Transcriber’s Notes:
Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
in the original text.
Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
Illustrations have been moved so they do not break up paragraphs.
Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved.
Typographical errors have been silently corrected
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
[Illustration: 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superseded the endeavour to understand.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
S. Sebastian. By Sodoma _Frontispiece_
PLATE I:
Apollo with Bow and Mouse. Bronze coin of
Alexandria Troas. _c._ 250 B.C. × 2.
Asclepius with Serpent. Bronze coin of Pergamon.
Time of Antoninus Pius. × 2.
Serpent and Galley. Medallion. Time of Antoninus Pius.
Pest-Thaler, struck at Wittenberg, A.D. 1528.
Christ on the Cross.
The Brazen Serpent _To face p._ 4
PLATE II. Plague of Ashdod. By N. Poussin _To face p._ 18
PLATE III. Plague of David. By P. Mignard _To face p._ 19
PLATE IV. Gregory and the Angel _To face p._ 93
PLATE V. Fresco in S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome _To face p._ 95
PLATE VI. La Peste à Rome. By Delaunay _To face p._ 96
PLATE VII. Sebastian as Protector against
Pestilence. By Benozzo Gozzoli _To face p._ 99
PLATE VIII. Sodoma’s Sebastian Plague Banner
(Reverse). SS. Roch and Sigismund, and
Brethren of Compagnia di S. Sebastiano _To face p._ 100
PLATE IX. SS. Mark, Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas,
and Damian. By Titian _To face p._ 102
PLATE X. S. Roch. By Ambrogio Borgognone _To face p._ 108
PLATE XI. S. Roch tended by an Angel. By Niklaus
Manuel. Intercessory plague picture _To face p._ 109
PLATE XII. Madonna and Child, S. Anna and Saints.
By G. Francesco Caroto _To face p._ 110
PLATE XIII. Dance of Death, at Basle _To face p._ 135
PLATE XIV. Madonna della Misericordia.
By Bonfigli _To face p._ 138
PLATE XV. Madonna del Soccorso.
By Sinibaldo Ibi _To face p._ 138
PLATE XVI. Plague Banner. Christ and Saints.
By Bonfigli _To face p._ 139
PLATE XVII. Pest-Blätter:
1. The Almighty with SS. Sebastian and Roch.
2. The Almighty, Madonna and Suppliants. The
Virgin and Child, S. Anna and Suppliants _To face p._ 142
PLATE XVIII. The Impruneta Virgin _To face p._ 146
PLATE XIX. S. Tecla liberates Este from Plague.
By Giovanni Battista Tiepolo _To face p._ 147
PLATE XX. Plague. A drawing by Raphael _To face p._ 148
PLATE XXI. Procession to S. Maria della Salute,
Venice. From a seventeenth century engraving _To face p._ 172
PLATE XXII. Carlo Borromeo.
By Annibale Carracci _To face p._ 173
PLATE XXIII. Borromeo leading a Plague
Procession. By Pietro da Cortona _To face p._ 174
PLATE XXIV. Borromeo interceding for the
Plague-stricken. By P. Puget.
A marble bas-relief _To face p._ 175
PLATE XXV. Torture and Execution of the Anointers _To face p._ 179
PLATE XXVI. Plague of Naples, 1656.
By Micco Spadara _To face p._ 184
PLATE XXVII. Plague Scenes in Rome, 1656.
From an old engraving _To face p._ 186
PLATE XXVIII:
1. Dress of a Marseilles Doctor, 1720.
2. German Caricature of the same _To face p._ 200
PLATE XXIX. Peste de Marseille.
By François Gérard _To face p._ 206
PLATE XXX. La Peste dans la Ville de Marseille
en 1720. By J. F. de Troy _To face p._ 207
PLATE XXXI. Les Pestiférés de Jaffa. By Baron Gros _To face p._ 208
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_.
[Illustration: PLATE I (Face Page 4)
Apollo with Bow and Mouse Asclepius with Serpent
Serpent and Galley
Christ on the Cross The Brazen Serpent]
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.
[Illustration: PLATE II
PLAGUE OF ASHDOD. BY N. POUSSIN
Photograph by Giraudon, Paris (Face Page 18)]
[Illustration: 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Metamorphoses_, vii. 520.
[2] _Hist. Francorum_, x. 1.
[3] _De Gestis Langobardorum_, iii. 24.
[4] A. Bastian, _Ein Besuch in San Salvador_, p. 318; and Frazer,
_Commentary on Pausanias_, ii. 10. 3.
[5] _The Great African Island_, p. 268.
[6] Gordon Cumming, _In the Hebrides_, pp. 53 seq.
[7] Aristophanes, _Plutus_, 733.
[8] Frazer, _Pausanias_, ii. 2. 8.
[9] Gordon Cumming, _loc. cit._
[10] _Iliad_, i. 44 seq.
[11] Derby, Homer’s _Iliad_.
[12] VII. xi. 2, tr. Bloomfield.
[13] Synonym for Rudra.
[14] Synonym for Rudra.
[15] _Atharvaveda_, V. xi. 10.
[16] xvii. 41.
[17] _Hist. Anim._ vi. 37. 580 B.
[18] _Geographica_, xiii. 1. 48, and iii. 104.
[19] _Zoologist_, September 1892.
[20] Strabo, _Geographica_, iii. 104.
[21] 2 Kings xix. 35.
[22] ii. 141; and Rawlinson’s _Herodotus_, ed. 1880, vol. ii. 219-20.
[23] _Geographica_, xiii. 64.
[24] _Journal Asiatique_, 1st series, iii. 307.
[25] i. 39.
[26] _Revue Numismatique_, N.S. iii.
[27] _Nat. Anim._ xii. 5.
[28] _Geographica_, xiii. 1. 64.
[29] Newton, _Travels and Discoveries in the Levant_, i. 130.
[30] Thomas, _Two Years in Palestine_, p. 6.
[31] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, ed. 1900, ii. 423.
[32] _Iliad_, i. 39.
[33] Strabo, _loc. cit._
[34] Aeschylus, _Theb._ 145.
[35] Pausanias, v. 14. 1.
[36] Strabo, _loc. cit._
[37] Varro, _Rerum rusticarum_ i. 1. 6.
[38] Aymonier, _Revue de l’histoire des religions_, xxiv (1891) 236.
[39] _Morals: Essay on Envy and Hatred._
[40] 2 Samuel xxiv; and 1 Chronicles xxi.