CHAPTER III
Unlike Greece, young Rome was subject to repeated pestilence: plagues punctuate the pages of her history. We shall see how deep an imprint they left on the nascent religion, literature, and art of Rome.
At first these plagues must needs have been endemic, and bred no doubt in the extensive swamps that lay within the city and around it for many miles, for Rome was not then a commercial city. Her corn she derived from Italy and Sicily, and held little or no intercourse with Egypt, until after the conquest of Carthage. Yet, in spite of the numerous records of her pestilences that have survived, there is not one the nature of which can be identified before the true Plague of Gregory the Great.
According to Plutarch[54]there was pestilence in Italy and Rome in the eighth year of Numa Pompilius (707b.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 habitedin 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, butvetus 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 = deliverancefrom 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 somenumen, 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 centuryb.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.
Cumé tonas, Leucésie, prae tet tremonti,Quom tibei cunei dextumúm tonárent.
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 theIliad, and his invocation in theOedipus Tyrannus.
Pestilence was in Rome again just before the death of Tullus Hostilius[59]in 640b.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 514b.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 centuryb.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 473b.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 humansacrifice 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 centurya.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 Apolloniusordered 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 461b.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 GermanHerbarius,[70]first published ina.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 451b.c., which carried off all the slaves and half the citizens of Rome. Thepollution 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 435-430b.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 431b.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 431b.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 395b.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 insacred 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 alectisternium.
Thelectisternium, 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 andthe 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 363b.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 solemnlyrevived. 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 348b.c.pestilence[80]was again rife, and alectisterniumwas observed at the instance of the Sibylline books.
In 331b.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 312b.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, somestrong 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 295b.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 (420b.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 219b.c., and of those again from 167b.c.to the end of his history in the middle of the reign of Augustus. That there was no cessation of the frequent recurrence ofpestilence may reasonably be inferred from the regularity of appearance in those intervening years, of which his complete histories survive.
In 212b.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 ofa.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 212b.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 180b.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 176-175b.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.