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.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] _Life of Numa._
[55] Frazer, _Golden Bough_.
[56] Pausanias, ix. 22. 1.
[57] _Odes_, I. 37.
[58] I. vi. § 40.
[59] Livy, i. 31.
[60] Livy, i. 56, and Dion. Halic. _Antiq. Rom._ iv. 68.
[61] _Antiq. Rom._ ix. 40.
[62] Porphyry, _De Abstinentia_, ii. 56.
[63] Deuteronomy xii. 31; Leviticus xviii. 21; 2 Kings ii. 5-17.
[64] I. v. 2.
[65] IX. viii. 2.
[66] _Vita Apollonii_, iv. 10.
[67] iii. 6.
[68] iii. 8.
[69] iii. 5.
[70] Agnes Arber, _Herbals_, 1912.
[71] _Antiq. Rom._ x. 53; and Livy, iv. 32.
[72] Livy, iv. 21-5.
[73] Livy, v. 13.
[74] xiv. 70.
[75] Livy, vii. 2.
[76] Leviticus xiv. 7, and 53.
[77] _Nat. Hist._ xxviii. 63.
[78] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, and E. C. Gurdon, _County Folk-lore,
Suffolk_, p. 14.
[79] _Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg_, ii. 120, §
428.
[80] Livy, vii. 27.
[81] Livy, viii. 18.
[82] Livy, ix. 28.
[83] x. 31.
[84] Livy, X. 47, and _Epit. Lib._ xi.
[85] Valerius Maximus, i. 8.
[86] See Duruy, _History of Rome_, i. 555.
[87] ii. 10. 3.
[88] xxv. 26-8.
[89] _Punic War_, v. 580-626.
[90] Livy, xxxix. 41; xl. 19; xl. 37.
[91] xli. 21.