the separation of the crust, comparable to the ‘pitting’ of small-pox. In some cases ulceration did not occur, but the exanthem was rough and scaly and became detached like a skin: in this condition all got well. Galen gives some indication of the course of the disease in one who recovered. ‘A young man on the ninth day had his whole body covered with ulcers, as had most of those who recovered. Then he was seized with a cough, and three days after the ninth he was in a condition to go into the country for convalescence.’ The day after the cough set in, he expelled during a paroxysm of coughing a crust just like those of the cutaneous ulcers. Galen had previously examined his mouth and fauces, and had detected no signs of ulceration. He could also swallow both liquids and solids without any difficulty. To determine whether the crust came from his gullet or no, Galen administered a draught of vinegar and mustard; and from the absence of pain attending this drastic procedure he concluded that it must have come from the larynx and not from the gullet. Destructive ulcerations of the larynx have been recorded in rare instances in the course of small-pox, but such a condition would certainly preclude a journey to the country after the lapse of two days. It would be less impossible after the expulsion of a diphtheritic membrane.

It would be unprofitable to follow Galen further into the features of the pestilential fever he details, for, as we have said, it is quite uncertain that these are the features of a single disease. Indeed, apart from the evidence of Galen’s writings, it would be reasonable to presume the reverse from such knowledge as we have of other prolonged periods of pestilence.

Before leaving Galen we may say that he postulates a dual causation of pestilence: on the one hand, great irregularity of the seasons inducing a pestilential state of the atmosphere: on the other, a vitiated condition of the human body, due to contaminated food, rendering it liable to fever from very slight causes. The atmospheric factor, no doubt, would seem to be confirmed by the universality of the disease, while the greater severity of the disease and perhaps its special incidence as well among the ill-fed and destitute would seem to incriminate the resisting power of the individual.

The plague of a.d. 252, during the joint imperialty of Gallus and Hostilian, rivalled the Antonine pestilence both in virulence and duration. Hostilian was one of the first victims, though his death was commonly ascribed to the hand of Gallus. Eusebius[113] says that the disease had already worked havoc in Alexandria and Egypt, before it reached Rome. In some cities of Rome and Greece the daily mortality rose as high as 5,000,[114] and with greater or less virulence the disease spread over the whole known world.[115] Eusebius attributes the pestilence to moulds deposited from the air, a belief that we shall meet again in the course of the Great Plague of London.

Cyprian, the Christian bishop of Carthage, has left us some details of the symptoms in his eloquent homily ‘De Mortalitate’, which St. Augustine admired so greatly. Eusebius and Cyprian are both intent on extolling the self-sacrificing zeal with which the Christians laid down their lives in the service of the sick. Their writings help us to appreciate the contempt of suffering generated in the mind of the early enthusiasts of Christianity by living perpetually in the presence of persecution and in the fear of death. We know from the manner in which Cyprian[116] yielded himself to the sword of the executioner that the spirit of the ‘Sermo de Mortalitate’ permeated his whole being. In this sermon we may still read the glowing appeal of Cyprian to his hearers to seek courage and consolation in repentance for their sins.

Cedrenus[117] was so impressed with the infectiveness of the disease that he believed it might be communicated by a look, as Plato had conceived to be true of ophthalmia. Trebellius Pollio[118] recounts the association of terrestrial and other portents. Volcanoes awoke to fresh activity: earthquakes occurred and rumblings of the earth were heard: the sky was darkened for days: chasms yawned in the ground: great tidal waves overwhelmed many cities. It seemed as though the end of the world, foretold by the Christians, was at hand. In Rome the Sibylline books were consulted, and they prescribed the easy atonement of a sacrifice to Jupiter Salutaris.

Eusebius[119] is the chief authority for the pestilence of a.d. 302, during the reign of Maximian. It was accompanied by famine, so that the people were reduced to eating grass, and as many died of starvation as of disease. The famished dogs fought over the corpses of the dead, and the people slaughtered them wholesale, lest they should go mad and attack the living.

CHAPTER V

Until recent years it was generally believed that no certain record of bubonic plague existed prior to that of Procopius (c. a.d. 490-560). It would seem to be necessary to revise this opinion in the face of a fragment of the writings of Rufus of Ephesus, preserved by Oribasius,[120] the Christian physician of the Emperor Julian (a.d. 355-63). He writes: ‘The buboes called pestilential are most fatal and acute, especially those that are seen occurring about Libya, Egypt, and Syria, and which are mentioned by Dionysius Curtus. Dioscorides and Posidonius make much mention of them in the plague, which occurred in their time in Libya: they say it was accompanied by acute fever, pain, and prostration of the whole body, delirium, and the appearance of large and hard buboes, which did not suppurate, not only in the accustomed parts, but also in the groins and armpits:’ and further: ‘One can foresee an approaching plague by paying attention to the ill condition of the seasons, to the mode of living less conducive to health, and to the death of animals that precedes its invasion.’

Rufus is believed to have flourished in the reign of Trajan (a.d. 98-117), and may have been his physician. Dioscorides and Posidonius were probably Alexandrine physicians who flourished soon after the Christian era. The identity of Dionysius Curtus is conjectural, but there is some reason to think that he practised medicine in Alexandria in the third century b.c. Accepting these dates, one must admit that the evidence for the existence of bubonic plague in epidemic form in northern Africa and the Levant as early as the third century b.c. is exceedingly strong. Even if we conceive buboes to have been more common than nowadays in the course of other acute infectious diseases, the above record can hardly denote anything but bubonic plague. The reference to buboes as occurring with greater frequency in other parts than the groins and armpits does not appear to have received from medical writers the attention it deserves.

We have already adduced evidence to show that Hippocrates also was familiar with bubonic plague in its sporadic, but probably not in its epidemic form. Galen,[121] too, discusses the relation of buboes to fever in such a manner as to show that he also was acquainted with a severe bubonic malady, distinct from ordinary septic buboes. Oribasius also is cognizant of bubonic fevers, but it may be asserted generally that neither Galen nor Oribasius shows any signs of knowing them as a prevalent epidemic pestilence. We may, then, justly say that the narrative of Procopius affords the first unequivocal description of an epidemic of bubonic plague.

According to Procopius[122] the plague began at the ill-starred Pelusium, spreading in one direction through Alexandria and Egypt, in another through Palestine, and thence throughout the world, which would have meant to him from the eastern limits of Persia as far westward as the shores of the Atlantic. In the light of modern knowledge it is probable that Pelusium was no more than a distributing centre en route, and that the true focus of origin lay much further back along the commercial highways to the east or south. Of its pandemic character, however, we have the fullest confirmation in a succession of historical records. Evagrius[123] says that its total duration was fifty-two years, and this also it is possible to substantiate from the annexed table of its offsets, along with the names of the authorities for each locality.

Procopius describes the plague as progressing by definite stages, expending its virulence on one country before passing to another, as though intent on overlooking nothing. Indeed, if at first it touched a place lightly, it always returned to it subsequently, till the full measure of punishment was exacted. Always beginning at the sea-coast it spread into the interior, so that the infection in the first place was clearly sea-borne. He states that it took over a year to reach Byzantium, where it made its appearance in the spring of a.d. 542. We know, however, from Evagrius that plague was already in Antioch in a.d. 540, earlier, therefore, than the date of its alleged appearance in Pelusium.

In his discussion of etiology Procopius borrows much of the phraseology of Thucydides, but neither here nor elsewhere does he show the least sign of being influenced by the substance of the Thucydidean narrative. Thucydides, it will be remembered, evidently attributed the plague of Athens to natural causes, declining to speculate as to what could have produced such a disturbance of nature (μεταβολή).

Procopius says that those who pretended to knowledge ascribed the pestilence to things darting down from heaven (τοῖς ἐξ οὐρανοῦ ἐπισκήπτουσιν). This is indeed harking back to primitive conceptions. But he adds that they do so without a fragment of evidence, merely for the sake of deceiving, ascribing to nature what is clearly the handiwork of God and nothing else. This opinion he bases on the ground that the plague did not confine its ravages to any single country nor fall specially on either sex or any age, but spread over the whole world, regardless of season and of differences of habit. The argument, in so far as it was negative, was certainly a strong one in the light of the medical knowledge of his time, which referred much of the distinction of different maladies to variations of climate, soil, season, habit, and other accidental circumstances. Visual and auditory hallucinations were not lacking. Procopius says that many that were stricken by the plague saw, either when awake or when asleep, visions of spirits arrayed in human forms. Some seemed to hear in their sleep a voice saying that they were enrolled in the number of the dead. They fancied that these spectres in human form struck them in some part of the body, and immediately they were seized with the disease. To avoid these demons some shut themselves up in their houses and would not come out on any account. Others tried to escape the demons by invoking that the most sacred names and by every form of expiation.

This idea of pestilential demons seems to be of oriental origin. We have already encountered it in the story of Apollonius of Tyana at Ephesus. It figures in early Indian medicine, and also in Mahometan lore. Mahomet seems to have adopted it directly from Magian tradition, as embodied by Zoroaster in the Zendavesta. The Magians conceived one supreme God and Creator of the universe, from whom also emanated two active principles, personified as Ormusd, the principle or angel of light or good, and Ahriman, the principle or angel of darkness or evil, a demon. From these two opposite principles the universe was compounded, and in the direction of its affairs these two conflicting elements were always striving for mastery. So long as the angel of light was in the ascendant it was well with the affairs of men; but if for a while the demon of darkness prevailed, then sorrow and suffering and sin were the lot of mortal man. It was inevitable that a shepherd race, tending their flocks beneath a star-lit sky in the plains of Arabia and the uplands of Central Asia should see in the light and the darkness two hostile personalities dominating their existence for better or for worse.

Mahometans believed that spirits were sent by God armed with bows and arrows to disseminate plague as a punishment for sin. Spectres of a black colour dealt fatal wounds, but those dealt by white spectres were not fatal. We shall presently find this same fancy figuring in the literature and art of mediaeval Italy. It is not without interest to have traced the conception spreading, like the plague itself, from an endemic focus in the East, first to Byzantium, and then by slow stages to Italy and the West.

In Byzantium many succumbed to the disease without any premonitory visions. In these there was a sudden onset of a mild fever without any grave symptoms, so that the victim had no apprehension of dying. Then either the same day, or a day or two after, appeared a bubo (βουβών), either in the groin or armpit, or behind the ear, or elsewhere. So far as these symptoms went, all suffered in pretty much the same way. The Byzantine plague was therefore characteristically bubonic, and the buboes seem to have been distributed in the different parts of the body, much as we find them to-day. In this and in all essential points bubonic plague still exhibits a striking conformity to the picture drawn by Procopius some 1,400 years ago. Indeed Procopius has afforded an admirable outline sketch of oriental plague, to which the most recent medical science has added little beyond some elaboration of detail. We can decipher in his narrative at least four recognized types—the bubonic, the pustular, the pneumonic, and the tonsillar—as having prevailed during this epidemic in Byzantium. Unlike Thucydides, Procopius rejects the idea of contagion, as opposed to his own observations. Physicians, nurses, and those who buried the dead were not, in his experience, specially affected, in spite of their constant contact with the sick; and contrariwise, many contracted the disease without any contact at all. The belief of Procopius in the pestilence as a special act of God almost necessitated his being a non-contagionist. He was at a loss whether to attribute the varied manifestations of the disease to differences of constitution, or to the will of the Author of the plague. In one case profound lethargy prevailed, in another maniacal delirium. The lethargic lay simply regardless of everything and died of starvation, unless food was pressed on them. The delirious in their terror tried to flee: they struggled with their attendants in the attempt to throw themselves out of windows, or to drown themselves. Their desire was not to assuage their thirst, for often they threw themselves into the sea. This is evidently a criticism of the suggestion of Thucydides that it was thirst that drove the victims to throw themselves into cisterns.

Procopius says that the physicians conceived that the source of the disease lay in the buboes. This was a not unnatural inference from the fact that, in cases of simple suppuration of the bubo, the sufferer usually recovered, as though some virulent humour had escaped by this channel. For the same reason in later years incision was performed, and suppuration encouraged, whenever practicable. When, however, the physicians opened the buboes in the hope of discovering the cause, they found nothing but a horrible growth, like a carbuncle (ἄνθραξ). The Byzantine physicians evidently regarded the disease as a morbid process within the confines of recognized pathology.

There was a pustular type of the disease, and those who got a crop of black pustules all over the body, as large as a lentil, died at once. Procopius in his φλυκταίναις μελαίναις, ὅσον φακοῦ μέγεθος, ἐξήνθει τὸ σῶμα echoes the language of Thucydides, ᾄφλυκταίναις μικραῖς καὶ ἓλκεσιν ἐξηνθηκός: and it is noteworthy that ulcers were no feature of the Byzantine plague.

Many dropped dead from spontaneous vomiting of blood, probably from the lungs, as is not infrequent in the pneumonic form of plague.

Some escaped with a defect in the speech, so that as long as they lived they stammered or stuttered, and were unintelligible. This may well have been a sequel of the tonsillar type.

The plague lasted in epidemic virulence in Byzantium for four months in all, and was at its height for three. This again, speaking broadly, has been a feature of most European and Levantine outbreaks. At the worst the daily mortality reached the appalling total of ten thousand.

Procopius dwells at length on the accumulation of dead bodies in the streets and the neglect of funeral rites. At first each man buried the dead members of his own household, sometimes throwing them into graves prepared for others; but soon buriers failed, and then corpses began to litter the streets. These Justinian commissioned his agent Theodorus to bury. When all the existing burial-grounds were filled, huge burial-pits were dug wherever they could find space all round the city. Finally, when the digging of graves could no longer keep pace with the deaths, they mounted the towers of the city walls in Sycae, the port of Byzantium, and removing the roofs threw in the bodies promiscuously: when these were filled, the roofs were replaced. But when the wind set from that quarter, the awful stench proved most distressing to the citizens. Many corpses were simply cast out on the shore, where they were piled in barges and turned adrift out to sea. We shall see these various conditions strikingly reproduced during the plague of Marseilles in a.d. 1721. John of Ephesus states that the ambulance arrangements made by Justinian for the burial of the dead met all the requirements, but it is impossible to accept his statement in face of the precise and detailed account of Procopius.

The horrors of the plague, according to Procopius, turned men from dissoluteness to piety, for fear that their own death was imminent. If, however, they fell sick and recovered, they became even more dissolute than before, in the belief that they were now safe for the future. According to Thucydides, the Athenian Greeks became reckless from the first and gave themselves over to pleasure, seeing that the disease smote virtuous and vicious alike. Perhaps, however, the difference lay more in the mental attitude of the observer than in the actual demeanour of those observed.

All work came to a standstill in Byzantium, so that famine supervened in the city, where usually everything was in profusion. Justinian himself became infected and suffered from an attack, in which a bubo appeared.

Such in brief is the account that Procopius gives of the plague of Byzantium, as he saw it with his own eyes. Unquestionably he had before him the description of the plague of Athens, for now and again he slips into an identical turn of language. But to speak of him as a flagrant plagiarist of Thucydides is sheer absurdity. Rather he gives the impression of maintaining a critical attitude towards Thucydides, and of emphasizing the points of dissent. Procopius has no doubt that he is describing the same disease as Thucydides, and is impressed by the clinical differences he has observed. The tone of Thucydides is subjective: he attempts a general description, but cannot keep in the background the symptoms of his own case. The tone of Procopius is wholly objective: he writes as an intensely interested onlooker, retailing his own observations, supplemented by the statements of those who have had the disease and recovered. The apparent resemblance of the two accounts is really no more than surface deep.

An account of an offset of this pandemic at Antioch survives from the pen of the historian Evagrius,[124] who was born in a.d. 536 and spent the greater part of his life at Antioch. Apparently he knew nothing of the records of Procopius or Agathias, for he says that the history of this pestilence had not been written previously. He knew the narrative of the plague of Athens, for he says that this plague was ‘in some respects much like that which Thucydides described, in others quite unlike’: it cannot be said to have influenced either the form or the substance of his description. He says that it first reached Antioch in 540 b.c., whereas it did not appear at Byzantium till the spring of 542 b.c., and that the pandemic lasted altogether fifty-two years, exceeding ‘all the diseases that had ever been before Philostratus wondered at the plague, which was in his time, because it continued fifteen years’. This is presumed to have been the Antonine pestilence, for Philostratus was born in Lemnos about a.d. 170, but spent most of his life in Rome and died there in a.d. 245. Evagrius had the fullest opportunities of observing the plague at close quarters, for as a boy at school he himself suffered from an inguinal bubo, and in later years he lost his wife and several children of plague. He was but three years old when it first reached Antioch, so that his description must represent the disease after it had been rife for many years. Evagrius traces its origin further back than does Procopius, placing it in Ethiopia, so that it may actually have originated in an endemic area in Central Africa. Spreading over the whole world, it attacked cities quite irrespective of season, summer and winter alike. Evagrius has no doubt whatever of the contagiousness of the distemper. Those, he says, who escaped one year were attacked the next, and those who fled to places free from disease were the first to succumb, as they carried the contagion with them. Infection seemed to be taken in various ways—by sharing beds, by actual contact, by visiting infected houses, or even by casual meeting in the market-place. Some, however, escaped in spite of running every risk of infection.

The description that Evagrius gives of the symptoms of the disease, though brief, is wonderfully comprehensive. It shows that he was cognizant of the tonsillar, the bubonic, and the carbuncular or pustular types at least, and the rapidity of a fatal issue in a proportion of the cases suggests that pneumonic and septicaemic forms were also rife. ‘The disease’, he writes, ‘was compound and mixt with many other maladies. It took some men first in the head, made their eyes as red as blood and puffed up their cheeks: afterwards it fell at their throat, and whomsoever it took it dispatched him out of the way. It began with some with a fire and voiding of all that was within them, in others with swellings about the secret parts of the body, and there arose burning fires, so that they died thereof within two or three days of the furthest in such sort and of so perfect a remembrance as if they had not been sick at all; others died mad, and carbuncles that arose out of the flesh killed many.’

Agathias[125] (b. a.d. 536) describes a recrudescence of this pandemic in Byzantium in a.d. 558. He carried on the history of Procopius from its termination to a.d. 558. He says that the disease had never really disappeared since the first outbreak in a.d. 542, when it burst out furiously a second time in the spring of this year. Many persons fell as though stricken with apoplexy: those who held out longest died on the fifth day. Buboes and continuous fever were the outstanding features, as in the previous visitation. ‘People of all ages perished indiscriminately, but especially the young and vigorous and those in the flower of youth: and of them the males, for the females were not so much affected.’ With an epidemic recurrence such as this, the chief incidence would necessarily be on the young, who had neither resisted, nor acquired immunity from, a previous attack. The character of their occupation or of their habits of life would doubtless explain the special liability of the males to infection.

Gregory of Tours[126] (a.d. 540-94) testifies to the widespread character of the plague in France. In a.d. 549 he says that it depopulated the province of Arles, and afterwards devastated Narbonne. Here Felix, bishop of Nantes,[127] succumbed to the sloughing of his legs caused by the application of cantharides plasters to a crop of pustules.

In a.d. 566, before the plague invaded the Auvergne,[128] a succession of portents terrified the district. Three or four great brilliant lights made their appearance around the sun, which nevertheless underwent almost complete eclipse in October, looking dark and discoloured and like a bag. The heaven also seemed to be on fire, and many strange signs were seen. Then in a.d. 567 the epidemic raged throughout the district, causing an immense mortality. Lyons, Bourges, Chalons, and Dijon also lost a large part of their population. Coffins for the dead soon failed, and as many as ten bodies would be placed in the same grave. One Sunday no less than three hundred corpses were counted in the church of St. Peter at Clermont. Death seized the victims with dramatic suddenness. ‘There grew in the groin or armpit a lesion in the shape of a serpent, the effect of which was such that men yielded up their souls on the second or third day, and its violence completely took away their senses.’

In this epidemic buboes were evidently most frequently found in the groins, for Gregory repeatedly speaks of the disease as lues inguinaria or morbus inguinalis and the like.

Plague broke out at Marseilles[129] in a.d. 587, brought there by a merchant ship from Spain, which concealed its contact with a plague-stricken port. Several people made purchases from it, and in consequence eight inhabitants of one house were fatally infected. As in the epidemic of a.d. 1720, the disease did not spread immediately to the whole town. Bishop Theodore and a few of his suite shut themselves up in the church of St. Victor, and there, amid the general desolation, implored the mercy of God with prayer and vigil till the epidemic was at an end. On the return of the fugitive populace a belated outbreak exacted its appointed tribute.

Around Avignon[130] celestial portents foretold the plague that broke out in a.d. 590. The earth was illuminated at night by a light as bright as the midday. Balls of fire were seen tracking the sky during the night. A violent earthquake was felt at dawn in mid-June. The sun suffered almost complete eclipse in mid-August. Abundant autumn thunderstorms and rain raised the rivers in flood.

Meantime Italy, too, had been in like case. Paul the Deacon[131] (a.d. 720-90) briefly refers to a plague that had devastated Liguria in a.d. 565. He says that the plague was presaged by the sudden appearance of marks on houses, doors, utensils, and clothing, and the more they tried to efface them the more conspicuous they became. Eusebius[132] in like manner told of moulds on the walls of houses in a previous pestilence, and in Leviticus[133] we read of greenish and reddish marks on houses infected with leprosy. Towards the end of the year buboes began to attack the people, followed by a fever that killed in three days. The inhabitants fled, leaving property and cattle and crops, and desolation reigned supreme.

But it was on the head of hapless Rome that the full fury of the expiring storm was destined to spend its virulence. Both Gregory of Tours[134] and Paul the Deacon have left a record of the havoc. Gregory says that he obtained his information from his own deacon, who happened to be in Rome at the time. Paul the Deacon[135] seems to borrow his material from Gregory of Tours. An inundation of the Tiber in a.d. 589 resulted in the destruction of many old buildings on its banks and in the flooding of the granaries of the church, so that immense stores of grain were spoilt. The river yielded up a multitude of serpents, and a dragon of extraordinary size was seen to float through the city on its passage to the sea. Probably these were eels from the muddy bed of the Tiber, metamorphosed after the manner of Ovid into serpents: the dragon no one seems to have seen at close quarters. The inundation was followed in a.d. 590 by a severe outburst of bubonic plague (pestilentia, quam inguinariam vocant).

Portents were not confined to Rome. According to Evagrius,[136] a great earthquake in a.d. 589 laid Antioch in ruins, destroying the sanctuary of the Mother of God, and taking sixty thousand lives. In Upper Italy also there were extensive inundations due to overflowing of the mountain streams in Venetia, Liguria, and the sub-Alpine plains.

It is instructive to contrast the records of these chroniclers of the Church of the West with those of Procopius and Evagrius, and still more so with that of the pagan historian Thucydides. So intent are they on the mental and moral features of the distemper, that they say almost nothing of its physical features. They dilate at length on the visions and hallucinations that haunted the distracted fancy of the sufferers, which Thucydides disregards, though such must have accompanied the wild delirium he describes. Demons stalking the streets, ineffaceable marks and moulds on houses, voices from the grave, and celestial portents were the creations of the delirious fancy, and are faithfully reproduced in the pages of the Christian writers. One is sensible of something of the spirit in which Fra Angelico portrayed the joys of heaven and the torments of hell, when pestilence lay heavy on mediaeval Italy. The mortality in Rome was appalling. Death was rampant everywhere. At first the dead bodies were gathered up and flung in loads into great gaping graves, but after a while none were left even to bury the dead, and putrid corpses littered the streets. All business was at a standstill, and such as survived were huddled, panic-stricken like sheep, in the insecure sanctuary of the churches. To add to the general consternation, Pope Pelagius perished on February 8, a.d. 590. The choice of a successor lay with the clergy and people of Rome, subject to confirmation by the Emperor. With one accord they haled Abbot Gregory from the seclusion of his monastery to the pontifical chair in anticipation of the Imperial assent. Gregory of Tours, Paul the Deacon, and John the Deacon all tell of Gregory’s unwillingness to obey the summons, and of his attempt to intercept the letter of election on its way to the Emperor in Constantinople. But meantime, as the plague showed no sign of abating, Gregory determined to try to appease the wrath of God by a special act of contrition. Ascending the pulpit of St. John Lateran, he preached a memorable sermon, which has been preserved by the hand of Gregory of Tours. He implored them to make their sufferings an instrument for their conversion, and a means by which to soften the hardness of their hearts. He besought them, as Cyprian had done before, as Borromeo and Belsunce were to do hereafter, not to let the suddenness with which death seized them, sweeping away numbers at a time, and giving no opportunity for tears of penitence, find them unprepared to meet their God. Let them call their sins to mind and purge them away with weeping, for God wills not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live. Let no man despair because of the multitude of his offences. Did not God forgive the people of Nineveh of old, when they did penance for three days, and did He not give the reward of everlasting life to the dying thief? Let them therefore turn with him to God with importunity of prayer, or ever the sword of punishment descend. Does He not say by the mouth of the Psalmist: call upon Me in the time of trouble: so will I hear thee and thou shalt praise Me. Let them all come with contrite hearts and mended moods at early dawn on the fourth day from then to the celebration of a sevenfold litany, and with lamentation in their souls, so that the stern Judge may remit the sentence of damnation He has purposed to pass upon them. Let the clergy then start from the church of the martyr-saints Cosmo and Damian, along with the priests of the sixth region. All the abbots with their monks from the church of the martyrs Gervase and Protasius, along with the priests of the fourth region. All the abbesses with their flocks from the church of the martyr-saints Marcellinus and Peter, along with the priests of the first region. All the children from the church of the martyr-saints John and Paul, along with the priests of the second region. All the laity from the church of the protomartyr-saint Stephen, along with the priests of the seventh region. All the widowed women from the church of St. Euphemia, along with the priests of the fifth region. And the married women from the church of the martyr-saint Clement, along with the priests of the third region. Let them all go forth from these several churches with prayer and lamentation, to meet at the basilica of the Blessed Virgin Mary the Mother of Christ, there with long and earnest supplication to implore pardon for their sins.

So Gregory distributed the remnant that the plague had spared according to the seven ecclesiastical regions of Rome, bidding his clergy spend the three days’ interval in ceaseless psalms and prayers for mercy. Then on the fourth day, the festival of St. Mark, in the pale light of the early April morning, the great procession set out. With solemn chant of doleful Miserere, these seven trains of human suffering wended their slow way sadly amid the ruined monuments of ancient Rome. No other sound broke the stillness, but the faint rustle of sweeping garments and the silent shuffle of sick men’s feet. Now and again one fell stricken and lay as he fell, for Death was moving hither and thither among the moving ranks.[137] No less than eighty breathed out their lives before the church of the Mother of God was reached. There again Gregory fervently exhorted the people to repentance, so that the plague might cease.

A legend has it that as Gregory, heading his train of penitents, reached the Aelian Bridge, there, right before him, on the summit of Hadrian’s mole, a heavenly vision met his eyes. There stood the Archangel Michael, restoring a flaming sword to its sheath, in token that the plague was stayed. It is to this legend that the mausoleum owes the name of Castel S. Angelo, that it has borne since the tenth century at least. A bronze figure of the Archangel sheathing his sword still hovers on the summit, fifth of a series that have stood there at different times.

The legend of the angel is not mentioned by either of Gregory’s biographers, the deacons Paul and John, or by Bede or Gregory of Tours. Though of earlier origin than the tenth century, the first written records of it are in a German sermon of the twelfth or thirteenth century and in the Legenda Aurea of the end of the thirteenth century Caxton has rendered it thus:

‘And because the mortality ceased not, he ordained a procession, in which he did do bear an image of our Lady, which, as is said, St. Luke the Evangelist made, which was a good painter, he had carved it and painted it after the likeness of the glorious Virgin Mary. And anon the mortality ceased, and the air became pure and clear, and about the image was heard a voice of angels that sung this Anthem:

Regina Coeli laetare! Alleluia. Quia quem meruisti portare: Alleluia. Resurrexit sicut dixit: Alleluia.

and St. Gregory put thereto

Ora pro nobis, deum rogamus: Alleluia.

At the same time St. Gregory saw an angel upon a castle, which made clean a sword all bloody, and put it into the sheath, and thereby St. Gregory understood that the pestilence of this mortality was passed, and after that it was called the Castle Angel.’

In memory of this legend the great processions from S. Marco, until the prohibition of processions in a.d. 1870, used to strike up the antiphon ‘Regina Coeli’, as soon as they came to the bridge of Hadrian.

For the true source of this legend there is no need to look beyond the vision of the angel at the threshing-floor of Araunah: ‘And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the angel of the Lord stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem.’ In the Capitoline Museum is an altar dedicated to Isis by some traveller on his safe return, and bearing the customary imprint of two feet. The devout believed these to be the footprints of the angel that appeared to Gregory, and the altar once stood in the church of Ara Coeli.

GREGORY AND THE ANGEL

Photograph by Giraudon, Paris

It is certain that at least as early as this time pictures were carried in public procession. Theophylactus[138] has described two occasions on which a sacred effigy of Christ, believed not to have been made by human hands, was carried into battle for the sake of inspiring valour and discipline into the soldiery (a.d. 586 and 588). Among the many gems in which Bede’s Ecclesiastical History[139] abounds is that picture of the arrival of Augustine and his companions in Thanet ‘bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted on a board’ (a.d. 597). The sixteenth-century chronicler Baronius says, that the picture which Gregory carried in this plague procession of a.d. 590 was that of the Madonna, now preserved in the church of S. Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline, and still believed to protect Rome from plague and pestilence. Rome has no fewer than four pictures of the Madonna attributed like this one to the hand of Luke the Physician, and all of them reputed to have wonder-working powers. Expert opinion, alas! pronounces the oldest of them a fifteenth century production.

Gregory’s procession has afforded a favourite theme for art. It is the subject of one of the frescoes in the Lady Chapel of Winchester Cathedral executed under the direction of Prior Silkstede at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The scene is also shown in a picture in the Chiesa del San Pietro at Perugia, in a modern picture by the Austrian painter Hiremy Hirsch, and in several others elsewhere. The miniature figured on the opposite page is one of two from a beautiful Livre d’Heures, of the early fifteenth century, and once the property of the Duc de Berry. It is now in the Musée Condé of the Château de Chantilly.

An Italian tradition refers the custom of saying ‘Bless you’, when a person sneezes, to the time of the pestilence of Gregory, in which all those that sneezed were said to have died. Boersch, quoting from the local chronicles of Kleinlauel and of Oseas Schadaeus, would trace its origin to the plague at Strasbourg in a.d. 591.[140] ‘And when any one sneezed, he gave up the ghost forthwith. Hence the saying “God help you”. And when any one yawned, he died. Hence it comes that when any one yawns, one makes the sign of the cross before the mouth.’ Probably the association is even older than this, for Thucydides speaks of sneezing in the plague of Athens. Sneezing and yawning were prominent features of the Sweating Sickness.

PLATE V (Face Page 95)

FRESCO IN S. PIETRO IN VINCOLI, ROME

Photograph by Anderson, Rome

CHAPTER VI

In the summer of a.d. 680 Rome was again gripped in the toils of an appalling plague that had spread over the greater part of Italy. Paul the Deacon[141] says that eclipses of both sun and moon in May were followed by pestilence in the months of July, August, and September. Describing its ravages at Ticinum (Pavia) Paul says that ‘the number of the dead was so great that parents were often carried to burial on the same biers as their children, and brothers along with sisters.... And then many saw with their own eyes a good and a bad angel passing through the city by night. And whenever at the bidding of the good angel, the bad one, who seemed to carry a lance in his hand, struck so many times with his lance on the door of each house, as many of that household would die on the following day. Then it was revealed to some one that the plague would not cease until an altar was set up to Sebastian, saint and martyr, at the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli. This was done, and as soon as the altar was set up, the relics of the martyr-saint Sebastian were brought from Rome, and forthwith the plague ceased.’

Paul the Deacon, beyond all doubt, was referring to the church of [S. Pietro in Vincoli] at Pavia, but the Romans of later date claimed the legend for their own church of the same name, in which it has been embodied in a fresco of the fifteenth century, ascribed to Pollajuolo (1429-98). In the background, at the summit of a flight of stairs, presumably suggested by those of Ara Coeli, a citizen is telling to Pope Agatho, who is seated among his cardinals, his dream that the pestilence will not cease till the body of S. Sebastian is brought into the city. On the right the good angel indicates the condemned houses to the bad angel in the guise of the Evil One, who strikes on the door with his lance. On the left a procession, carrying a banner on which the Madonna is depicted with robe spread out in protecting attitude, is bringing in the relics. The foreground is strewn with corpses of the dead. In the sky, bow in hand, hovers the angel that spreads the pestilence. To the left is a group of the Almighty and angels, now almost obliterated.

It is not generally recognized that the well-known picture ‘La Peste à Rome’, by Delaunay (a.d. 1828-91), now in the Musée du Luxembourg at Paris, was directly inspired by this fresco. The scene is laid in a street of Rome, which is strewn with bodies of dead and dying, among which the good and evil angels are busy at their task. The figure of a youth huddled up in a brown shawl on a doorstep is a living picture of misery. In the background a procession bearing a cross is descending a flight of stairs, and a fire to purify the atmosphere is burning in the open street. An effigy of Aesculapius and a colossal equestrian statue of Constantine are introduced in the manner of the Renaissance. The chief merit of the picture lies in the excellence of its draughtsmanship.

In this same church at Rome is a mosaic effigy of Sebastian, believed to have been executed in a.d. 683. In spite, however, of the name of Sebastian, that it carries in gold mosaic letters, it is difficult to believe that it is anything but a figure of St. Peter, transformed perhaps in the presence of this epidemic to that of Sebastian. It represents faithfully the traditional lineaments of the apostle, an old man with white hair and beard, dressed in the true Byzantine style. Kugler considers that the careful shadowing of the drapery, executed with more than usual pains, indicates that the effigy was intended to be exposed to the close gaze of the pious. The figure on its blue mosaic background is stiff and inanimate, even beyond other similar archaic effigies. Beside it, on a marble tablet, is an inscription in Latin, reproducing almost to a word the story told by Paul the Deacon. Tradition has it that Pope Agatho (a.d. 678-82) on this occasion caused the bones of the saint to be collected in the cemetery of Calixtus, and brought to the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli, there to be enshrined beneath an altar. In the ninth century the body seems to have been removed for safety to the Vatican, and again transferred to the church of S. Sebastiano, where it now is, by Honorius III in a.d. 1216. This church, however, was completely rebuilt in a.d. 1611.

PLATE VI LA PESTE À ROME. BY DELAUNAY

Photograph by Giraudon, Paris (Face Page 96)

From the time of this pestilence in a.d. 680, Sebastian was universally recognized as the patron saint of pestilence. Gradually he comes to be identified more particularly with true plague, but never in the same exclusive fashion as his brother saint, St. Roch. His comprehensive patronage of pestilence indicates not only how rife were other epidemic diseases besides true plague, but how little they were differentiated in the public mind.

The story of the life of Sebastian[142] is well authenticated in its main incidents. Born in the middle of the third century a.d., he was a native of Narbonne in Gaul. His noble birth secured for him early in life the command of a company of Praetorian Guards, so that he was constantly about the person of the Emperor. Though secretly a Christian and using his position to secure the conversion of others to Christianity, he remained intensely loyal to the temporal interest of the Emperor. Among his friends were two young soldiers, Marcus and Marcellinus, like him of noble birth. They were convicted of embracing Christianity, and after enduring torture bravely were led out to die. On the way their aged parents, their wives and children, and their friends, implored them to relent, and they were about to recant, when Sebastian rushed forward and exhorted them not to renounce their Redeemer. So inspiring was his appeal, that the whole assembly, guards, judges, and all, were converted and baptized, and for a while Marcus and Marcellinus were saved. This scene is depicted in a spirited canvas by Veronese in the plague church of S. Sebastiano at Venice. Their respite was but short, for in a few months they were put to death with many others of the Christian community, and Sebastian himself was condemned to die. The Emperor Diocletian (a.d. 284-305), by reason of his personal attachment, sent for him and exhorted him to abjure his heresy, but Sebastian meekly and courageously refused. Diocletian then ordered that he should be bound to a stake and shot to death with arrows, and that an inscription should be placed on the stake for all to see, saying that he was put to death only for being a Christian. A vast number of pictures, beside the masterpiece of Sodoma,[143] depict this scene. Pierced with arrows, Sebastian was left for dead, but at midnight Irene, the widow of one of his martyred friends, came to take away his body for burial, but found him still alive, the arrows having pierced no vital part. She and her attendants carried him to her house and tended him, till he was completely healed. After this they urged him to leave Rome, but Sebastian went boldly to the palace gate, and as the Emperor passed out, pleaded for those Christians who were condemned to suffer for their faith, and reproached Diocletian for his cruelty. The Emperor in fierce anger ordered his guards to seize Sebastian and carry him to the circus, there to beat him to death with clubs. To conceal his dead body from his friends it was thrown into the Cloaca Maxima, but a Christian woman, Lucina, received tidings in a vision of where the body lay, and recovering it had it secretly buried in the catacombs. The church of S. Sebastiano at Rome is now built over these catacombs.

PLATE VII (Face Page 99)