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.
FOOTNOTES:
[92] _De Re Rustica_, i. 12.
[93] _Metamorphoses_, vii. 520 seq.
[94] Bk. I.
[95] iii. 5.
[96] x. 2.
[97] _Aeneid_, x. 272 seq.
[98] _Annals_, xiv. 22.
[99] _Quaestiones Naturales_, vi. 27. 28, and Seneca, _Physical
Science_, Clarke and Geikie.
[100] _Annals_, Bk. XVI.
[101] lxvii. 11.
[102] lxxii. 14.
[103] Herodian, Bk. I.
[104] Evagrius, _Hist._ iv. 28.
[105] xxiii. 7.
[106] Merivale, _Hist. of Rome_, vii. 578.
[107] vii. 15.
[108] _Hist. of Rome_, v. 186.
[109] _Commentar. I. in Hippocrat. Lib. VI, Epidem. Aph._ 29.
[110] _De Praesag. ex pulsibus_, iii. 4.
[111] _De Simplicium Medicamentorum Temperamentis et Facultatibus_, ix.
1.
[112] _Method. Medendi_, v. 12.
[113] _Hist. Eccles._ vii. 22.
[114] Trebellius Pollio, _Gallienus_, tom. ii.
[115] Pomponius Laetus, _Rom. Hist._ tom. ii.
[116] Pontius, _Vita Caecilii Cypriani_.
[117] _Compend. Historiarum, ex versione Xylandri_, p. 258.
[118] _Gallienus_, iv and v.
[119] _Hist. Eccles._ ix. 8.