Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art

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Title: Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art
Author: Crawfurd, Raymond Henry Payne, Sir
Language: English
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LITERATURE AND ART ***

PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE IN LITERATURE AND ART

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY
HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE

S. SEBASTIAN. BY SODOMA]

PLAGUE
AND
PESTILENCE
IN
LITERATURE AND ART

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

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1914

PREFACE

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superseded the endeavour to understand.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

_January 1914._

LIST OF PLATES

S. Sebastian. By Sodoma _Frontispiece_

PLATE I:

Apollo with Bow and Mouse. Bronze coin of
Alexandria Troas. _c._ 250 B. C. × 2.

Asclepius with Serpent. Bronze coin of Pergamon.
Time of Antoninus Pius. × 2.

Serpent and Galley. Medallion. Time of Antoninus
Pius.

Pest-Thaler, struck at Wittenberg. A. D. 1528.

Christ on the Cross.

The Brazen Serpent _To face p. 4_

PLATE II. Plague of Ashdod. By N. Poussin _To face p. 18_

PLATE III. Plague of David. By P. Mignard _To face p. 19_

PLATE IV. Gregory and the Angel _To face p. 93_

PLATE V. Fresco in S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome _To face p. 95_

PLATE VI. La Peste à Rome. By Delaunay _To face p. 96_

PLATE VII. Sebastian as Protector against Pestilence.
By Benozzo Gozzoli _To face p. 99_

PLATE VIII. Sodoma’s Sebastian Plague Banner
(Reverse). SS. Roch and Sigismund, and Brethren
of Compagnia di S. Sebastiano _To face p. 100_

PLATE IX. SS. Mark, Sebastian, Roch, Cosmas, and
Damian. By Titian _To face p. 102_

PLATE X. S. Roch. By Ambrogio Borgognone _To face p. 108_

PLATE XI. S. Roch tended by an Angel. By Niklaus
Manuel. Intercessory plague picture _To face p. 109_

PLATE XII. Madonna and Child, S. Anna and Saints.
By G. Francesco Caroto _To face p. 110_

PLATE XIII. Dance of Death, at Basle _To face p. 135_

PLATE XIV. Madonna della Misericordia. By Bonfigli _To face p. 138_

PLATE XV. Madonna del Soccorso. By Sinibaldo Ibi _To face p. 138_

PLATE XVI. Plague Banner. Christ and Saints.
By Bonfigli _To face p. 139_

PLATE XVII. Pestblätter:

1. The Almighty with SS. Sebastian and Roch.

2. The Almighty, Madonna and Suppliants. The
Virgin and Child, S. Anna and Suppliants _To face p. 142_

PLATE XVIII. The Impruneta Virgin _To face p. 146_

PLATE XIX. S. Tecla liberates Este from Plague.
By Giovanni Battista Tiepolo _To face p. 147_

PLATE XX. Plague. A drawing by Raphael _To face p. 148_

PLATE XXI. Procession to S. Maria della Salute,
Venice. From a seventeenth-century engraving _To face p. 172_

PLATE XXII. Carlo Borromeo. By Annibale Carracci _To face p. 173_

PLATE XXIII. Borromeo leading a Plague Procession.
By Pietro da Cortona _To face p. 174_

PLATE XXIV. Borromeo interceding for the
Plague-stricken. By P. Puget. A marble bas-relief _To face p. 175_

PLATE XXV. Torture and Execution of the Anointers _To face p. 179_

PLATE XXVI. Plague of Naples, 1656. By Micco Spadara _To face p. 184_

PLATE XXVII. Plague Scenes in Rome, 1656. From an
old engraving _To face p. 186_

PLATE XXVIII:

1. Dress of a Marseilles Doctor, 1720.

2. German Caricature of the same _To face p. 200_

PLATE XXIX. Peste de Marseille. By François Gérard _To face p. 206_

PLATE XXX. La Peste dans la Ville de Marseille
en 1720. By J. F. de Troy _To face p. 207_

PLATE XXXI. Les Pestiférés de Jaffa. By Baron Gros _To face p. 208_

CHAPTER I

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: PLATE I

Apollo with Bow and Mouse
Asclepius with Serpent
Serpent and Galley
Christ on the Cross
The Brazen Serpent

(Face Page 4)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Prayer to Bhava[13] and Sava[13] for protection from dangers._

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

Other gods than Rudra can stem the pestilence. ‘Vayu [the wind] shall
bend the points of the enemies’ bows, Indra shall break their arms, so
that they shall be unable to lay on their arrows: Aditya [the sun] shall
send their missiles astray, and Krandramas [the moon] shall bar the way
of the enemy that has not started.’[14] Like the Madonna of the Christian
Church Aditya staves off the arrows of pestilence. The Aryan warrior
certainly, the primitive Greek probably, used poisoned arrows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is tempting to assert with confidence a direct causal connexion
between the morbid swellings and the mice, for rats and mice were ill
distinguished from each other until recent times. The matter is further
complicated by the fact that there is considerable doubt as to the
authenticity of parts, at least, of the narrative. The composition of
the Books of Samuel ranged over some seven centuries, from 900-200 B.
C., and the mouse story is believed to be a late interpolation, of which
it is impossible to fix the date. But in the text, as it stands, the
mice are designated ‘mice that mar the land’, and ancient literature
abounds in records of appalling devastation of crops by the agency
of field-mice. Aelian,[15] Aristotle,[16] Strabo,[17] Theophrastus,
Pliny, and others testify to this. Loeffler[18] gives an account of a
Thessalian corn-harvest destroyed by a horde of field-voles, a field
being completely devastated in a single night. Mice were, in fact, one
prominent cause of the famine-plagues[19] of history. Viewed in this
light, it helps us to understand another Biblical pestilence, that fell
on the army of Sennacherib, in 701 B. C., at Pelusium. This campaign
of Sennacherib was undertaken to quell a general revolt of the western
states against Assyrian supremacy and the payment of tribute to the
Assyrian king. The revolt was fomented, seemingly, by Merodach-Baladan,
whom Sargon had ousted from the kingship of Babylon, and who now drew
Hezekiah into the revolt. He sent an embassy with gifts to Hezekiah,
nominally to congratulate him on his recovery from a severe illness,
which the Bible narrative terms ‘a boil’. This may perhaps indicate true
pustular plague, but forms of boil (e. g. Baghdad boil), quite distinct
from plague, are familiar occurrences in several regions of the East.
Sennacherib first crushed Merodach-Baladan, and then advanced against
Hezekiah, who at once called on Tirhaquah, the Ethiopian viceroy of
Egypt, for help. At the pitched battle of Altaku Sennacherib defeated
Tirhaquah, and shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem, to which he proceeded to
lay siege. Meantime Tirhaquah rallied his army and again advanced to the
aid of Hezekiah, so that Sennacherib was compelled to march south against
him. At Pelusium, on the border of Egypt, Sennacherib’s army was suddenly
destroyed by a pestilence, that compelled him to withdraw the remnant
at once to Assyria. ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of
the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred
fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning,
behold, they were all dead corpses.’[20] Isaiah confirms in detail the
narrative of the Book of Kings, and the Chaldaean chronicler, Berosus,
in a fragment preserved by Josephus, states also that Sennacherib was
driven back by pestilence. The prism inscriptions of Sennacherib are
characteristically silent on the subject: they tell only how he shut up
Hezekiah in Jerusalem, like a bird in a cage.

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

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

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed on the face of the foe as he passed:
And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still.
...
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.

Herodotus[21] relates that the tradition of this wonderful deliverance
lived on in Egypt also. His cicerone in the temple of Ptah at Memphis
told him the following tale. ‘The next king was a priest of Vulcan,
called Sethos. This monarch despised and neglected the warrior class of
the Egyptians, as though he did not need their services. Among other
indignities which he offered them, he took from them the lands which they
possessed under all the previous kings, consisting of twelve acres of
choice land for each warrior. Afterwards, therefore, when Sennacherib,
king of the Arabians and Assyrians, marched his vast army into Egypt, the
warriors one and all refused to come to his aid. On this the monarch,
greatly distressed, entered into the inner sanctuary, and before the
image of the god bewailed the fate that impended over him. As he wept he
fell asleep, and dreamed that the god came and stood at his side, bidding
him be of good cheer, and go boldly forth to meet the Arabian host, which
would do him no hurt, as he himself would send those who should help him.
Sethos then, relying on the dream, collected such of the Egyptians as
were willing to follow him, who were none of them warriors, but traders,
artisans, and market people, and with these marched to Pelusium, which
commands the entrance into Egypt, and there pitched his camp. As the
two armies lay here opposite one another, there came in the night a
multitude of field-mice, which devoured all the quivers and bow-strings
of the enemy and ate the thongs by which they managed their shields. Next
morning they commenced their flight, and great multitudes fell, as they
had no arms with which to defend themselves. There stands to this day in
the temple of Vulcan a stone statue of Sethos, with a mouse in his hand,
and an inscription to this effect: “Look on me and learn to reverence the
gods.”’

Strabo[22] has a story of mice eating up the bow-strings, and a variant
of it appears also in Chinese annals,[23] so that it may be regarded as
merely a figurative expression for some providential deliverance from
an enemy, and in the case of Sennacherib the medium of deliverance was
pestilence.

It is impossible to say whose was the statue Herodotus ascribes to
Sethos, for no king Sethos is known in Egyptian history. Perhaps it was
a statue of Horus, the Egyptian equivalent of Apollo, or not impossibly
of Apollo himself, for we have abundant evidence of the association of
the mouse with Apollo. In the pestilence of the _Iliad_,[24] Chryses
addresses him as Mouse-God (Σμινθεύς). Strabo says that the statue of
Apollo Smintheus in Chrysa, a town of the Troad, had a mouse beneath his
foot: so also has a bronze coin now in the British Museum. De Witte[25]
has figured coins of Alexandria, the more ancient Hamaxitus, in the
Troad, in which Apollo Smintheus is represented with his bow, and a mouse
on his hand. Aelian[26] says that an effigy of the mouse stood beside the
tripod of Apollo. An ancient bas-relief, of uncertain date, illustrating
the Homeric plague and the offerings of the Greeks to Apollo Smintheus,
also shows a mouse on a tripod. Another shows Apollo with a mouse beneath
his chin: so, too, does a coin of Tenedos. White mice were actually
kept beneath the altar in the temple of Apollo Smintheus at Hamaxitus,
and were fed at the public expense. Strabo[27] says that the worship of
Apollo Smintheus extended to the whole coast of Asia Minor and to the
neighbouring islands.

Many votive offerings in the form of mice have been found, at Alexandria
Troas,[28] in Palestine,[29] and elsewhere, and Strabo suggests that
the worship of mice originated in a desire to propitiate mice, so as
to induce them not to ravage the cornfields. The propitiation of
animals,[30] and particularly of those that infest the crops, is common
in the worship of primitive men. The Philistines are said to have made
images of the mice that marred their land, and sent them out of their
country, so as to induce the real mice to depart also. In a later stage
of worship, when a god has supplanted the animal, the god is propitiated
instead of the pest itself: hence Mouse Apollo,[31] Locust Apollo,[32]
Wolf Apollo,[33] and Zeus Averter of Flies.[34] Even lowlier pests are
absorbed into the godhead, so that we have Apollo Erythibius[35] (ἐρυσίβη
= mildew), and the Romans personified it and worshipped it as Robigus[36]
(_robigo_ = mildew). The Chams of Indo-China offer sacrifices to a rude
pillar-idol, called Yang-tikuh (god-rat), when swarms of rats infest
the fields.[37] Thus Apollo seems to stand in the same relation to the
mouse, as Asclepius to the serpent. He not only sends pestilence, but
also wards it off both from man and from crops. And viewing all the facts
we may conclude with some certainty that the association of mice with
famine-pestilence was well recognized, but of any knowledge at this time
of the association of rats with plague there is little evidence.

Plutarch[38] asserts that the Persian Magi killed all their mice and
rats, because they and the gods they worshipped entertained a natural
antipathy to them, a feeling which, he says, they shared with the
Arabians and Ethiopians. One is curious to know what may have been the
real ground of this antipathy, for which Plutarch advances the current
explanation. More than likely it was that experience had taught these
nations the relation of these animals to famine and perhaps to pestilence
as well.

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

[Illustration: PLATE II

PLAGUE OF ASHDOD. BY N. POUSSIN

Photograph by Giraudon, Paris

(Face Page 18)]

[Illustration: PLATE III

PLAGUE OF DAVID. BY P. MIGNARD

(Face Page 19)]

One other Biblical[39] pestilence, the plague of David, presents to us
another and more enduring image of pestilence, and represents also a
stage at which religion has superseded magic. David, in punishment for
his presumption in numbering the people, is given the choice of seven
years of famine, three months of fleeing before his enemies, or three
days of pestilence. He chose the last, and seventy thousand of his people
perished. ‘And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the Angel of the Lord
stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand
stretched out over Jerusalem.’ ‘And when the angel stretched out his hand
upon Jerusalem to destroy it,’ God checked him by the threshing-floor of
Araunah the Jebusite. ‘And the Lord commanded the angel; and he put up
his sword again into the sheath thereof.’ Then the prophet Gad told David
to set up an altar in the threshing-floor of Araunah. So David bought
it and set up an altar and offered sacrifice to God, and the plague was
stayed: on the site of this altar Solomon built the Temple.

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

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

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

CHAPTER II

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

The _Oedipus Tyrannus_ seems to have been first publicly performed
between 429-420 B. C., possibly therefore before the plague of Athens
had finally died out. Sophocles is certainly not describing the plague
of Athens in the guise of a Theban plague, but it must needs have
coloured his thoughts as well as those of his audience. His description
of the pestilence blighting the crops, and causing murrain among cattle
and disease and death among men, suggests one of the famine plagues
common in ancient history. Hesiod[40] was not unaware of them (λιμὸν
ὁμοῦ καὶ λοιμόν). Sophocles is the first writer to attempt even in
outline a description of pestilence, and in doing so he has drawn the
picture of pestilence sent by the gods for the punishment of sin. The
way of atonement is sought for at Delphi, and pending this knowledge
supplication is made to Athena, Artemis, and Apollo, the deities who
control pestilence and have the plague-stricken city in their special
keeping. Here is the invocation to Apollo, the Delian Healer:

Shower from the golden string
Thine arrows, Lycian King.
O Phoebe, let thy fiery lances fly
Resistless, as they rove
Through Xanthus’ mountain-grove!
O Theban Bacchus of the lustrous eye,
With torch and trooping Maenads and bright crown,
Blaze on the god whom all in Heaven disown.[41]

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

In their despair the Athenians vented their angry feelings on Pericles,
just as persons in a delirium, says Plutarch,[42] turn on their physician
or their father. They urged that the pestilence was due to cooping up in
the city in stifling huts a rural population accustomed to an open-air
existence, so that they conveyed infection to one another. But popular
resentment subsided as quickly as it arose. In a noble speech, which
Thucydides reproduces at length, Pericles weaned them to a better mind.
His own domestic sufferings may have stirred their sympathy. He lost of
the pestilence his only two legitimate sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, his
sister, and many relatives and friends. The death of his favourite son,
Paralus, left him with no legitimate heir to maintain the family and the
hereditary sacred rites. ‘That blow’, says Plutarch,[43] ‘crushed him to
earth. He struggled indeed to preserve his wonted impassiveness and to
maintain his serene composure. But, as he laid a wreath upon the body
and looked upon his dead, the anguish of it all overwhelmed him, and he
burst out wailing and sobbing bitterly—a thing which in all his life
he had never before done.’ The spectacle of this proud, reserved man,
this man who had stood firm as a rock amid the rising tide of popular
resentment, humbled before God, humiliated before man, as the iron seared
his innermost soul, is one of the most moving pictures in all history and
literature.

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

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

The first outbreak of pestilence lasted for two years, from the
spring of 430 B. C. to that of 428 B. C., then came a partial, but
not complete, abatement for one and a half years, followed by another
outbreak in 427 B. C. which lasted a year. ‘To the power of Athens’, says
Thucydides, ‘certainly nothing was more ruinous. Not less than 4,400
Athenian hoplites, who were on the roll, died, and also 300 horsemen,
and an incalculable number of the common people’, estimated by Diodorus
Siculus[44] at 10,000 freemen and slaves. Bury[45] puts the total number
of Athenian burghers (of both sexes and all ages) at the commencement
of the Peloponnesian War at 100,000, and this total was reduced by the
pestilence to some 80,000 or less. The metic class and the slaves he
estimates roundly at 30,000 and 100,000 respectively, but beyond the
unreliable statement of Diodorus Siculus, we have no index of their
reduction. In accepting the verdict of Thucydides on the disastrous
effects of the pestilence on the power of Athens, we must not forget that
there were other influences at work, conspiring to this same result, the
consequences of which Pericles had pointed out clearly in his speech
before the war. Had it not been for these, Athens would beyond doubt have
rallied quickly from the blow, as we shall see that other cities have
habitually done in like case with hers.

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

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

The following is the full narrative[46] of the pestilence, as given by
Thucydides:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dorian war will come and a plague with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thucydides has laid it down that the plague of Athens was an unknown
disease. Now there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that bubonic
plague was recognized, in its sporadic form, as a clinical entity at
the time of Thucydides. The language of a passage in the 2nd Book of
the Epidemics, a treatise of the Hippocratic school, seems hardly
susceptible of any other interpretation: οἱ ἐπὶ βουβῶσι πυρετοὶ κακόν,
πλὴν τῶν ἐφημέρων, καὶ οἱ ἐπὶ πυρετοῖσι βουβῶνες κακίονες (‘fever
supervening on buboes is a bad sign, except they be ephemeral: but buboes
supervening on fever still worse’). The allusions also to buboes in
Aristophanes are so numerous as almost to preclude any other conclusion:
and it cannot be argued that these were an aftermath of the epidemic,
for Thucydides[47] implicitly asserts the complete disappearance of the
disease.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Thucydides then is due the credit not only of the first detailed
description of an actual visitation of pestilence, but of a description
that breathes in every line the true spirit of history, the recording
of past events as a medium for the surer forecasting of the future—the
spirit that animates him in all his historical writing to give ‘a true
picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which
may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things’—the
whole duty of the historian, which not even Herodotus had recognized
to the full before him. So anxious is he that his readers shall see
things as he saw them, and learn the same lessons from them as he has
learnt, that he is willing on occasion to manipulate his narrative,
as when he brings forward the great Funeral Speech of Pericles into
immediate juxtaposition to the narrative of the pestilence, assuredly
so as to heighten the dramatic effect. So vivid and so forcible is
his picture of the plague, that it is difficult to believe that some
ten years had elapsed before he set pen to paper, and some thirty or
more before the whole attained its present form. It is no matter for
surprise that Lucretius, Procopius, Boccaccio, and Froissart should have
paid the homage of conscious imitation to this virile narrative. (See
Appendix.)[48]

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

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

Pausanias[49] regards the romantic temple of Apollo at Bassae as a
memorial of the deliverance of Phigalia from an offset of this plague of
430 B. C. He seems to infer this from the dedication of the temple to
Apollo, under his surname the Helper (Ἐπικούριος). On the other hand, we
know from Thucydides[50] that the plague scarcely touched Peloponnesus.
It is unlikely also that an Athenian architect, Ictinus, who as Pausanias
says built it, would have worked for the Peloponnesians during the war
with Athens.

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

Pausanias[51] says that a statue of Apollo, Averter of Evil (Ἀλεξίκακος),
by Calamis, was erected in Athens as a memorial of deliverance from the
plague, but this cannot be the case, as Calamis was dead before the
plague commenced.

Such dedications were, however, common enough. When Epimenides freed
Athens from pestilence he cleansed the city and set up a shrine to the
Eumenides, and the people of Tanagra[52] similarly showed their gratitude
to Hermes the Ram-bearer (Κριοφόρος) by entrusting to Calamis the
erection of a statue in his honour.

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

CHAPTER III

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

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

According to Plutarch[53] 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[54]
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.[55]

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[56] 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[57] 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[58] 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,[59] 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.[60] ‘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[61] resorted to it in times of national calamity, such
as epidemic pestilence. There is abundant evidence from the Bible[62]
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[63] 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[64] 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[65] 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[66] 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[67] 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[68] 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_,[69] 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[70] 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,[71] 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[72] 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[73] 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 (περὶ τὸν τράχηλον
οἰδήματα) 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[74] 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,[75] that at the cleansing of a leper the Jews let a bird fly
away. Pliny[76] 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.[77] 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,[78] 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[79] 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.[80]
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[81] 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[82] 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[83] 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[84] 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[85] 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[86] 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[87] 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[88] 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[89] 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[90] account
of it is interesting, because he states that, in spite of the great
mortality among cattle and men, there were no vultures to be seen in
either year of the pestilence. Taking the observation in its context it
reads as though the vultures were the first to suffer, so that they were
exterminated locally, then the cattle, and afterwards man, and with him
probably his dog. Thucydides had already drawn attention to the absence
of vultures during the plague of Athens, and with the passage of years
the observation crystallized into an article of faith pertinent to
all and every pestilence. In the case of the plague of Aleppo Russell
definitely negatives the observation.

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

CHAPTER IV

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

The views of Lucretius as to the proximate causes of pestilence are
almost identical with those of his contemporary, Diodorus Siculus. With
each of them moisture, as cloud or mist, distempers the air or damages
food, and so finds entry into lungs or stomach. With each an ill wind may
engender pestilence: with Lucretius, by bringing a harmful to replace a
beneficent atmosphere: with Diodorus Siculus, by failing to cool the air
to an appropriate temperature, thus causing fever. To Lucretius clouds,
mists, and winds are carriers of noxious particles. In this atomic
theory of infection he faintly foreshadows the doctrine of particulate
poisons, that held the field of scientific speculation within the memory
of living men. But even so Lucretius came less near the truth than his
great contemporary Varro,[91] 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[92] 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_,[93] 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[94] 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[95] 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[96] 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[97] assigns to them even a political significance,
for he says that in popular opinion they always portend a revolution to
kingdoms.

Seneca,[98] 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[99] 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[100] 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[101] 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[102] 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[103]—was brought to Rome from the East
by the Syrian army of Verus, about A. D. 165. Ammianus Marcellinus[104]
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[105]
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,[106] 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[107] 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[108] 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[109] 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[110] 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[111] 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[112] 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,[113] and with greater or less virulence the
disease spread over the whole known world.[114] 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[115] 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[116] 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[117] 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[118] is the chief authority for the pestilence of A. D. 302,
during the reign of Maximian. It was accompanied by famine, so that the
people were reduced to eating grass, and as many died of starvation as of
disease. The famished dogs fought over the corpses of the dead, and the
people slaughtered them wholesale, lest they should go mad and attack the
living.

CHAPTER V

Until recent years it was generally believed that no certain record
of bubonic plague existed prior to that of Procopius (_c._ A. D.
490-560). It would seem to be necessary to revise this opinion in the
face of a fragment of the writings of Rufus of Ephesus, preserved by
Oribasius,[119] the Christian physician of the Emperor Julian (A. D.
355-63). He writes: ‘The buboes called pestilential are most fatal and
acute, especially those that are seen occurring about Libya, Egypt, and
Syria, and which are mentioned by Dionysius Curtus. Dioscorides and
Posidonius make much mention of them in the plague, which occurred in
their time in Libya: they say it was accompanied by acute fever, pain,
and prostration of the whole body, delirium, and _the appearance of large
and hard buboes_, which did not suppurate, not only in the accustomed
parts, but also in the groins and armpits:’ and further: ‘One can foresee
an approaching plague by paying attention to the ill condition of the
seasons, to the mode of living less conducive to health, and to the death
of animals that precedes its invasion.’

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

We have already adduced evidence to show that Hippocrates also was
familiar with bubonic plague in its sporadic, but probably not in its
epidemic form. Galen,[120] too, discusses the relation of buboes to
fever in such a manner as to show that he also was acquainted with a
severe bubonic malady, distinct from ordinary septic buboes. Oribasius
also is cognizant of bubonic fevers, but it may be asserted generally
that neither Galen nor Oribasius shows any signs of knowing them as
a prevalent epidemic pestilence. We may, then, justly say that the
narrative of Procopius affords the first unequivocal description of an
epidemic of bubonic plague.

According to Procopius[121] the plague began at the ill-starred Pelusium,
spreading in one direction through Alexandria and Egypt, in another
through Palestine, and thence throughout the world, which would have
meant to him from the eastern limits of Persia as far westward as the
shores of the Atlantic. In the light of modern knowledge it is probable
that Pelusium was no more than a distributing centre _en route_, and
that the true focus of origin lay much further back along the commercial
highways to the east or south. Of its pandemic character, however, we
have the fullest confirmation in a succession of historical records.
Evagrius[122] says that its total duration was fifty-two years, and
this also it is possible to substantiate from the annexed table of its
offsets, along with the names of the authorities for each locality.

_Date._ _Locality._ _Authority._

A. D. 540 Antioch Evagrius.
A. D. 542 Byzantium Procopius.
A. D. 549 Arles Gregory of Tours.
A. D. 558 Byzantium Agathias.
A. D. 565 Liguria Paul the Deacon.
A. D. 567 Auvergne Gregory of Tours.
Narbonne Gregory of Tours.
A. D. 587 Marseilles Gregory of Tours.
A. D. 590 Rome Gregory of Tours.
Paul the Deacon.
John the Deacon.
A. D. 590 Avignon Gregory of Tours.
A. D. 591 Strasbourg Oseas Schadaeus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An account of an offset of this pandemic at Antioch survives from the
pen of the historian Evagrius,[123] who was born in A. D. 536 and spent
the greater part of his life at Antioch. Apparently he knew nothing of
the records of Procopius or Agathias, for he says that the history of
this pestilence had not been written previously. He knew the narrative of
the plague of Athens, for he says that this plague was ‘in some respects
much like that which Thucydides described, in others quite unlike’: it
cannot be said to have influenced either the form or the substance of
his description. He says that it first reached Antioch in 540 B. C.,
whereas it did not appear at Byzantium till the spring of 542 B. C., and
that the pandemic lasted altogether fifty-two years, exceeding ‘all the
diseases that had ever been before Philostratus wondered at the plague,
which was in his time, because it continued fifteen years’. This is
presumed to have been the Antonine pestilence, for Philostratus was born
in Lemnos about A. D. 170, but spent most of his life in Rome and died
there in A. D. 245. Evagrius had the fullest opportunities of observing
the plague at close quarters, for as a boy at school he himself suffered
from an inguinal bubo, and in later years he lost his wife and several
children of plague. He was but three years old when it first reached
Antioch, so that his description must represent the disease after it
had been rife for many years. Evagrius traces its origin further back
than does Procopius, placing it in Ethiopia, so that it may actually
have originated in an endemic area in Central Africa. Spreading over the
whole world, it attacked cities quite irrespective of season, summer and
winter alike. Evagrius has no doubt whatever of the contagiousness of the
distemper. Those, he says, who escaped one year were attacked the next,
and those who fled to places free from disease were the first to succumb,
as they carried the contagion with them. Infection seemed to be taken in
various ways—by sharing beds, by actual contact, by visiting infected
houses, or even by casual meeting in the market-place. Some, however,
escaped in spite of running every risk of infection.

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

Agathias[124] (b. A. D. 536) describes a recrudescence of this pandemic
in Byzantium in A. D. 558. He carried on the history of Procopius from
its termination to A. D. 558. He says that the disease had never really
disappeared since the first outbreak in A. D. 542, when it burst out
furiously a second time in the spring of this year. Many persons fell
as though stricken with apoplexy: those who held out longest died
on the fifth day. Buboes and continuous fever were the outstanding
features, as in the previous visitation. ‘People of all ages perished
indiscriminately, but especially the young and vigorous and those in the
flower of youth: and of them the males, for the females were not so much
affected. With an epidemic recurrence such as this, the chief incidence
would necessarily be on the young, who had neither resisted, nor acquired
immunity from, a previous attack. The character of their occupation or of
their habits of life would doubtless explain the special liability of the
males to infection.

Gregory of Tours[125] (A. D. 540-94) testifies to the widespread
character of the plague in France. In A. D. 549 he says that it
depopulated the province of Arles, and afterwards devastated Narbonne.
Here Felix, bishop of Nantes,[126] succumbed to the sloughing of his legs
caused by the application of cantharides plasters to a crop of pustules.

In A. D. 566, before the plague invaded the Auvergne,[127] a succession
of portents terrified the district. Three or four great brilliant lights
made their appearance around the sun, which nevertheless underwent almost
complete eclipse in October, looking dark and discoloured and like a bag.
The heaven also seemed to be on fire, and many strange signs were seen.
Then in A. D. 567 the epidemic raged throughout the district, causing
an immense mortality. Lyons, Bourges, Chalons, and Dijon also lost a
large part of their population. Coffins for the dead soon failed, and as
many as ten bodies would be placed in the same grave. One Sunday no less
than three hundred corpses were counted in the church of St. Peter at
Clermont. Death seized the victims with dramatic suddenness. ‘There grew
in the groin or armpit a lesion in the shape of a serpent, the effect of
which was such that men yielded up their souls on the second or third
day, and its violence completely took away their senses.’

In this epidemic buboes were evidently most frequently found in
the groins, for Gregory repeatedly speaks of the disease as _lues
inguinaria_ or _morbus inguinalis_ and the like.

Plague broke out at Marseilles[128] in A. D. 587, brought there
by a merchant ship from Spain, which concealed its contact with a
plague-stricken port. Several people made purchases from it, and in
consequence eight inhabitants of one house were fatally infected. As in
the epidemic of A. D. 1720, the disease did not spread immediately to
the whole town. Bishop Theodore and a few of his suite shut themselves
up in the church of St. Victor, and there, amid the general desolation,
implored the mercy of God with prayer and vigil till the epidemic was at
an end. On the return of the fugitive populace a belated outbreak exacted
its appointed tribute.

Around Avignon[129] celestial portents foretold the plague that broke out
in A. D. 590. The earth was illuminated at night by a light as bright as
the midday. Balls of fire were seen tracking the sky during the night. A
violent earthquake was felt at dawn in mid-June. The sun suffered almost
complete eclipse in mid-August. Abundant autumn thunderstorms and rain
raised the rivers in flood.

Meantime Italy, too, had been in like case. Paul the Deacon[130] (A. D.
720-90) briefly refers to a plague that had devastated Liguria in A. D.
565. He says that the plague was presaged by the sudden appearance of
marks on houses, doors, utensils, and clothing, and the more they tried
to efface them the more conspicuous they became. Eusebius[131] in like
manner told of moulds on the walls of houses in a previous pestilence,
and in Leviticus[132] we read of greenish and reddish marks on houses
infected with leprosy. Towards the end of the year buboes began to
attack the people, followed by a fever that killed in three days. The
inhabitants fled, leaving property and cattle and crops, and desolation
reigned supreme.

But it was on the head of hapless Rome that the full fury of the expiring
storm was destined to spend its virulence. Both Gregory of Tours[133]
and Paul the Deacon have left a record of the havoc. Gregory says that
he obtained his information from his own deacon, who happened to be in
Rome at the time. Paul the Deacon[134] seems to borrow his material from
Gregory of Tours. An inundation of the Tiber in A. D. 589 resulted in the
destruction of many old buildings on its banks and in the flooding of the
granaries of the church, so that immense stores of grain were spoilt. The
river yielded up a multitude of serpents, and a dragon of extraordinary
size was seen to float through the city on its passage to the sea.
Probably these were eels from the muddy bed of the Tiber, metamorphosed
after the manner of Ovid into serpents: the dragon no one seems to
have seen at close quarters. The inundation was followed in A. D. 590
by a severe outburst of bubonic plague (_pestilentia, quam inguinariam
vocant_).

Portents were not confined to Rome. According to Evagrius,[135] a great
earthquake in A. D. 589 laid Antioch in ruins, destroying the sanctuary
of the Mother of God, and taking sixty thousand lives. In Upper Italy
also there were extensive inundations due to overflowing of the mountain
streams in Venetia, Liguria, and the sub-Alpine plains.

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

So Gregory distributed the remnant that the plague had spared according
to the seven ecclesiastical regions of Rome, bidding his clergy spend
the three days’ interval in ceaseless psalms and prayers for mercy. Then
on the fourth day, the festival of St. Mark, in the pale light of the
early April morning, the great procession set out. With solemn chant of
doleful _Miserere_, these seven trains of human suffering wended their
slow way sadly amid the ruined monuments of ancient Rome. No other sound
broke the stillness, but the faint rustle of sweeping garments and the
silent shuffle of sick men’s feet. Now and again one fell stricken and
lay as he fell, for Death was moving hither and thither among the moving
ranks.[136] No less than eighty breathed out their lives before the
church of the Mother of God was reached. There again Gregory fervently
exhorted the people to repentance, so that the plague might cease.

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

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

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

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

and St. Gregory put thereto

Ora pro nobis, deum rogamus: Alleluia.

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

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

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

[Illustration: PLATE IV

GREGORY AND THE ANGEL

Photograph by Giraudon, Paris

(Face Page 93)]

It is certain that at least as early as this time pictures were carried
in public procession. Theophylactus[137] has described two occasions
on which a sacred effigy of Christ, believed not to have been made by
human hands, was carried into battle for the sake of inspiring valour and
discipline into the soldiery (A. D. 586 and 588). Among the many gems in
which Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_[138] abounds is that picture of
the arrival of Augustine and his companions in Thanet ‘bearing a silver
cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted
on a board’ (A. D. 597). The sixteenth-century chronicler Baronius
says, that the picture which Gregory carried in this plague procession
of A. D. 590 was that of the Madonna, now preserved in the church of
S. Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline, and still believed to protect Rome
from plague and pestilence. Rome has no fewer than four pictures of the
Madonna attributed like this one to the hand of Luke the Physician, and
all of them reputed to have wonder-working powers. Expert opinion, alas!
pronounces the oldest of them a fifteenth-century production.

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

An Italian tradition refers the custom of saying ‘Bless you’, when a
person sneezes, to the time of the pestilence of Gregory, in which all
those that sneezed were said to have died. Boersch, quoting from the
local chronicles of Kleinlauel and of Oseas Schadaeus, would trace its
origin to the plague at Strasbourg in A. D. 591.[139] ‘And when any
one sneezed, he gave up the ghost forthwith. Hence the saying “God help
you”. And when any one yawned, he died. Hence it comes that when any one
yawns, one makes the sign of the cross before the mouth.’ Probably the
association is even older than this, for Thucydides speaks of sneezing in
the plague of Athens. Sneezing and yawning were prominent features of the
Sweating Sickness.

[Illustration: PLATE V

FRESCO IN S. PIETRO IN VINCOLI, ROME

Photograph by Anderson, Rome

(Face Page 95)]

CHAPTER VI

In the summer of A. D. 680 Rome was again gripped in the toils of an
appalling plague that had spread over the greater part of Italy. Paul the
Deacon[140] says that eclipses of both sun and moon in May were followed
by pestilence in the months of July, August, and September. Describing
its ravages at Ticinum (Pavia) Paul says that ‘the number of the dead
was so great that parents were often carried to burial on the same biers
as their children, and brothers along with sisters.... And then many saw
with their own eyes a good and a bad angel passing through the city by
night. And whenever at the bidding of the good angel, the bad one, who
seemed to carry a lance in his hand, struck so many times with his lance
on the door of each house, as many of that household would die on the
following day. Then it was revealed to some one that the plague would not
cease until an altar was set up to Sebastian, saint and martyr, at the
church of S. Pietro in Vincoli. This was done, and as soon as the altar
was set up, the relics of the martyr-saint Sebastian were brought from
Rome, and forthwith the plague ceased.’

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

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

[Illustration: PLATE VI

LA PESTE À ROME. BY DELAUNAY

Photograph by Giraudon, Paris

(Face Page 96)]

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

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

The story of the life of Sebastian[141] is well authenticated in its
main incidents. Born in the middle of the third century A. D., he was a
native of Narbonne in Gaul. His noble birth secured for him early in life
the command of a company of Praetorian Guards, so that he was constantly
about the person of the Emperor. Though secretly a Christian and using
his position to secure the conversion of others to Christianity, he
remained intensely loyal to the temporal interest of the Emperor. Among
his friends were two young soldiers, Marcus and Marcellinus, like him of
noble birth. They were convicted of embracing Christianity, and after
enduring torture bravely were led out to die. On the way their aged
parents, their wives and children, and their friends, implored them to
relent, and they were about to recant, when Sebastian rushed forward
and exhorted them not to renounce their Redeemer. So inspiring was his
appeal, that the whole assembly, guards, judges, and all, were converted
and baptized, and for a while Marcus and Marcellinus were saved. This
scene is depicted in a spirited canvas by Veronese in the plague church
of S. Sebastiano at Venice. Their respite was but short, for in a
few months they were put to death with many others of the Christian
community, and Sebastian himself was condemned to die. The Emperor
Diocletian (A. D. 284-305), by reason of his personal attachment, sent
for him and exhorted him to abjure his heresy, but Sebastian meekly and
courageously refused. Diocletian then ordered that he should be bound to
a stake and shot to death with arrows, and that an inscription should be
placed on the stake for all to see, saying that he was put to death only
for being a Christian. A vast number of pictures, beside the masterpiece
of Sodoma,[142] depict this scene. Pierced with arrows, Sebastian was
left for dead, but at midnight Irene, the widow of one of his martyred
friends, came to take away his body for burial, but found him still
alive, the arrows having pierced no vital part. She and her attendants
carried him to her house and tended him, till he was completely healed.
After this they urged him to leave Rome, but Sebastian went boldly to the
palace gate, and as the Emperor passed out, pleaded for those Christians
who were condemned to suffer for their faith, and reproached Diocletian
for his cruelty. The Emperor in fierce anger ordered his guards to seize
Sebastian and carry him to the circus, there to beat him to death with
clubs. To conceal his dead body from his friends it was thrown into the
Cloaca Maxima, but a Christian woman, Lucina, received tidings in a
vision of where the body lay, and recovering it had it secretly buried
in the catacombs. The church of S. Sebastiano at Rome is now built over
these catacombs.

[Illustration: PLATE VII

SEBASTIAN AS PROTECTOR AGAINST PESTILENCE

By Benozzo Gozzoli. Photograph by Brogi, Florence

(Face Page 99)]

Though Sebastian was martyred in A. D. 288, it was not till the plague
of A. D. 683 that his cult as a protector from pestilence was firmly
established.

The association of Sebastian with pestilence was in the first instance
purely fortuitous. Devout men in seasons of pestilence were wont to
acclaim their own peculiar patron saint a very present help in time of
trouble: an altar, a church, a votive picture, a procession, these, now
one, now another, were the price of the promised dispensation. But that
Sebastian came to be the patron saint of plague and pestilence was due
to the association of arrows with his effigy and with the story of his
attempted martyrdom. From remote antiquity we have seen that arrows have
been emblematic of plague. It was Apollo among the Greeks that scattered
pestilence with his bow, and who was invoked also by sacrifice and hymns
of praise to avert it. In Christian hagiology and Christian art Sebastian
is the counterpart of the pagan Apollo. Whatever the variations of
detail, Sebastian is practically always represented, either transfixed
with arrows or carrying an arrow in his hand. Having regard to his story,
it is a mistake to show the arrows piercing a vital part, such as the
heart, the brain, or even the neck, as is often done. And for artistic
effect it is well that they should not be so numerous as to suggest a
well-filled pin-cushion: albeit the _Golden Legend_ has it that ‘the
archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of
pricks’.

Such is the effect of an interesting fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli (_c._ A.
D. 1420-97) in the Chiesa della Collegiata at San Gimignano, dedicated to
Sebastian in A. D. 1465 in a time of plague. At the head of the picture,
Christ, with the marks of wounds in His hands, communes with the Virgin
and a group of saints. Sebastian is standing on a pedestal, his whole
body studded with arrows, while archers on either side of him are rapidly
increasing the number. This Collegiata fresco has been closely followed
in an Italian _Pestblätter_, reproduced in the Heitz-Schreiber portfolio
of _Pestblätter_ (q. v.).

Another votive fresco in the church of S. Agostino at San Gimignano,
also by Benozzo Gozzoli, commemorating the disastrous plague of A. D.
1464, shows Sebastian turning aside with his cloak the broken arrows of
pestilence. In the uppermost part of the fresco the Almighty is launching
forth His shafts, and attendant angels are aiding in the task. Between
them and Sebastian Christ and the Virgin kneel in an attitude of prayer.
Sebastian stands in the centre of the foreground on a low stone pedestal,
on which are inscribed the words, ‘Sancte Sebastiane, Intercede Pro
Devoto Populo Tuo.’ His body is fully draped, and the broken arrows lie
behind him, removed by the hands of angels, two of whom hold a crown of
martyrdom above his head.

[Illustration: PLATE VIII

SODOMA’S SEBASTIAN PLAGUE BANNER (REVERSE)

SS. Roch and Sigismund, and Brethren of Compagnia di S. Sebastiano

Photograph by Alinari, Rome

(Face Page 100)]

These older representations of Sebastian by Benozzo Gozzoli, and others
by Albrecht Dürer and the early German school, showing Sebastian as an
elderly bearded man, offer but little attractiveness. By far the most
beautiful pictures are those of Perugino, Sodoma, and Francia, who use
his nude and youthful figure, as the Greeks used Apollo, as a model for
the exhibition of elegance of form and accuracy of anatomical design.
As one of the few nude forms permitted to Christian art, it is readily
understood why Sebastian figures in such a multitude of pictures. The
finest example of this type is the peerless masterpiece of Sodoma
(1477-1549), now in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence, one of the most
beautiful creations of Renaissance art. It was formerly a banner, painted
in A. D. 1528 for the Sienese Compagnia di San Sebastiano in Camollia,
and was carried in procession when Siena was afflicted with pestilence.
It was kept in the church of the Confraternity at Siena, until it was
removed to Florence in A. D. 1786. The undraped body of the saint is
modelled on the lines of the youthful Apollo. He is bound to a tree in
the foreground of a wild Italian landscape. His neck, side, and one
thigh are transfixed with arrows. The upturned face wears an expression
of ecstasy, in spite of suffering, as an angel descends to place the
crown of martyrdom on his brow. Symonds has said of this picture:

‘Gifted with an exquisite feeling for the beauty of the human
body, Sodoma excelled himself when he was contented with a
single figure. His St. Sebastian, notwithstanding its wan and
faded colouring, is still the very best that has been painted.
Suffering, refined and spiritual, without contortion or spasm,
could not be presented with more pathos in a form of more
surpassing loveliness. This is a truly demonic picture in the
fascination it exercises and the memory it leaves upon the
mind. Part of its unanalysable charm may be due to the bold
thought of combining the beauty of a Greek Hylas with the
Christian sentiment of martyrdom. Only the Renaissance could
have produced a hybrid so successful, because so deeply felt.’

On the reverse of the banner is the Madonna with the Child in her arms,
enthroned on clouds, above a kneeling group of SS. Roch and Sigismund and
members of the Compagnia di S. Sebastiano, wearing their characteristic
garments. The work is much inferior to that of the face of the banner,
and is said to be in part the work of Beccafumi (1486-1551).

Another superb, but little known picture, by Perugino (A. D. 1446-1524)
in the Musée at Grenoble, shows the same type of nude figure of Sebastian
bound to a tree. Face and figure alike are the very embodiment of
youthfulness and grace, verging almost on effeminacy. In this picture S.
Apolline stands beside Sebastian.

Exceptionally, and more particularly in the older pictures, the youthful
Sebastian is depicted clothed in the costume of the period, with or
without an arrow in his hand. In the Brera at Milan is a folding
altar-piece of five panels by Nicolò da Foligno (A. D. 1430-92), in which
he is represented as a youth in kilted tunic and hose. He is similarly
clad in another picture in the Vatican, ‘The Coronation of the Virgin
and Saints,’ also by Nicolò da Foligno, and in a few others as well.

Sebastian is very frequently represented in plague pictures along with
other saints: his most frequent companion by far is St. Roch. In the
sacristy of S. Maria della Salute at Venice, itself a plague church,
is Titian’s well-known picture commemorating the great plague of A. D.
1512, in which St. Sebastian, St. Roch, and the physician-saints Cosmo
and Damian stand before the throne of St. Mark, across whose majestic
figure the shadow of a cloud has fallen. These groups of saints are not
infrequently represented mediating with the Madonna.

Travelling through Italy from town to town one becomes aware that the
land of pestilence has been roughly partitioned into separate dominions
under the tutelage of varying presiding saints. In Milan it is Carlo
Borromeo: in Venice, S. Rocco: in Rome, the Madonna: in Central Italy,
in Siena, and in Florence, S. Sebastiano. In Florence he was the patron
saint of the Compagnia della Misericordia, the institution that has for
seven centuries been so closely interwoven with the daily life of the
city, and has left no small mark on the products of Florentine art.

Christian sculpture has also seized the opportunity of the nude figure
for a model. Well-known statues are those by Matteo Civitali (_c._ 1470)
at Lucca, and by Puget (1622-94) in the church of Carignano at Genoa.
A colossal recumbent figure of the saint by Bernini (1598-1680) lies
beneath the high altar of the church of S. Sebastian on the Via Appia at
Rome.

[Illustration: PLATE IX

SS. MARK, SEBASTIAN, ROCH, COSMAS AND DAMIAN. BY TITIAN

Photograph by Naya, Venice

(Face Page 102)]

In Switzerland especially, but also in southern Germany and south-eastern
France, wooden statues of Sebastian are commonly met with, mostly
belonging to the three centuries following the Black Death. Several
may be seen in the Historical Museum at Basle, more or less archaic in
character, and a very fine example in the Cluny Museum at Paris. The
same museum also possesses a pair of quaint coloured high reliefs in
wood of St. Sebastian and St. Roch respectively. These wooden effigies
are naturally most common in districts where wood-carving has been
extensively pursued.

It must not be supposed that the cult of Sebastian was widespread from
the first, or that the record of its growth is continuous and unbroken
from its inauguration in this Roman plague of A. D. 683. Circumstance
chanced to be arrayed against its continuity. The seventh century was not
a notable period of plague in Europe, and that was now the dominating
epidemic. There was famine and pestilence in Ireland,[143] but its nature
is not known, and the kings of Erin faced their Irish question in the
spirit of Cromwell. In a season of famine they summoned the leading
clergy and laity to a council to consider the situation. No one, in the
circumstances, will dispute the propriety of their injunction to clergy
and laity to observe a fast. But the further injunction that they should
employ their hours of abstinence in praying that some sickness might
carry off the surplus of the lower orders, as the excess of population
was the cause of the famine, is more debatable. (‘Petebant ut nimia
multitudo vulgi per infirmitatem aliquam tolleretur, quia numerositas
populi erat occasio famis.’) At the instance of St. Gerald, who contended
that the Almighty could relieve the situation more suitably and quite
as easily by multiplying the fruits of the earth, it was proposed to
recommend this course to His adoption, at any rate as a preliminary
measure. But clergy and laity, headed by the holy St. Fechin, were in
no mood for such half-hearted measures as promised no finality, and St.
Gerald’s suggestion was set aside. Pestilence followed in due course, and
the Divine working was made manifest in that it claimed St. Fechin and
the two kings of Erin among its innumerable victims.

In spite of the retrocession of plague from Europe after the seventh
century, Syria,[144] the Euphrates valley, and Irak were still devastated
at frequent intervals by recurring epidemics. From this persistent
source it spread as far as Constantinople in A. D. 697 and 794, in the
latter case almost completely depopulating Constantinople according to
Nicephoras Byzantinus. Constantinople was in such intimate relation,
commercial and political, with Syria and Central Asia that transference
of plague was wellnigh inevitable. After this there was a long lull in
Europe, and to a less extent in Syria, until the eleventh century. It
is often confidently stated that the Crusades brought plague back to
Europe, but it must not be forgotten that there was a severe epidemic of
plague on that continent in A. D. 1094, before the Crusades commenced.
Doubtless they served to maintain the continuity of infection. The
pestilence that decimated the army of Louis IX and carried off him and
his son was by no means certainly bubonic plague. The surviving accounts
suggest rather cholera or dysentery. Again, in A. D. 1167, the army of
Frederick Barbarossa, while encamped before Rome, was swept away by a
pestilence, that seems to have been bubonic plague, which penetrated
into the city also and worked great havoc. Thomas à Becket, writing to
Pope Alexander III after the retreat of Frederick, congratulates him
on the Lord having destroyed Sennacherib’s army. Again, in A. D. 1230,
a destructive inundation of the Tiber was followed by plague, that led
the Romans to recall the banished pope, Gregory IX. In A. D. 1244 plague
was in Florence, and led to the institution of the Compagnia della
Misericordia. Its foundations were laid in the fines paid by wool-porters
for the use of foul and blasphemous language at their meeting-house. One
of them, the good old Piero di Luca Borsi, induced them, when the total
had reached a large sum, to spend it in the provision of six litters, one
for each ward of the city, and to select two of their members weekly for
each litter, to carry sick persons to the hospitals or dead bodies to the
mortuaries.

In A. D. 1294 plague was again widespread and severe in Europe, and a
succession of scattered epidemics, of which the most severe were those
of A. D. 1320 and 1333 respectively in southern France and Spain, led up
to the virulent pandemic of A. D. 1348 and after, commonly known as the
Black Death.

Out of the desolate wilderness of the Black Death arose the figure of St.
Roch,[145] patron saint of the plague-stricken and intercessor against
the plague. Born at Montpellier, the son of noble parents, probably about
A. D. 1295, he seemed designed for a life of sanctity by the birthmark of
a small red cross on his breast. So Mahomet before him had borne in the
imprint of a mole between his shoulders the token of his divine mission.
From boyhood he was attracted by the active virtues of the Redeemer,
and aspired to follow that example rather than to devote himself to the
life of the cloister. The death of his parents, before he was twenty
years old, left him with great riches, which he distributed forthwith
among the poor and hospitals. His lands he left in the management of
his brother, and set out on foot, as a pilgrim, for Rome. On his way he
found plague raging at Aquapendente. There he gave himself to the service
of the sick in the hospital, and such was his skill and sympathy that
his ministrations were regarded as more than human. The sick seemed to
be healed by his mere prayers, or by the sign of the Cross as he stood
over them, so that when the plague soon ceased, they in their enthusiasm
attributed it to his intercession. So Roch himself became inspired with
the belief in a divine Providence specially guiding his ministry. Hearing
that plague was devastating the province of Romagna, he hastened thither
and devoted himself to the sick in the cities of Casena and Rimini.
Thence he went to Rome, where plague was raging fiercely (_c._ 1306),
and for three years tended the sick, devoting himself to those most
destitute of help. His constant prayer to God was that he might be a
martyr in his task, but for long he passed unscathed through daily peril.
Visiting city after city, wherever plague was rife, he succumbed at last
to the infection at Piacenza, while nursing the sick in the hospital.
Along with a burning inward fever, a horrible ulcer broke out on his left
thigh. The pain was so intolerable that he shrieked aloud. Fearing to
disturb the inmates of the hospital, he crawled into the street, but the
officers would not let him remain there for fear of spreading infection.
With the aid of his pilgrim’s staff he dragged himself to a solitary
spot outside the gates of Piacenza, and there laid himself down to die.
But still a kind Providence watched over him. His little dog, that had
attended him faithfully in all his pilgrimage, went daily into the city
and brought back a loaf of bread, none knew whence. An angel came, too,
and dressed his sore and tended him, till he was well. Others say that
it was the dog of a countryman, one Gothard, that brought food to him.
On his recovery he turned his steps back to his native Montpellier, but
his sufferings had so changed him that even his own retainers there
did not recognize him. He was arrested as a spy, and condemned by the
judge, who chanced to be his own uncle, to be thrown into the public
prison. Roch, believing it to be God’s will, yielded to the punishment
without revealing his identity, and languished in a dungeon for five
years. One morning, when the jailer entered his cell, he found it filled
with a bright supernatural light, but his prisoner dead, and by his
side a writing that revealed his name and the words: ‘All those that
are stricken by the plague, and who pray for aid through the merits and
intercession of St. Roch, the servant of God, shall be healed.’ His
uncle, the judge, gave him an honourable burial, and the whole city
lamented his death.

St. Roch is believed to have died in A. D. 1327 in his thirty-second
year. At Montpellier he was venerated from the first, and this veneration
was quickened and extended by the great pandemic of A. D. 1348. But it
was not till the fifteenth century that his cult became widespread. This
was the direct consequence of an outbreak of plague at Constance in A. D.
1414, during that Council of prelates that condemned Huss to the stake.
They were about to disperse and fly from danger, when a young German monk
told them of the power of St. Roch. On his advice the Council ordered an
effigy of the Saint to be carried in procession through the streets with
prayers and litanies: and immediately the plague was stayed. His festival
has been celebrated for centuries on the sixteenth day of August.

In A. D. 1485 the Venetians, who from their trade with the Levant, were
constantly subject to plague, carried off the body of St. Roch from
Montpellier by stealth, and the church of San Rocco was built to receive
it.

Such is the legend of St. Roch. He and Sebastian commonly figure together
in dedicatory plague pictures, as dual protectors against plague. They
seem to represent in art two attitudes to suffering, St. Roch that of
compassion, St. Sebastian that of courage and resignation—two attitudes
well expressed in four short lines of an obscure Australian poet that
deserve to be better known than they are:

Life is mostly froth and bubble:
Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.

Coming into general knowledge about the time of the revival of art, the
legend of St. Roch and his figure were favourite and familiar subjects in
the Christian art of the West. The whole legend has been frequently used
as a theme for the decoration of churches dedicated to his name: such a
one may be seen in Siena, and another, though less complete, in Venice.
In the Scuola di S. Rocco his life-story is set out in a series of twenty
carved reliefs on the walnut panelling of the upper hall.

Sometimes several scenes from his life are blended in a single picture.
In the Brera, at Milan, is a picture of St. Roch with Madonna and Child,
by Ambrogio da Fossano, called ‘Borgognone’ (A. D. 1480-1523). In the
background are scenes from his life, among which his dog is shown
carrying a loaf in its mouth. The picture formerly belonged to the
Company of Charity of Milan.

St. Roch is generally represented as a man in the prime of life, with
a short pointed beard, delicate features, and a gentle expression of
countenance. As a rule he wears a pilgrim’s dress, with a cockle-shell
in his hat and a wallet at his side. In one hand he holds a long staff,
while with the other he lifts his robe to show the plague sore in his
groin or thigh. Very rarely he is figured as a youth in the dress of
the period, and is then nearly always introduced to balance a similar
Sebastian.

Numerous pictures deal with single episodes in his life—his tending the
plague-sick, his healing by an angel, his life and death in prison. The
best known are perhaps those by Tintoretto in the church of S. Rocco
at Venice. Many show him praying among the sick, as in the picture by
Domenichino of Bologna (A. D. 1584-1641) in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa.
An angel with a drawn sword hovers over the scene, and St. Roch holds
out one arm, as though entreating the angel to put up his sword into
its sheath. Jacopo Bassano (A. D. 1510-92), in a picture in the Brera,
represents him among a number of plague victims, with hand raised in
attitude of benediction.

[Illustration: PLATE X

S. ROCH. BY AMBROGIO BORGOGNONE

Photograph by Anderson, Rome

(Face Page 108)]

[Illustration: PLATE XI

AN INTERCESSORY PLAGUE PICTURE BY NIKLAUS MANUEL. S. ROCH TENDED BY AN
ANGEL

(Face Page 109)]

A picture by the Swiss painter, Niklaus Manuel (A. D. 1484-1530), at
Basle, painted in tempera on linen, shows St. Roch with a little angel
tending his wound. It is typical of a large group of intercessory plague
pictures. At the summit of the picture is the Almighty in glory in the
heavens. Beneath Him is St. Anna with the Virgin Mary and the Child
Jesus: they are placed between the Almighty and the plague-stricken to
indicate that they are the appropriate medium of intercession. They are
flanked on the one side by St. Roch, and on the other by St. James.
St. Anna appears in many pictures of this period, as Pope Alexander
II in 1494 promoted her worship, by making her feast-day one of the
chief festivals of the Church. At the foot of the picture is a rough
delineation of the city attacked by plague: on the right of it, a group
representing probably the donors of the picture: on the left, a group of
sufferers, two of whom show plague marks on their limbs. On the woman’s
arm is a raised sore: on the man’s arm black petechial blotches, on his
body large circular spots, and an open red ulcer on the inner side of his
leg.

One of the most famous pictures of St. Roch is the altar-piece by Rubens,
at Alost, near Brussels. The upper part of the picture shows the interior
of a prison illuminated by a supernatural light. St. Roch kneels looking
up into the face of Christ, in radiant gratitude, as he receives his
commission as patron saint against the plague. An angel holds a tablet
on which is written, ‘Eris in peste patronus,’ in allusion to the words
revealed in his cell at his death.

Statues of St. Roch are hardly so frequently met with as those of
Sebastian: he was a less attractive model for sculptors. In the Musée
of Grenoble is a quaint archaic wooden figure of St. Roch of the early
fifteenth century, which stood formerly in the chapel of the Château of
Bressieux. It shows him in pilgrim guise, holding aside his garments to
show the bubo in his left groin. It is deeply incised, according to the
surgical practice of the period.

The plague mark of St. Roch is depicted in a variety of forms. Sometimes
it is simply a bubo in the groin, usually the left, or just below it, to
satisfy artistic decency. This form may be seen in a picture by Crivelli
(A. D. 1468-93) of ‘Four Saints’, in the Academy at Venice, and in
another of St. Roch and St. Sebastian, by Alfani, in the Pinacotheca at
Perugia.

Far more commonly the mark is a short longitudinal incision in the upper
part of either thigh, as in Sodoma’s plague banner (see Plate VIII, p.
100).

Sometimes the incision is in the substance of a bubo. This may be seen in
a portrait of St. Roch over a side altar in the church of S. Maria dei
Servi at Siena.

Not infrequently the incision is slanting or transverse and displays a
complete disregard for the femoral artery. A notable example is Titian’s
‘St. Mark and Saints’ in the Salute at Venice (see Plate IX, p. 102).

Sometimes the hose is slit over the incision in the flesh, as though
some bold and busy surgeon had been pressed for time. This may be seen
in Caroto’s picture of ‘Four Saints’ in the church of S. Fermo Maggiore
at Verona: also in a picture by Perugino, ‘Virgin and Saints,’ in the
cathedral at Perugia, and in another of St. Roch in the Palazzo Borromeo
at Milan.

A solitary example of St. Roch with a black pustule on the inner side of
his left thigh, surrounded by a pink zone of inflammation, may be seen in
the Brera. The picture is by Bernardino Borgognone (A. D. 1490-1524).

In some of the _Pestblätter_ a gash in the thigh is shown as well as a
small circle, which would seem to indicate the circular plague pustule.

[Illustration: PLATE XII

MADONNA AND CHILD, S. ANNA AND SAINTS. BY G. FRANCESCO CAROTO

Photograph by Alinari, Rome

(Face Page 110)]

CHAPTER VII

There is no need to rewrite the history of the Black Death: that has
been admirably accomplished by Hecker and by Abbot Gasquet. It is still
profitable, however, to investigate its by-effects in the domains of
literature and art, and to consider its broad morbid features, as
a contribution to the medical history of the time. The Black Death
was the first great pandemic that left in its wake a complete and
continuous succession of literary and historical records, in most points
complementary, in some frankly contradictory, but for all that none the
less instructive.

As to the starting-point of the pandemic there is a diversity of voices.
Russian records place it in India, Greek in Scythia, English in India and
Asiatic Turkey, Arabian in Tartary and the land of darkness. According
to Italian tradition it originated in Cathay, to the north of China,
and spread in every direction from that focus; northward by Bokhara and
Tartary to the Black Sea; to India and the towns south of the Caspian,
and to Asia Minor; and by way of Bagdad through Arabia and Egypt to the
north of Africa. The leading contemporary Italian authority is Gabrielle
de Mussi, a notary of Piacenza, who himself saw its outbreak in Upper
Italy. In his ‘Ystoria de morbo seu mortalitate qui fuit a 1348’, first
printed by Henschel in Haeser’s _Archiv für die gesammte Medicin_, he
describes how the plague was brought by ship from Caffa; a Genoese
settlement in the Crimea. The Tartar city Tana (Port Azov), that had
been appropriated by Italian merchants, was besieged in A. D. 1346 by an
army of Tartars and Saracens. The Tartars expelled them, and followed
them to Caffa, whither they had fled. Plague broke out fiercely among
the besieging Tartars, who, in the hope of infecting the garrison,
threw their dead bodies into the city by means of engines of war. The
garrison in turn cast them into the sea, but the city became infected and
almost completely depopulated, a few survivors taking ship and carrying
the disease with them to Italy in the autumn of A. D. 1347. Speaking of
the infection of Caffa, de Mussi says ‘the air became tainted and the
wells of water poisoned, and in this way the disease spread rapidly in
the city’. So the old idea of poison still prevails, but it is a virus
derived from infected corpses, and not some extraneous poison compounded
by a maleficent enemy. The poison was communicable also from man to man,
for he says of the sailors coming from Caffa to Venice and Genoa that ‘as
if accompanied by evil spirits, as soon as they approached the land, they
were death to those with whom they mingled’.

These ships seem to have infected Constantinople _en route_, and an
account of its ravages there survives from the pen of the Emperor
Cantacuzenus.[146] It is a mistake to regard his record as worthless
material, because of its plagiarism of much of the language of
Thucydides. In what is not appropriated from this source he gives a
valuable clinical description of the disease. He notes the early low
delirium, and distinguishes pneumonic, bubonic, and carbuncular types of
the disease. He mentions cervical and axillary, but not inguinal buboes,
and also the dark patches on the skin, that later came to be termed
‘tokens’. He also asserts the incidence of the disease on the domestic
animals.

In making for Genoa these ships put in at Messina in Sicily and left the
infection there. Michael Platiensis (of Piazza), a Franciscan friar,
has given an account of its course in this city. He refers to infection
by means of the breath, and by contact with the belongings of, the
infected. Gabrielle de Mussi seems to hold a similar belief. ‘We’ [i. e.
the Genoese sailors], he says, ‘reach our homes: our kindred and our
neighbours come from all parts to visit us. Woe to us, for we cast at
them the darts of death! Whilst we spoke to them, whilst they embraced us
and kissed us, we scattered the poison from our lips. Going back to their
homes, they soon infected their whole families.’

De Mussi explicitly asserts that the plague was carried from the seaport
of Genoa by some Genoese to Bobbio, and to his city of Piacenza. Here
such was the mortality that ‘no prayer was said, no solemn office sung,
nor bell tolled for the funeral of even the noblest citizen: but by day
and night the corpses were borne to the common plague pit without rite or
ceremony’.

So Italy had been primarily infected at Venice and at Genoa, and from
these sea-coast cities the disease spread itself over the whole Italian
peninsula.

At Venice the example of Galen had sunk deep into the hearts of her
physicians. They fled before the advancing enemy and shut themselves up
in their houses, leaving the surgeons, led by Andrea di Padova, to fill
their place. Physicians would do well to bear this occasion in mind,
when they complain of the encroachments of surgery into the domain of
medicine. On March 30, A. D. 1348, the Grand Council of Venice appointed
three men to act as a Committee of Public Safety. These men had large
burial-pits dug in one of the islands of the lagoon, and organized a
service of boats to transport the bodies to them.

Rome was not so hard hit as some of the cities of Italy. Nevertheless,
there remains to this day a monument of this plague in the flight of
marble steps leading up to the church of Ara Coeli. These were set up by
Giovanni de Colonna in October 1348, out of the spoils of the temple of
the Sun on the Quirinal, and were designed for the use of the citizens,
who with ropes round their necks and with ashes on their heads climbed
the hill barefooted, to implore from the Blessed Virgin the cessation of
the plague. The thirteenth-century mosaic of the Madonna and Child may
still be seen above the side entrance of Ara Coeli at the head of the
well-worn stairs leading up from the Capitoline Piazza. The object of
worship remains, but the worshippers are no more.

Lanciani[147] has reproduced an old engraving showing women ascending the
marble stairs on their knees. This staircase would seem to be indicated
both in Delaunay’s picture and in the fresco by which it was inspired.

There is a legend in Rome, that as the panic-stricken people were
carrying an effigy of the Madonna from the Ara Coeli to St. Peter’s, the
statue of the angel on the Castel S. Angelo bowed its head to do homage
to it.

Plague was not the only enemy in Rome in A. D. 1348, for a terrible
earthquake on September 9 and 10 wrought havoc among the remaining
monuments of ancient Rome. Those citizens, who had escaped the plague and
from death among the falling ruins, lived for weeks in the open Campagna
with no shelter from the inclemency of the weather. Perhaps it was this
accident that served to bring the visitation to an end at Rome more
rapidly than elsewhere.

Agnolo di Tura, in his _Cronica Senese_, edited by Muratori, gives a
graphic picture of the Black Death in Siena. A large uninteresting
picture in the church of S. Maria dei Servi depicts St. Catharine
attending the plague-stricken, and there is an ugly, almost ludicrous,
fresco of the same subject in the House of St. Catharine of Siena. The
painter brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti were both carried off by
plague. But it is in the Duomo itself that the mark of the Black Death
is most apparent. Begun in A. D. 1339, on the site of an older cathedral
dedicated to the Madonna of the Assumption, the transepts were built,
the foundations of the nave and choir were laid, and their walls partly
raised according to the designs of Lando Orefice, when the Black Death
broke out in the city in A. D. 1348. The money collected for the building
was diverted to urgent public purposes, and the work, once suspended,
has never been completely accomplished. The present cathedral, splendid
as it is, is a mere fragment of the magnificent fabric, in which Orefice
purposed to enshrine a memorial to the glory of fourteenth-century Siena.

The little Cappella di Piazza, attached as a loggia to the Palazzo
Publico of Siena, was set up in gratitude for the cessation of the plague
that carried off no less than thirty thousand persons. It was commenced
in A. D. 1352 and completed in A. D. 1376. Hard by Siena the citizens
of San Gimignano vowed an altar to St. Fabian and St. Sebastian as the
price of their protection, and set it up between the doors of the Pieve
or Collegiata. Above the place where once it stood is now the fresco of
Benozzo Gozzoli, commemorating the plague of A. D. 1464.

No less a man than Petrarch[148] has chronicled this plague at Parma. His
letter is in no sense descriptive, but rather a long-drawn-out wail over
the devastation, the loss of friends and relations, and the magnitude of
the destruction, that seemed to him to threaten the utter extinction of
the human race. Affectation is the key-note of his lamentations, that are
freely interspersed with allusions to the ancient classics. Laura had
died of plague at Avignon in A. D. 1348, and Petrarch in sadness of soul
wrote these lines on the manuscript of his beloved Vergil, now in the
Ambrosian Library at Milan:

‘Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in my
songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth, the 6th
April, 1327, at Avignon; and in the same city, at the same
hour of the same 6th April, but in the year 1348, withdrew
from life, whilst I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss.
The melancholy truth was made known to me by letters, which I
received at Parma on the 19th May.’

‘Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening of
the same day in the Church of the Minorites: her soul, as I
believe, returned to heaven, whence it came.’

‘To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in
the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it
something of a cruel sweetness, but I forget that nothing more
ought in this life to please me, which by the grace of God need
not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and manfully of
the idle cares, the empty hopes, and the unexpected end of the
years that are gone.’

The Florentines, by way of rehabilitating their city after the Black
Death, founded a university, and offered Petrarch a professorial chair,
which he declined.

Matteo Villani[149] wrote a plain unvarnished account of the state of
Florence during the Black Death, but it has found little favour beside
the lighter sketch that stands as a prelude to the _Decameron_. His
brother Giovanni, the Florentine historian, was one of the early victims,
and Matteo takes up his history at the point at which he left it, and
begins with a description of the epidemic. Famine had preceded the
plague, and like it was regarded as sent by Heaven for the punishment of
sin. But the energy of the government, in importing corn and distributing
it to the destitute, had done much to relieve the distress, when this
worse enemy presented itself at the gates.

Both Villani and Boccaccio enlarge on the futility of all measures,
preventive and remedial alike, and the intense infectiveness of the
disease. They believed that it could be communicated by a look, as well
as by contact with the person or belongings of an infected subject.
Boccaccio mentions the speedy death of two pigs from rooting among some
infected clothing. Some pinned their faith on strict seclusion: some
on temperate living, some on intemperance: others sought safety in the
carrying of aromatic substances. Both Villani and Boccaccio lay stress
on the utter depravity and demoralization engendered by the plague.
Great uncertainty of life has never failed to generate corresponding
recklessness. It has always been the same tale in every desperate city;
it was so when Jerusalem, panic-stricken at the threatened attack of
Sennacherib, gave itself over to wild revelry: ‘And in that day did the
Lord God of Hosts call to weeping and to mourning, and to baldness,
and to girding with sackcloth: but behold joy and gladness, slaying
oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: let us eat
and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ Matteo Villani traces to the Black
Death the social and moral degeneracy and the political anarchy, that
were rampant in Florentine life, in the centuries that followed close
upon it. Family affection is apt to reach its lowest ebb in the houses
of a plague-stricken city. Villani and Boccaccio echo the language of
Thucydides when they tell of parents deserting children, and husbands
wives, in their hour of need, and the neglect of the sacred rites of
sepulture. The plague raged in Florence from April to September, and
Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, computes the mortality within the
city at 60,000 persons, two-thirds of the total population. Boccaccio
actually raises the figure to 100,000 between March and July only, but
this figure, if correct, must comprise also the surrounding district,
which suffered only less severely than the city itself. One bright record
stands out against this dark background of social demoralization in the
devotion of the Compagnia della Misericordia to their self-appointed
task. Instituted in A. D. 1244 for the service of the sick, they now also
lent themselves to the transport of the dead. A picture by Cigoli (A. D.
1559-1613), now in the church of the Misericordia, shows the brotherhood
in red robes—now changed to black—gathering up the dead and dying at
the foot of Giotto’s Tower. The bearers may be seen to this day in the
streets of Florence in the same robes and hoods masking the whole face
but the eyes, but the hand-litters and sedans of Cigoli’s picture have
now been slung on wheels and sanctified to modern use with the addition
of a motor ambulance. Great wealth flowed into the coffers of the guild
from men who desired to crown a vicious life with a comfortable death and
a decent burial.

The horrors of the plague-stricken city, with which Boccaccio has
prefaced his _Decameron_, stand out in striking contrast to the gay
frivolity of the young men and women round whom his romance ranges.
Plague and pleasure jostle each other in jarring juxtaposition. Boccaccio
of set purpose chose this dark background for the staging of his brighter
theme. Thucydides had done the same before him, in setting the panegyric
of Pericles side by side with the plague of Athens: and Manzoni has done
so after him in the romance of _Promessi Sposi_. Perhaps also he had
learnt, amid the fierce realities of the plague, to envisage life as it
is, and so present it to his readers.

Niebuhr, in tracing the decadence of Roman literature to the Antonine
plague, cites as a parallel illustration the influence of the Black Death
on early Florentine literature. In the latter case, at any rate, it is
difficult to bring his dictum into line with the actual circumstances. It
would seem rather that the break in the vernacular Florentine literature
after Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, was deliberate, and in no sense
accidental. What Petrarch perceived, and perceived unerringly, was the
poverty of the material on which the vernacular had maintained a starved
existence; and he saw in the ancient classics, in their mythology, in
their speculative freedom, in the principles of their art, liberation
from the bondage that the Church had laid on literature. What he did
not perceive was that in reverting to ancient modes of thought it was
needless, nay even harmful, to adopt also the language of the ancients.
It was not open to him to see, as it is to us, that no great work of
literature has ever been produced in any language but that in which the
writer speaks and feels and thinks: any tongue but the tongue of his
daily life must needs be artificial and inanimate. Petrarch himself
little guessed that with posterity his fame would rest on his _Rime_ in
the vernacular, and not on his epistles and multifarious dissertations
in a lifeless Latin language. It is this mistaken teaching of Petrarch
that explains the abrupt break of a century or more in vernacular
Florentine literature, to which the Black Death can have been at most
a trivial contributory cause. As soon as this mistake came to be
recognized Florentine literature flows on again in its old channel in
the full stream of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century masterpieces
of Ariosto, of Tasso, and the rest. It was the advice of Petrarch that
turned Boccaccio from the vernacular to Latin, after he had completed
in his _Decameron_ a masterpiece of Italian prose. The influence of
the classical revival that Petrarch had brought to life was destined
also slowly to secularize Florentine art, but the time of its complete
emancipation was not yet.

The Black Death first touched French soil at Marseilles, brought thither,
it was thought, by ships from Genoa. Simon de Covino, a doctor, described
the features of the disease as he witnessed it at the neighbouring town
of Montpellier, in Latin hexameter verse. He clearly recognized its
contagious character, for he says, ‘By a single touch or a single breath
of the plague-stricken they perished.’

Of the plague at Avignon both lay and medical accounts survive. A full
description is contained in a letter from an anonymous canon to his
friends in Bruges. He remarks on the virulence of the contagion, and
describes both pneumonic and bubonic types of the disease. He says that
Clement VI ordered bodies to be examined after death, in the hope of
discovering the origin of the disease. This fact should be noted by
those who assert that the Church interpreted the _De Sepulturis_ bull of
Boniface VIII (A. D. 1300) as prohibiting the anatomy of human bodies.
The autopsies disclosed no more than inflammation of the lungs in the
pneumonic cases. Similar examinations, previously undertaken in Italy,
had also yielded no better result. Clement also ordained expiatory
processions and penitential litanies. Within the precincts of his palace,
to which his medical attendant, Gui de Chauliac, confined him, he lent
his own presence to the whole ceremonial that he prescribed. But he
did not neglect to keep large fires alight in his apartments, as Pope
Nicholas IV (A. D. 1288-92) had done at Rome in a previous visitation.
Only those who have been at Avignon at midsummer can appreciate the price
that Clement was ready to pay for immunity.

Clement’s physician, Gui de Chauliac, says that the plague began at
Avignon in January, and lasted for seven months.[150] In his view
the causes of the pandemic were twofold: universal, consisting in
a conjunction of the planets: and special, dependent on the feeble
constitution of the individual, whereby it came about that labouring men
were chiefly attacked. But then as now the scared populace was proof
against pontifical pronouncements from the Chair of Medicine. They saw in
it the handiwork of Jews spreading poison throughout the world, so they
put them to death. They saw in it malevolence of lepers, so they drove
them out. They saw in it a plot of feudal overlords for their extinction,
so they remained within their houses. And for completer security they set
a guard around the towns and villages, who accosted each newcomer and
compelled him to swallow any ointments or powders found upon him.

De Chauliac describes two prevalent types of the disease. The one
type, the pneumonic, prevailed only for the first two months, and was
characterized by spitting of blood, extreme infectiousness, and death in
three days. The second type, the bubonic, prevailed throughout the five
succeeding months, and was characterized by boils, by buboes chiefly
in the armpits and groins, by slight infectiousness, and death in five
days. The mortality extended to no less than three-fourths of the total
population, so that to get rid of the bodies they were driven to throw
them into the Rhone, after Clement had pronounced a blessing on its
waters.

To Gui de Chauliac the best of all preservatives was flight, aided, or
perhaps we should say embarrassed, by the free use of aloetic purgatives.

He did not fly himself, for he says, with the _naïveté_ of a Pepys, ‘As
for me, to avoid infamy, I did not dare absent myself, but still I was
in continual fear.’ (Et moy pour euiter infamie, n’osay point m’absâter:
mais auec continuelle peur me preseruay tant que ie peux, moyennant les
susdicts remedes.) His hesitancy was to prove his undoing, for he was
himself infected towards the end of the epidemic—but recovered after six
weeks. Among other preservatives he reckons venesection, purification
of the air by means of fires, comforting the heart with treacle and
apples and things of savoury flavour, consoling the humours with Galen’s
Armenian bole, and the prevention of putrefaction by the use of bitter
things. Should the disease defy all these precautions, then he commends,
as curative measures, bleedings and evacuations, with electuaries and
cordial syrups. Buboes should be ripened with poultices of figs and
boiled onions, pounded and mixed with leaven and butter: then they
should be opened and treated like ulcers. Carbuncles are to be leeched,
scarified, and cauterized—an improvement on the disastrous treatment
meted out to Felix, bishop of Nantes, on a previous occasion.

Raymond Chalin de Vinario, another practitioner in Avignon during the
plague, adds but little to what Gui de Chauliac has to say. He describes
a solid cord, red or variously discoloured, which appeared in some cases
on the body surface, with a carbuncle at one end and a pestilential
tubercle at the other. This can hardly have been anything else than an
acute lymphangitis.

It is clear from the descriptions of the various writers that a large
proportion of the cases in this pandemic were of pneumonic type: hence
its virulence and its infectiousness.

Amid all the panic of the Black Death, persecution of the Jews broke
out with even greater ferocity than during the Crusades in the twelfth
century. Some victim was needed to appease the maddened populace: so
the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells, and even of infecting the
air. Circumstantial accounts were circulated throughout Europe of secret
operations directed from Toledo. The concoction of poisons from spiders,
owls, and other supposed venomous animals was described, and its mode of
distribution made known. So well did their accusers deceive themselves
that in many places the springs and wells were sealed, so that no one
might use them, and the inhabitants of many cities had to rely on rain
and river water. If confirmation of poison were ever needed, the rack
could be trusted to procure it: or, failing that, men could be found vile
enough to deposit poison in places in which circumstances demanded its
presence. Those who escaped the fury of the mob fell into the clutches of
an inexorable justice. In the case of the Jews the suspicion of poisoning
was prompted by the fact that at this time the practice of medicine,
at any rate in southern Europe, was chiefly in the hands of Jewish
physicians. Hideous massacres of Jews had taken place in southern France
and Spain in the previous epidemics of A. D. 1320 and 1333, as we know
from the writings of Rabbi Joshua.

The first outbreak of murderous ferocity seems to have occurred at
Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, in September and October, A. D. 1348.
Here it was merely the culmination of an accusation of poisoning the
wells so long previously as the epidemic of A. D. 1320. In face of the
common danger, high and low bound themselves together by a solemn oath to
extirpate the Jews by fire and the sword. Chillon summoned Bern, and Bern
sent on the summons to Basle, Freyburg, and Strasbourg to join them in
their righteous task. The record of confessions extracted from the Jews
by the ordeal of torture within the Castle of Chillon has been rescued
from oblivion by the vigilance of Hecker.[151] In Basle and Freyburg
the Jews were seized, one and all, and without form of trial were burnt
to death in a wooden building, specially constructed for the purpose,
while at Strasbourg no less than two thousand Jews were immolated on a
wooden scaffold, erected in their own burial-ground. Such as escaped were
ruthlessly murdered in the streets, saving a few only to whom freedom
was granted on submission to baptism. But for these the respite from
renewed accusation and death was only temporary. Faithlessness to their
own religion, or physical charms sufficient to assuage the blood-lust of
their Christian persecutors, constituted the only acceptable claims to
a passing mercy. Strasbourg betrayed the true ground of its hatred of
the Jews in an order of its senate that all pledges and bonds should be
returned to the debtors and the money divided among the working-people.
Those who were unwilling to soil their hands with blood-money presented
their share of the spoils to monasteries, at the prompting of their
confessors. At Spires, Mayence, and Eslingen, voluntary immolation in
their own houses alone saved the Jews from more inhuman tortures. Some
were murdered in the open streets and their dead bodies thrown into the
Rhine in empty casks, so that they might not infect the air. Now and
again banishment was substituted for burning, only for the outcasts to
perish at the hands of a savage and bloodthirsty countryfolk.

When the houses of the Jews were burnt a ban was set on entry into the
ruins of their habitations: the site was accursed, as the site of Jericho
of old. But the bricks of the destroyed dwellings and the tombstones of
the victims were in due time rendered as an acceptable thank-offering to
God in the repair of Christian churches. In Austria the same accusations
were brought against the Jews as elsewhere, and numbers were burnt to
death in Vienna and throughout the country. Where there were no Jews, as
in Leipsic, Magdeburg, and other places, the grave-diggers were accused
of propagating the plague for their own sordid ends.

It should be set to the credit of Clement VI that he extended his
personal protection to the Jews at Avignon, issuing two bulls, asserting
their innocence, and calling on Christians to refrain from persecution.
The Emperor Charles IV did what lay in his power, short of drawing the
sword, to check the outrages perpetrated by the Bohemian nobles. Duke
Albert of Austria exacted from the persecutors punishments only less
cruel than they themselves had inflicted, but even so did not avail to
save hundreds of Jews from the flames, in his own fortress of Kyberg.
Other lesser princes, more often for bribes than for pity, extended some
measure of protection to the wretched Jews, earning for themselves the
_sobriquet_ of ‘Jew-masters’. It was no light matter for a private person
to shelter a Jew, for the penalty was often exacted on the rack or at the
stake.

Basnage[152] states that the large number of Jews in modern Poland may be
traced to the fact that King Casimir the Great (A. D. 1333-70), yielding
to the entreaties of a favourite Jewess, Esther, granted sanctuary to
such Jews as sought it. But actually Casimir only confirmed an edict
of protection promulgated in A. D. 1264, and Poland had then already
afforded a haven of refuge to the Jews, who had fled from the cruel
massacres perpetrated in the enthusiasm of the first Crusade.

In England the Black Death served to revive the perennial charges brought
against the Jews—that they stole Christian children and killed them,
especially at Easter-time, a charge that Chaucer, mindful of Hugh of
Lincoln, has enshrined in the pathetic verse of his Prioress. They were
charged also with outraging the Host, as well as with spreading poison.

The Black Death seems to have fallen with greater violence on Austria
than on Germany,[153] perhaps on account of its close contact with Italy.
It devastated Vienna from Easter to Michaelmas of A. D. 1349, carrying
off thirty thousand out of a population of less than one hundred thousand
persons. The excited populace personified it as the Pest-Jungfrau, who
had only to raise her hand to infect a victim. She was to be seen flying
through the air in the form of a blue flame, and also proceeding out
of the mouths of dead and dying. Some saw the plague poison descend in
the form of a ball of fire. One such was seen hovering over the town,
but a bishop exorcised it by prayer, so that it fell harmless to earth.
A stone effigy of the Madonna was set up in the street, where it fell.
All medical aid proved useless, and amulets, potions, and preservative
electuaries were in general use. Segregation of the sick was attempted,
by nailing up doors and windows of infected houses, but even so dead
bodies littered the streets. Huge plague pits were dug for the reception
of the dead. Flagellant processions sought to excite divine compassion by
the ritual of peripatetic penitence.

The genesis of the Flagellant movement must be looked for further back in
the history of pestilence than the Black Death. The idea of mortifying
the flesh by the penance of scourging is of ancient origin, and at least
as early as the eleventh century brotherhoods were devoted to this
ritual. The processions of these _Devoti_, as they were termed in Italy,
were originated by St. Anthony in A. D. 1231, and we hear of them under
the name of Flagellants in Vienna during the plague of A. D. 1261.

One Monachus Paduanus, quoted by Hecker, has left a record of the early
days of the _Devoti_.

‘When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled
spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians.
The fear of Christ fell upon all: noble and ignoble, old and
young, and even children of five years of age, marched through
the streets with no covering but a scarf round the waist. They
each carried a scourge of leather thongs, which they applied to
their limbs, amid sighs and tears, with such violence that the
blood flowed from the wounds. Not only during the day, but even
by night, and in the severest winter, they traversed the cities
with burning torches and banners, in thousands and tens of
thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves
before the altars. They proceeded in the same manner in the
villages: and the woods and mountains resounded with the voices
of those whose cries were raised to God. The melancholy chaunt
of the penitent alone was heard. Enemies were reconciled: men
and women vied with each other in splendid works of charity, as
if they dreaded that Divine Omnipotence would pronounce on them
the doom of annihilation.’

Before this mediaeval pageant of penitence the mind insensibly reverts
to the ancient ritual of the Salii on this same Italian soil, to their
choric hymn of expiation, to the _supplicationes_, and to the love-feast
of the _lectisternium_ of later days.

Under the stimulus of the Black Death, the Brotherhood of the Cross,
or Cross-bearers, arose out of the ranks of the Flagellants, first in
Hungary, and afterwards in Germany. Ditmar[154] has left the following
account of their processions:

‘Their heads covered as far as the eyes: their look fixed
on the ground, accompanied by every token of the deepest
contrition and mourning. They were robed in sombre garments,
with red crosses on the breast, back and cap, and bore triple
scourges, tied in three or four knots, in which points of iron
were fixed. Tapers and magnificent banners of cloth of gold
were carried before them: wherever they made their appearance
they were welcomed by the ringing of the bells: and the people
flocked from all quarters, to listen to their hymns and to
witness their penance, with devotion and tears.’

When the Flagellants entered the town they would hand the citizens a
document setting forth God’s anger and determination to destroy mankind,
had not the Virgin Mary interceded for them. Some of the crosses carried
by the Flagellants are still to be seen at Gross-Glogau, Kaysersberg, and
Ammerschweyer in Upper Alsace.

This spirit of religious fanaticism spread like wildfire through Hungary,
Germany, Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, and Flanders, and even beyond these
countries. In the autumn of 1349 some six-score Flagellants crossed from
Holland and paraded the streets of London, but the metropolis had not
then acquired the taste for processions, and ejected them as undesirable
aliens. At last the movement had alighted on uncongenial soil. So
great was the number of the Flagellants that they became a cause of
well-founded anxiety to the clergy, whose churches they actually invaded,
and whose influence they threatened to supersede. Their hymns were in
every mouth, and one of them, the chief psalm of the Cross-bearers, is
reproduced by Hecker in his _Epidemics of the Middle Ages_.

The secular authorities also saw cause for alarm at the growing numbers
and power of the brotherhood, bound together by common ritual and common
regulations, and capable, under bold and designing leaders, of exerting
their influence in the affairs of states. The Emperor Charles IV appealed
to the Holy See for protection against the heretics, and Clement VI
responded by issuing a bull from Avignon on October 20, 1349, prohibiting
the pilgrimages on pain of excommunication. Philip VI forbade altogether
their reception in France, and several other ruling princes followed
his example. Relentless persecution soon took the place of unthinking
homage. The processions were abandoned, but the spirit that animated
them was not dead, and the same fanaticism broke out again in Germany in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in Italy even as late as the
eighteenth, under the influence of successive plagues.

The Black Death, sweeping throughout England, is believed to have carried
off one-half of the total population. Historians have told the tale of
the resulting emancipation of the labouring class, but we find that it
has also left its mark on the education, the literature, the art, and the
architecture of England.

In education, it helped greatly to bring about the revival of English
in the schools. After the Norman Conquest French had gradually become
the language of education: not of set purpose, for the Conqueror himself
tried ineffectually to learn English. But most of the education was in
the hands of the clergy, and as many Frenchmen had been put in charge of
monasteries and of parochial cures, it was inevitable that French should
become the language of education, and so diffuse itself generally through
the educated part of the nation, both French and English. About the
middle of the fourteenth century Higden, in his _Polychronicon_, states
that French was still the language taught in the schools, and had been so
since the Norman Conquest. In A. D. 1385 Trevisa, commenting on Higden’s
statement, writes:

‘This maner was myche yused tofore the first moreyn [before
the 1349 murrain], and is siththe som dele [since somewhat]
ychaungide. For John Cornwaile, a maister of gramer, chaungide
the lore [learning] in gramer scole and construction of [from]
Frensch into Englisch, and Richard Pencriche lerned that maner
teching of him, and other men of Pencriche. So that now, the
yere of owre Lord a thousand thre hundred foure score and
fyve, of the secunde King Rychard after the Conquest nyne, in
alle the gramer scoles of England children leveth Frensch, and
construeth an [in] Englisch.’

Despite the adoption of French as the language of the schools, English
had survived as a colloquial language side by side with its supplanter.
In the conflict between the two prestige and fashion were on the side
of French, tradition and nationality on the side of English: and
sooner or later the balance was bound to incline to the side of the
national language. The fusion of the two had inevitably led to the
corruption of each, but the corrupted French, at any rate after the loss
of Normandy, had no standard of purity at hand to limit corruption,
while the corrupted English was constantly purified by contact with
the native tongue, and by the existence of a pre-Norman vernacular
literature. National spirit, stimulated by international strife, was
ripe for completing the task, that John Cornwall had begun in a single
west country school; and the Black Death, by sweeping away the existing
teachers and making place for others of native stock, did much to
facilitate the change. The triumph of the vernacular operated a mighty
revolution in our national literature, paving the way for Langland
and Chaucer. Thomas Usk, in the Prologue to his _Testament of Love_,
completed not later than A. D. 1387, alludes to the utter corruption of
the imported French, and the Prioress in the Canterbury Tales, although
she could speak French ‘ful fayre and festishly’ spoke it only

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frenche of Paris was to hire [her] unknowe.

One other immediate effect of the Black Death was to reduce the
literary output of the monasteries to its lowest level. No one can
fail to be struck by the scantiness and sterility of the contemporary
chronicles, which characterize the period following the Black Death,
and the reasonable explanation of this abrupt change would seem to
lie in the notorious depletion of the monastic households. The tragedy
of the Provençal brotherhood, in which Petrarch’s brother and his dog
alone survived to tend and guard the monastery, found an echo in a
like desolation of many an English monastery. The special incidence on
the monasteries was perhaps due to the monks moving freely among the
sick, and giving them sanctuary within their cloister. The sick, too,
exhibited often an ill-timed gratitude in bequeathing their clothes to
the monasteries. Doctors, as Chaucer remarked of his day, were only for
the rich.

In England, as in Italy, the Black Death left its mark on architecture in
the abrupt arrest of schemes of construction in course of execution. Many
such breaks may be detected in the church architecture of the fourteenth
century, and a notable example is furnished in the unfinished towers of
the church of St. Nicholas at Yarmouth.

Prior[155] indicates a similar break of continuity in the building of
York Minster. The west front and the nave were in course of construction,
when the Black Death appeared, and the result is a makeshift wood
vaulting to the nave. Then the building of the choir was delayed for
twelve years, till A. D. 1361, and in its structure the flowing lines
of the Decorated style, seen in the west front, have given place to the
formal stiffness of the Perpendicular.

In London the effect is much less conspicuous than in the northern parts
of England, perhaps because it was easier to replenish the supply of
masons in the metropolis than elsewhere. The building of St. Stephen’s
Chapel in Westminster and the completion of the Abbey cloisters seem to
have proceeded continuously, and with no change of style, throughout
the Black Death and the following years: and the same is the case with
Gloucester Cathedral.

Prior considers that the Black Death played a leading part in the
superseding of the Decorated by the Perpendicular type, and in the
diffusion of the latter from its Gloucester home throughout England. The
lack of builders led to masons passing from one district to another,
removing them from the conditions of local stone favourable to their
best work and to originality of style. The inevitable result was that
the architectural style easiest of expression in any form of stone was
bound to prevail, and that style was the Perpendicular. Examples of
this transformation in the years following close on the Black Death are
numerous, in the nave and cloisters of Canterbury Cathedral, in the west
front of Winchester Cathedral, and elsewhere.

The same stereotyped monotony, the same continuous decline in the skill
of execution, the same obvious diminution of interest in the craft of the
artificer, as is seen in the building construction, are manifest also
in the figure-sculpture and traceries of the period. The variation of
artistic expression, that in the two preceding centuries had progressed
steadily from strength to strength, comes to an abrupt cessation, and is
content with the incessant repetition of inanimate models.

‘The figure-sculpture[156] of the later mediaeval church under
such conditions grew to be especially of the shop, according
to pattern and not of fresh adventure. It no longer took its
place in the business of the building-yard, but was provided
for—not worked—in the building. The constructing mason left
niches for statues, and on occasion worked bosses with subject
relief, cornices with ‘angel’ sculpture, and gargoyles with
‘devil’ sculpture. But this figure work was not essential, and
a whole majestic piece of architecture in Perpendicular style
might rise from the ground and never ask for the craft of the
figure-sculptor at all. The works of the imager were now in
effect furniture, which could be bought in the city and added
to the building at any time. Accordingly statues and reliefs
ceased, in fifteenth-century practice, to be carved immediately
by the mason upon the building: they became outside works
conceived in no intimate relation to it.’

Gasquet maintains that a similar breach of continuity may be observed in
the manufacture of stained glass, and that there is a noticeable change
in style after the Black Death. Speaking broadly, the styles of stained
glass correspond to the styles of architecture, but in each case are a
little later: so that the contention comes to this, that there is an
unbridged gap between the late Decorated and early Perpendicular. Yet one
cannot but recall the ante-chapel windows of New College, Oxford, and the
east window of Gloucester Cathedral, in each of which the transition from
Decorated to Perpendicular is apparent.

CHAPTER VIII

For three centuries and more after the Black Death plague was endemic
throughout central and southern Europe, and its presence is indelibly
recorded in the productions of contemporary art. Dances of Death, plague
banners, votive and commemorative paintings, and actual representations
of plague scenes all bear silent testimony to the abiding presence of
the enemy within the gates. _Memento mori_, with its dismal foreboding,
was the appropriate motto of the age. Innocent III in his _De Contemptu
Mundi_ had said the last word on the misery of human existence, and the
shame and degradation of the human body, polluted and polluting, long
before the Black Death: but henceforward the gloom that haunted the soul
of this great successor of St. Peter seems to diffuse itself throughout
the world.

Dancing from early ages has been associated with the conception of death.
In many primitive races these dances seem to pertain to mimetic magic,
and purport to expedite the passing of the spirit of the deceased. Both
Greeks and Romans preserved dancing in their funeral celebrations, and
representations of these funeral dances have been found in connexion
with Greek and Etruscan tombs. These are commonly a file of maidens,
holding each other’s hands, and led by a youthful male coryphaeus.
Anacreon,[157] Tibullus,[158] and Vergil[159] all depict the revelry of
the dance in the land of departed souls, and joy is the key-note of the
dance. Christianity, in superseding paganism, for better or for worse
inculcated a gloomy conception of death, as a punishment, a penalty for
original sin. Recurrent epidemics of pestilence served to transform the
conception into that of an inexorable foe revelling in the subversion of
human happiness and the futility of human affairs. The literature of the
age no less than its art bears the imprint of this conception. Petrarch
has left us a _Triumph of Death_, and Langland in his _Vision of Piers
Plowman_[160] has given us in verse a Dance of Death:

Death came driving after, and all to dust pashed
Kynges and Knightes, Kaysers and Popes,
Learned and lewde: he ne let no man stande;
That he hitte even, stirred never after.
Many a lovely ladie and her lemmans of knightes
Swouned and swelte for sorwe of Death’s dyntes.

The earliest authenticated painting of the Death-dance is that which was
once to be seen in the churchyard of the Innocents at Paris, painted
in A. D. 1434, but it is improbable that it was actually the first. A
closely similar theme of earlier date may still be seen in the Campo
Santo at Pisa. Vasari attributed it to Andrew Orcagna (A. D. 1329-68),
but modern critics believe it to have been painted by Pisan artists,
about A. D. 1350. This fresco shows three young men following the chase
on horseback. Coming to the cell of St. Macarius, an Egyptian anchorite,
they are brought face to face with three open coffins, in which are a
skeleton and two dead bodies, reminding them of the fleeting nature of
human pleasures. This subject also is one adopted from contemporary
literature. Under the title of ‘Les trois Morts et les trois Vifs’ it had
figured in thirteenth-century verse, and is frequently illustrated in the
manuscript _Horae_ of the period. It is suggested that this legend is the
origin of the name ‘Danse macabre’, or ‘Macaber Dance’, used often as an
alternative name for the familiar ‘Dance of Death’.

[Illustration: PLATE XIII

DANCE OF DEATH, AT BASLE

(Face Page 135)]

It is not in Italy and not in France, but rather, as we should expect, in
Germany and Switzerland, that these Dances of Death found most favour,
as befits the countries that gave birth to Luther and shelter to
Calvin. In 1462-3 plague raged fiercely at Lübeck. In the chapel at the
east end of the Marienkirche is a much restored ‘Dance of Death’, dated
1463, and showing the costumes of the period. It is interesting as being
considerably older than the more famous Basle Dance.

By far the most celebrated ‘Dance of Death’ was that painted in a shed
in the churchyard of the Dominican convent at Basle. It is believed to
have been painted in commemoration of a plague that occurred during the
session of the Grand Council of Basle, that lasted from A. D. 1431 to
1443. It has been attributed on insufficient evidence to Holbein. It was
destroyed by a riotous mob in A. D. 1806, but relics of the life-size
figures, painted in oil, are still to be seen in the Historical Museum at
Basle. Engravings of it also exist that record its characters in detail.
Holbein did actually paint a ‘Dance of Death’ in fresco on the walls of
the old Whitehall Palace, which was destroyed in the fire of A. D. 1697.
It was an appropriate subject for the brush of an artist, who himself
was to die of plague (A. D. 1554). It is probably referred to by Matthew
Prior in his _Ode to the Memory of George Villiers_:

Our term of life depends not on our deed,
Before our birth our funeral was decreed,
Nor aw’d by foresight, nor misled by chance,
Imperious death directs the ebon lance,
Peoples great Henry’s tombs, and leads up Holbein’s Dance.

Holbein was almost certainly also the author of the originals of the
Lyons ‘Dance of Death’, from which Hans Lutzenberger engraved the
woodcuts, which represent a varied assortment of characters of each and
every social order, among whom Death, in grotesque guise, plies his grim
and gruesome task.

The most casual observer cannot fail to be struck in any collection
of pictures of the Holbein School, with the number that present some
aspect or other of death. In the small picture gallery of Basle there
is a picture of two skulls and a tibia, by Ambrose Holbein: a diptych,
with the bust of a young man on one panel, and a skeleton on the other,
by Hans Holbein the Younger: another sixteenth-century diptych with a
bust of a girl on one panel, and a bust of a skeleton on the other, by an
unknown painter: and two pictures by Hans Baldung (A. D. 1475-1545), one
of Death holding a woman by the hair and pointing to a grave: the other
of Death kissing a woman before an open grave.

Plague banners, or _gonfaloni_,[161] are a characteristic product of the
Umbrian school of painting, and particularly of its Perugian branch.
It was the lot of Perugian painters to ply their art in the midst of
tribulations of every kind. Throughout the fifteenth century their
country was devastated by war, and by a succession of epidemics of plague
(in A. D. 1399, 1418, 1429, 1437, 1450, 1456, 1460-8, 1475-80 and 1486).
In the face of these visitations Perugia set herself to appeal to the
mercy of Christ through the medium of her art. All her painters scarcely
sufficed to provide all the banners required for her expiatory and
triumphal processions. It was at times such as these that the _gonfaloni_
made their appearance, raised between heaven and earth, as though to
convey to God a splendid manifestation of popular repentance. Before the
suppliant banners marched the priesthood in their robes, behind them
followed a penitent people, striking their breasts and wailing aloud
_Misericordia_. At each fresh invasion of plague a new generation of
artists, beginning with Bonfigli (A. D. 1420-96) and ending with Baroccio
(A. D. 1528-1612), was called upon to produce afresh these tributes of
the popular devotion. The remedy was well adapted to their sufferings,
for these processions of penitents, traversing the city and following
banners, that displayed the figure of the Redeemer, or the Madonna,
or some other plague saint, produced in their souls such a degree of
spiritual exaltation, as made despondency impossible. Men gazed on them
as they gazed on the Brazen Serpent that Moses set up in the wilderness.
A striking banner is that by Bonfigli, in the church of S. Fiorenzo at
Perugia, painted in A. D. 1476 during an epidemic of plague. Above kneels
the Madonna: before her stands the Child in a basket of roses upheld by
angels, wearing chaplets of roses, as in most of Bonfigli’s pictures.
Both Madonna and Child are crowned. Below kneel groups of citizens, men
and women, with Sebastian and other saints, supplicating the Madonna. An
angel holds a scroll, on which is inscribed a fervid call to repentance,
blended with fierce denunciation of their sins, in these words of Lorenzo
Spiriti:

‘Oh, most obstinate and wicked people—cruel, proud, and full
of all iniquity, who have placed your faith and your desires
on things, which are full of a mortal misery, I, the angel of
Heaven, am sent unto you from God to tell you, that He will
put an end to all your wounds and weeping, your ruin and your
curse through the mediation of Mary.... Turn, turn your eyes,
most miserable mortals, to the great examples of the past and
present, to the utter miseries and heavy evils, which Heaven
sends to you because of all your sins: your homicide and your
adultery, your avarice and luxury.... Oh miserable beings,
the justice of heaven works not in a hurry, but it punishes
always, even as men deserve.... Nineveh was a city florid and
magnificent, and Babylon was likewise, but now they are as
nothing: and Sodom and Gomorrah, behold them now—a morass of
sulphur and of fetid waters.... Oh, therefore, be grateful and
acknowledge the benefits and graces of our Saviour, and let
your souls burn hotly with the fire of faith and charity, of
hope and faithful love.... But and if you should again grow
slothful and unwilling to renounce your errors, I foretell a
second judgement upon you, and I reckon that it will prove more
terrible, more cruel than the first.’[162]

In banners such as this the imagination of the painter finds play for
the crowding emotions not of his own heart only, but of the hearts of his
fellow citizens as well.

[Illustration: PLATE XIV

MADONNA DELLA MISERICORDIA. BY BONFIGLI

Photograph by Alinari, Rome

(Face Page 138)]

[Illustration: PLATE XV

MADONNA DEL SOCCORSO. BY SINIBALDO IBI

Photograph by Alinari, Rome

(Face Page 138)]

[Illustration: PLATE XVI

PLAGUE BANNER. CHRIST AND SAINTS. BY BONFIGLI

Photograph by Anderson, Rome

(Face Page 139)]

Another type of plague banner is that of the ‘Madonna della Misericordia’
in the church of S. Francesco del Prato at Perugia, also by Bonfigli.
It bears the date A. D. 1464. In the centre stands the crowned Madonna,
a majestic figure erect like a lighthouse amid the storm, on which
sufferers may fix their eyes and hope. On her garment lie broken arrows,
while beneath its ample folds kneel groups of monks on one side, and of
nuns on the other, all in attitudes of prayer. In the upper part of the
picture Christ, wearing both crown and cruciferous nimbus, casts arrows
down. At His right hand is the angel of justice with sword drawn, at
His left the angel of mercy with sheathed sword. Gathered around the
Madonna and craving her intercession are S. Lorenzo and the Bishop SS.
Severo, Costanzo, and Ludovico. Beneath these to the right SS. Francis
and Bernardino, and to the left S. Peter Martyr and S. Sebastian,
whose body is pierced with many arrows. These saints have Perugia in
their special keeping. At the foot of the picture is shown the city
of Perugia, with its emblematic griffin on the wall. Within the walls
a white-robed confraternity is kneeling in prayer. Without them lurks
Death, a bat-winged skeleton with bow and arrows, whose victims strew the
ground. But the prayers have prevailed, and already the archangel Raphael
strikes Death with his spear. In the foreground outside the walls is a
fugitive family, the mother mounted on a donkey, carrying her infants in
its paniers. At a side gate two soldiers make off in haste, as the porter
tells them the state of the city. Perugians say that not Bonfigli but an
angel painted the face of the Madonna. They might well have said it of
the exquisite ‘Madonna del Soccorso’ in Sinibaldo Ibi’s plague banner of
A. D. 1482 in the church of S. Francisco at Montone. This fancy of the
protecting Madonna, spreading her robes over her suppliants, as a hen
gathers her chickens under her wings, is borrowed from Hebrew poetry.
It figures in a similar conception in the language of the ninety-first
Psalm: ‘I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope and my stronghold: my
God, in Him will I trust. For He shall deliver thee from the snare of the
hunter, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall defend thee under His
wings, and thou shalt be safe under His feathers.’

One more Madonna banner calls for passing notice—that of Bonfigli at
Corciano near Perugia, dated 1472. It has the same general character as
his ‘Madonna della Misericordia’. The quaint head-gear of the angels
supporting her robe is the rose-wreath, symbolic of the Madonna, which
appears, in one form or another, in so many of her pictures.

In nearly all these banners, as in other archaic works, the dwindling
size of individual figures indicates the lesser parts they have to play.
In many the Madonna fills almost all the banner’s surface.

In another of Bonfigli’s banners in the church of S. Maria Nuova at
Perugia the figure of Christ, wearing a cruciferous nimbus, dominates the
picture. He holds the arrows of pestilence ready to be launched among
the people. His face is sad and regretful, as He executes faithfully the
behests of His Father. On either side of Him saints bear the emblems of
the Passion, and to the right and left are the darkened sun and moon.
Beside Him kneel the Madonna and the Franciscan S. Paulinus. In the
lowest part of the picture are the chimneys and towers of Perugia, with
the pest-fiend, in the semblance of a huge bat, bearing a scythe, and the
Angel of Deliverance smiting him with his lance. Below, shepherded by S.
Benedict and S. Scholastica, the diminutive citizens kneel in prayer.

Yet another type of plague banner is that in which the figure of a saint
plays the leading rôle. The saint is always Sebastian, only because
in Umbria and Tuscany he was the chief accredited protector against
pestilence. The finest example of this type is the S. Sebastian of
Sodoma, described above (pp. 100-1).

Plague banners were not the exclusive product of Umbria. Two of the most
famous, the S. Sebastian of Sodoma and the Sistine Madonna of Raphael,
painted at Siena and Florence respectively, are products of the Tuscan
school: but it is only in and around Perugia that they can be found and
studied to advantage. The Sistine Madonna, in which the Madonna and Child
are attended by S. Sixtus and S. Barbara, was painted during an epidemic
of pestilence for the Black Brothers of S. Sisto at Piacenza. No record
exists that it was ever actually used for the purpose for which it was
painted. Bonfigli, in the spirit of Phidias, had painted ‘Mary the Queen
of Heaven’: Raphael, in the spirit of Praxiteles, had painted ‘Mary the
Mother of God’. The people wanted a queen and Raphael gave them a peasant
woman. They could not see, as Raphael saw, in womanhood the embodiment
of gentleness spiritualizing the brute in man. They could not see in
motherhood the vision of willing suffering transfigured to joy. It was
this reunion of Art with Nature, that dethroned the plague banner from
the affections of the common people.

Plague banners of less importance are those by Bonfigli at Civitella
Benazzone, by Sinibaldo Ibi in the convent of S. Ubaldo at Gubbio, dated
A. D. 1503, by Giannicola Manni in the church of S. Dominico at Perugia,
dated A. D. 1525, and by Berto di Giovanni in Perugia Cathedral, dated A.
D. 1526. There they will be seen for the most part as framed altar-pieces.

Perugia’s greatest painter, Pietro Vannucci, better known as Perugino,
perished in the course of one of his city’s plagues. Tradition has it
that he died denying the Saviour and Madonna, whom his art had done so
much to glorify, and that his body was thrown into a desolate grave
beside a wayside oak. His sons searched diligently for their father’s
body, to lay it in the church of S. Agostino, but in vain, among so many
that had perished of the plague. It is, said, however, that a priest
found it and buried it under the walls of his church at Fontignano.

The humbler _Pestblätter_ seem to have played much the same part in the
devotional activities of the individual as did the _gonfaloni_ in those
of the multitude. They were not exclusively German, but were issued also
from the presses of Flanders, the Netherlands, Italy, and more rarely
of France as well. Pictorial _Pestblätter_ are mostly rough woodcuts or
copper-plate engravings, crudely coloured by hand in some cases, and
belong chiefly to the last two-thirds of the fifteenth and the first
third of the sixteenth centuries. In the character of their subjects
they are usually simply devotional, and represent some act of expiation
or intercession on behalf of mankind. The three leading types correspond
closely to the three types of _gonfaloni_ in their subjects:

1. Christ, the suffering Redeemer, on the cross.

2. Intercession by the Virgin Mary or by Christ.

3. Memorials of the martyrdom of special plague saints, such as
St. Sebastian, St. Roch, and St. Antony.

And closely allied to this last,

4. Intercession by these special plague saints, or by other
saints whose association with plague was more fortuitous and
less widely recognized: such were St. Quirinus, St. Adrian, and
St. Valentine.

Many of these forms have attached to them some appropriate prayer or
invocation. Sometimes the religious element is supplemented by an
exposition of hygienic precautions or of remedial measures. Thus a
devotional cut comes to be blended with injunctions, usually in verse,
as to how to stave off pestilence by isolation, fumigation, washing, or
dietary; or how to cure it by such measures as bleeding, or plasters to
hasten maturation of the buboes.

In addition to these types, a non-pictorial type is met with, nearly akin
to the English Broadside, in which the religious purpose has almost or
wholly disappeared, and which sets out in uncompromising prose directions
of prophylactic or therapeutic character.

_Pestblätter_ originated in more ways than one. In times of pestilence
pilgrimages were often made to the shrines of special saints, and rough
representations of these saints were provided, as memorials of their
pilgrimage to the devout. Sometimes the object of homage was some sacred
picture, which would then be roughly reproduced as a memento. At other
times they seem to have been issued by religious communities for purely
devotional purposes. Those of secular character were either printed by
order of the municipalities, or were the product of private medical
enterprise. Original _Pestblätter_ are to be seen in the leading museums
of most European countries. A selection of these has been admirably
reproduced in a portfolio[163] by Heitz and Mündel of Strasbourg.

[Illustration: PLATE XVII

1. THE ALMIGHTY WITH SS. SEBASTIAN AND ROCH

2. THE ALMIGHTY, MADONNA AND SUPPLIANTS. THE VIRGIN AND CHILD, S. ANNA
AND SUPPLIANTS

(Between Pages 142 and 143)]

Plate XVII (1) is a woodcut, probably printed at Nuremberg at the
commencement of the fifteenth century. The Almighty is depicted with the
drawn sword of pestilence in His hand, within what would seem from its
colouring in the original to be a representation of the rose-wreath,
emblematic of the Virgin Mary. In the centre are St. Sebastian with his
symbolic arrow, and an angel tending the plague sore of St. Roch. Below
is a prayer to these two saints.

Plate XVII (2) shows the Almighty above, with the shafts of pestilence in
His hands. The crowned Madonna shelters beneath her robe her suppliants,
among whom are dignitaries of the Church. Below a group of saints
are interceding with the Virgin and Child and St. Anna. The whole is
encircled by the Virgin’s girdle wrought into a rose-wreath.

St. Anthony is a favourite figure of these _Pestblätter_. He is more
closely associated with plague and pestilence in Germany than is the
case in Italy. He is also patron-saint against erysipelas, known as St.
Anthony’s Fire, which often raged in epidemics in pre-Listerian times.
He is commonly represented with the cross, on which he was crucified,
with a crutch symbolic of his great age and feebleness, and with an
exorcising bell. The passing bell was tolled originally not only to ask
for prayers for the soul of the departed, but also to scare away evil
spirits from it. The pig, that accompanies St. Anthony, is the emblem of
the Devil, whose temptings he successfully repelled. Even in the absence
of St. Anthony himself, his cross in the form of the Greek T is often
introduced, sometimes with Christ nailed upon it. From this association
of St. Anthony with the cross, it became customary to appeal to him, as
to the crucifix, in times of pestilence.

The association of SS. Quirinus, Adrian, and Valentine of Rufach with
plague is purely local and incidental. St. Quirinus was primarily the
patron-saint of the gouty, and St. Valentine of the epileptic, so that
the name _Veltins Krankheit_ was applied to epilepsy. St. Adrian held
under his special protection the Flemish brewers, and the more creditable
patronage of the plague-stricken was only a later accretion.

* * * * *

A very large number of pictures are designed to commemorate specific
plagues, and were painted in fulfilment of vows made to the Madonna and
saints for deliverance from plague. Many of these have already been
considered in connexion with the legends and cults of SS. Sebastian and
Roch, to whom they were dedicated. But in far the larger proportion of
these pictures the central figure is the Madonna (see Plates XI and
XII). Sometimes she is attended by SS. Sebastian and Roch, and by other
saints as well. The added saints are, as a rule, the special protectors
of the city, for which the thank-offering has been vowed. Sometimes
they are the patron saints of confraternities, for whom they have been
painted. Sometimes the special medical saints, Cosmas and Damian, are
appropriately added to the pictures. Examples may be seen in almost any
gallery of Italian pictures. In the Brera, Cima de Conigliano (A. D.
1460-1518) has painted the Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist,
St. Sebastian, the Magdalen and St. Roch, the last-named showing an
incised wound on the inner side of the right thigh. The character of the
picture may be taken as conclusive evidence of its origin and purpose.

Titian’s picture in the Vatican shows the Madonna and Child in glory, and
St. Sebastian, St. Nicholas, St. Catharine, St. Peter, and St. Francis
are the attendant saints. This picture was painted by Titian after the
cessation of a plague epidemic at Venice for the Franciscan church of S.
Nicolò de Frari.

Correggio’s ‘Madonna di San Sebastiano’, in which she is attended by SS.
Sebastian and Roch, with S. Geminiano, the patron saint of Modena, was
painted in A. D. 1515 in commemoration of a plague that devastated that
city three years previously.

Yet another by Guido Reni (A. D. 1574-1642), in the Academy at Bologna,
was painted at the instance of the senate of Bologna, after the plague
of A. D. 1630. It was carried in solemn procession through the city to
its consecration, and from this circumstance has been called ‘Il Pallione
del Voto’. The rainbow beneath the Madonna’s feet, and the olive branch
in the hand of the infant Christ, each signify the return of peace. The
attendant saints are the special protectors of Bologna, St. Petronius,
St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Proculus, St. Florian, St. Ignatius and St.
Francis Xavier.

Raphael’s ‘Madonna of Foligno’, in the Vatican, has been accounted by
some a plague picture on account of its general character, and of the
fireball descending on the city of Foligno. Raphael, however, painted
the picture in A. D. 1512, the very year in which it is recorded that an
aerolite fell into Foligno: the picture probably commemorates the escape
of some individual or institution. There was a disastrous plague in
Foligno, but not till A. D. 1523, and it has been depicted in a hideous
picture by Gaetano Gandolfi of Bologna (A. D. 1734-1802), which is now in
the Corsini Palace at Rome.

Miraculous Madonnas abound in Italy, but are, as a rule, of little
artistic interest. A pleasing exception is the ‘Madonna and Child’ that
hangs in the tribune of the church of Carmine in Perugia. It was put up
to commemorate the deliverance of Perugia from plague at the prayer of
the Perugian Carmelites: at each recurrence of plague it was the object
of popular adoration. Formerly it was covered with a gauze veil, which
caught fire and was destroyed, but the Madonna herself escaped any trace
of injury.

The Madonna of Ara Coeli and the Madonna of S. Maria Maggiore are both
accredited deliverers from plague and pestilence in Rome.

Florence, too, has her miraculous Madonna in the small village of
Impruneta. This dark panel, blackened and perished with the lapse of
years, was found, so the legend goes, in the soil at Impruneta, uttering
a cry as the workman’s spade struck it. Seldom or never exposed to the
gaze of the devout, she has suffered the indignity of an exposure at the
hands of the omnipresent photographer. In A. D. 1527 plague broke out
in Florence in the early summer. On June 2, an enormous festival was
celebrated in honour of the Virgin of the Annunciation, that she might
be persuaded to succour the Commonwealth in its troubles. But in July
and August the mortality rose to 150-200 a day, and in the autumn to
twice these numbers, so that all business was at a standstill, and the
city seemed deserted. Then the government determined to have recourse
to the Black Virgin of Impruneta, whom the Commonwealth of Florence has
invoked so often in various crises of its history. Of her Segni[164]
says: ‘To this mother of God our city has never publicly applied in vain,
in whatever extremity of distress. It is no light or silly thing, which I
am here affirming: for in time of drought she ever sent rain: in periods
of flood, she has restored to us fine weather: from pestilence she has
removed the poison: and in every most grievous ill she has found its
appropriate remedy.’ So the Black Virgin was brought from Impruneta, and
the magistrates of Florence, ‘barefooted and in mourning, received her at
the gate of the city, and carried her in solemn and very sad procession
to the Church of the Servites. Forty thousand citizens had died in the
month of November. But the never-failing Virgin of Impruneta prevailed on
this occasion also. For with the coming of the cold weather, the sickness
began to abate. And thus the faith of the Florentines in their charm was
more than ever confirmed.’ The Black Virgin still watches over Florence
in time of drought. Readers of _Romola_ will recall that other stirring
procession of the Impruneta Virgin, in which Savonarola strode along
defiantly among his company of black and white Dominicans.

Throughout France and Italy numerous pictures may be seen, recording the
ministrations of local or locally venerated saints in time of pestilence.
Such is Tiepolo’s picture in the cathedral at Este, showing St. Tecla
liberating Este from plague. Pictures such as this stand midway between
the group of votive pictures and the group of actual plague scenes, of
which Raphael (A. D. 1483-1520) is the earliest exponent.

[Illustration: PLATE XVIII

THE IMPRUNETA VIRGIN

(Face Page 146)]

[Illustration: PLATE XIX

S. TECLA LIBERATES ESTE FROM PLAGUE

By Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Photograph by Naya, Venice

(Face Page 147)]

Raphael’s drawing of ‘Plague’,[165] now in the Uffizi gallery at
Florence, has become much worn with time. The picture is divided into
two parts by a head of the god Terminus mounted on a lofty pedestal. To
the right it is night-time, but the interior of a house of mourning is
shown in vertical section. In its courtyard is a young man, with a torch
in his right hand, counting the number of stricken animals, while with
his left he prevents one of the sheep from coming near to those that are
dead. An ewe lies dead with a young lamb fastened to her dried-up udder.
An ox lying down surveys the scene sadly. Above this corpse-strewn court
a stream of light, penetrating into the interior of a room, illumines
the figures of two Sisters of Charity, as they minister to the master of
the house, who is dying: he is stretched on his bed, lying in a dense
shadow—the shadow of impending death. He seems to turn away from them and
to reject their help.

In the other part of the picture it is day, and daylight shows up
everywhere scenes of suffering, death, and desolation. In the foreground
lies the body of a woman stretched out in death, while her child
struggles to reach her ice-cold breast. The father bends down hastily
to hold the child away, and, as he does so, covers his nose and mouth
with his hand, to keep out the contagion of the pestilence. Behind this
group an older woman turns away in horror: before it, an old man buries
his face in his hands against the plinth of the statue in an anguish of
sorrow, while a young man makes off in panic. In the background broken
columns and the dead body of a horse serve to intensify the desolation of
the scene.

Raphael’s rendering of the scene, for all the horror of its details,
serves rather to inspire pity than horror. He holds the balance
evenly between the horrible realities of the plague and the redeeming
spirituality of human nature. Compassion and suffering stand side by
side. The ox pities his kind passively, as the Sisters seek to minister
actively to their kind. In the features and attitude of the child Raphael
has depicted the devotion that does not die with death. The deepest note
of pathos is touched in the form of the old man in the centre of the
picture, whose grey hairs are brought down in sorrow to the grave.

It has been asserted that Raphael’s rendering of the dead mother and the
child was inspired by an actual record of Ambroise Paré, but as Paré was
only born three years before Raphael died, the statement falls to the
ground.

Raphael’s debt seems to go back as far as to Aristides of Thebes, who
flourished about 340 B. C. Pliny[166] mentions a picture by him, which so
impressed Alexander the Great, at the sack of Thebes, that he took it for
himself, and ordered that it should be sent to Pella. According to Pliny,
the picture represented a wounded mother lying at the point of death,
and her infant child creeping to her breast. Fear is written in the
expression of her face, lest the child should draw blood from her breast,
now that her milk is dry.

Raphael’s drawing has been engraved by Marco Antonio Raimondi under the
name of ‘Il Morbetto’. In Delaborde’s _Marc-Antoine Raimondi_ it is
reproduced under the name ‘La Peste de Phrygie’, because on the pedestal
are inscribed the words of Vergil:

Linquebant dulces animas aut aegra trahebant corpora.[167]

Vergil, in this brief description of pestilence, aims at no more than
mere poetic effect. It is introduced only to fill up the cup of trouble
for the Trojan wanderers, and is compressed into a few lines. The Trojan
fleet had just made the land: Aeneas had laid the foundations of a new
town, and Ilium was to live again in Pergamus. Then the plague broke out.

[Illustration: PLATE XX

PLAGUE. A DRAWING BY RAPHAEL

(Face Page 148)]

Iamque fere sicco subductae littore puppes;
Connubiis arvisque novis operata iuventus,
... subito cum tabida membris,
corrupto caeli tractu, miserandaque venit
arboribusque satisque lues et letifer annus.
linquebant dulces animas aut aegra trahebant
corpora; tum steriles exurere Sirius agros;
arebant herbae, et victum seges aegra negabat.

Scarce stand the vessels hauled upon the beach,
And bent on marriages the young men vie
To till new settlements, while I to each
Due law dispense and dwelling place supply.
When from a tainted quarter of the sky
Rank vapours, gathering, on my comrades seize,
And a foul pestilence creeps down from high
On mortal limbs and standing crops and trees,
A season black with death, and pregnant with disease.

Sweet life from mortals fled: they drooped and died.
Fierce Sirius scorched the fields, and herbs and grain
Were parched, and food the wasting crops denied.

(FAIRFAX TAYLOR.)

As it stands, this is an outline sketch of a famine pestilence, which
Raphael had no intention of depicting, when he adopted the line. Surely
Sisters of Charity would not figure in a Phrygian plague, some thousand
years before Christ!

Besides pictures, a few medals exist commemorative of plagues prior
to the sixteenth century: these were sometimes struck as mediums of
spiritual consolation. Frequent devices on these were representations of
Christ on the Cross, or of a Serpent on a pole. The specimen figured here
(Plate I (4)) is a Wittenberg thaler of 1528. It shows these two devices
on the opposite faces of the medal, each with a descriptive legend.

The fifteenth century had drawn to a close in Italy amid a confusion of
epidemics. Pintor, the personal physician of Pope Alexander VI, has left
a book in which he says that the _morbus Gallicus_ first appeared at Rome
in March 1493 and had claimed numerous victims by the August following.
Then, after an inundation of the Tiber in December 1495, plague broke
out fiercely in Rome. Pintor states that the touch of certain precious
stones was vaunted as a specific. In 1493 plague was raging also at
Genoa and Naples. At the latter city the mortality amounted to 20,000
souls. A Genoese chronicler, Seneraga, attributes the outbreak at Genoa
to pollution of the shore by the dead bodies of the Jews, who had sought
sanctuary there on their expulsion from Spain in 1492, but had died of
starvation on the outskirts of the inhospitable city. Jewish writers
asserted that there was plague in Spain, and that it was carried by
the fugitives in their ships to Italy. Most of the expelled Jews found
shelter from the persecution of the Cross under the protection of the
Crescent, in Constantinople, Salonica, the Levant, and Northern Africa.
It was this far-reaching epidemic that drove Charles VIII of France out
of Florence, Rome, and Naples in succession, almost as soon as his army
had entered them.

CHAPTER IX

Throughout the sixteenth century plague epidemics follow each other in
almost unbroken succession throughout Central Europe. In Rome alone,
during this century, there were no less than twelve severe outbreaks. The
archives of the Capitol and the registers of contemporary notaries[168]
abound in scattered information concerning these visitations. It had
become an established custom that at the first appearance of an epidemic
the Pope and his court should escape from Rome to a place of safety,
leaving the municipality to provide for the situation as best it could.
In May 1449, Nicholas V had fled into Umbria: in 1462, Pius II had fled
successively to Viterbo, Bolsena, and Corsignano. In 1476, Sixtus IV had
flitted in like manner from place to place. So in April 1522, at the
height of the epidemic, it seemed only in accordance with precedent,
when Adrian VI from his secure seclusion in Spain sent word to Rome of
the necessity of imposing a fresh tax for supporting a crusade against
the Turks. The Cardinals seem to have desired to emulate the example of
Adrian, for in June the Town Council asked the Sacred College not to
forsake their posts. Deserted by their spiritual leaders, the populace
lent a ready ear to the imposture of the Greek necromancer Demetrius of
Sparta. He persuaded the terrified people that the plague was the work of
demons, and that, by appeasing them, it might be brought to an end. So
he paraded the streets of the city, leading by a silken cord a bull that
he professed to have tamed by spells, and sacrificed it in the Colosseum
with full pagan ritual to the hostile demons. As soon as the clergy
realized the enormity of the sacrilege they had condoned they instituted
a penitential procession, which marched through the city, scourging
themselves to bleeding and crying _Misericordia_. If we may credit Paolo
Giovio, chief physician to Clement VII (A. D. 1523-34), it was neither
prayer nor sacrifice that put an end to the plague, but a wonderful oil
invented by Gregorio Caravita, a physician from Bologna. The Oratorio
del Crocifisso, near the church of S. Marcello, is said to have been
erected in expiation of this event. This plague lingered on at least
till the following year, A. D. 1523, for Benvenuto Cellini[169] records
his experience of it in some detail. He says that it dragged on for
months, and that several thousands died daily in Rome. In not unnatural
apprehension on his own account, he determined to adopt such amusements
as would promote cheerfulness of mind, which many believed to be the best
remedy against infection. So he betook himself to shooting pigeons among
the ancient monuments of Rome, and found the pursuit so beneficial to his
health that he succeeded in staving off for a long time the plague, to
which many of his comrades succumbed. But somewhat later, after spending
the night with a young serving girl, he himself fell a victim and has
recorded his initial sensations as follows:

‘I rose upon the hour of breaking fast, and felt tired, for
I had travelled many miles that night, and was wanting to
take food, when a crushing headache seized me: several boils
appeared upon my left arm, together with a carbuncle which
showed itself just beyond the palm of the left hand, where it
joins the wrist. Everybody in the house was in a panic: my
friend, the cow [Faustina] and the calf [the serving girl]
all fled. Left alone there with my poor little prentice, who
refused to abandon me, I felt stifled at the heart, and made up
my mind for certain I was a dead man.’

By the constant ministrations of a male friend and the help of a
physician, whom the apprentice summoned, Benvenuto threw off the
sickness, but while the bubo was still open and plugged with lint
under a covering of plaster, went out riding on a little wild pony.
Benvenuto’s account is valuable as the record of the personal sensations
and sufferings of a plague-stricken man, and tells us also something of
the treatment to which he was subjected at the hands of sixteenth-century
medicine.

Benvenuto says that the joyous reunion of the survivors, after the plague
was over, led to the formation by one Michael Agnolo, a sculptor, of a
club of all the leading painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths in Rome. The
meetings of the club, to judge from his descriptions, seem to have been
devoted to merrymaking rather than to artistic discourse. On his return
to Florence he found that his father and most of his household were dead,
and his surviving sister Liparata, believing him to have died at Rome,
swooned at sight of him. But under the mellowing influence of supper, at
which weddings were the main topic of conversation, sorrow speedily gave
place to gaiety.

Marselius Galeati of Padua at the beginning of the fifteenth century had
drawn up the first known code of ‘Regulations against the Plague’, based
on the belief that the disease was imported to Italy by foreign commerce.

From the records of the city of Rome it is possible to gather some idea
of the measures adopted by the Popes and Town Council for the suppression
of epidemics of plague. There isolation of infected individuals or
districts was attempted. All wearing apparel and other materials and
articles capable of spreading the infection, were liable to be destroyed.
The city gates were closed, and every incomer was subjected to strict
inspection, and was frequently rejected. Those gates that were left open
could only be used from daybreak to nightfall, when they were locked
against all comers. Navigation of the Tiber was sometimes suppressed;
Lanciani says that an order was issued on July 30, 1575, that all the
boats on the Tiber should be scuttled in three days, because it was
found that the boatmen were ferrying passengers across stream for bribes.
Two transgressors were actually put to the rack for their offence, which
was placarded over them for all to read. On one occasion a wholesale
destruction of dried fish was taken in hand. Contract medical practice
seems to have existed even in these days. Lanciani has noted among the
city records agreements between physicians or quacks and Roman families
for the provision of medical advice and drugs for a stipulated payment of
money. Wills were often dictated from windows, while lawyer and witnesses
stood in the street beneath.

Confraternities for ministering to the sick and removing them to the
hospitals existed in Rome, though perhaps numerically less than in
other great cities of Italy. The confraternity of the _Pietà_ had been
instituted during a plague epidemic, in the time of Eugene IV (1431-47),
and still has a nominal existence in Rome.

Plague broke out fiercely again in Rome in 1527, at the time of the
sack of the city. Florence was also involved in this same epidemic. It
is this visitation that gave birth to Machiavelli’s _Descrizione della
Peste di Firenze dell’ anno 1527_, cast in the form of a letter to a
friend. In it we find no vivid picture of the awful catastrophe that was
overwhelming Florence, but in place of that a cold-blooded cynical record
of the trivial doings of a loafer sauntering idly through the streets
of the plague-stricken city. It is a record that challenges comparison
rather with the casual entries of _Pepys’s Diary_, than with the formal
descriptions of Bocaccio and Manzoni, his own compatriots. Opening with
a vapid soulless lamentation, in the vein of Petrarch, over the general
demoralization and devastation produced by the plague, he passes on to
describe his own daily mode of living, from which his correspondent is
invited to infer that of the general body of citizens. The _liaisons_
of licentious monks, the vile ribaldry of infamous buriers, the vain
recourse to preservatives against the plague, these are the things
that are uppermost in his mind, as he depicts his own amorous intrigues
against the dark background of the plague, with the fidelity of a Pepys
and the light-hearted insouciance of a Guy de Maupassant.

Villari, Macaulay, and others have declined to accept the _Descrizione_
as an authentic product of Machiavelli’s pen. They cannot reconcile its
garrulous obscenity with the stern cold-blooded restraint of the author
of the _Principe_—the frivolity of the one with the sinewy manhood of
the other. They seem to forget that, so far back as 1502, amid the
stirring life of the camp of Caesar Borgia, he had found leisure to write
similar puerilities to his friends in Florence. Political rectitude,
or if we may not ascribe this to Machiavelli, political sagacity is no
guarantee of moral righteousness, and sensuality is not the exclusive
property of the young. Moral levity, as the history of pestilence shows,
is a usual product of the constant imminence of danger and death; and
with Machiavelli political degradation had left moral levity in sole
possession of the field.

A copy of the discredited production still actually exists in the
handwriting of Machiavelli, with revisions inserted in the manuscript
in that of his friend Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi. Villari advances the
strange suggestion, that Machiavelli had merely copied out what Strozzi
had composed. Is it not equally reasonable to suppose that Machiavelli
had used an actual letter of Strozzi, as the basis of a casual
composition? This would explain the fact that it is cast in epistolary
form, as well as the apparent discrepancy of style. Francesco Berni (_c._
1490-1536), a contemporary of Machiavelli, has apostrophized plague in
one of his satirical poems or _capitoli_. A cleric, to whom indolent
pleasure was the be-all and end-all of existence, he must surely stand
alone among writers as one who would hug the pestilence to him as a
friend.

‘The pestilence time is good—a fig for other times.... Firstly,
it carries off the rabble, it destroys them, makes holes among
them and thins them out—like a housewife among the geese at
Allhallowtide! In the churches there are none to press upon
you. Besides, none keep any record of buying or borrowing. Yea,
buy and make debts, for there will be no creditors to trouble
you. And if a creditor should come, tell him that your head
aches, that your arm pricks, he straight will go away, and
will not turn him round! If you go out, no one will cross your
path: rather is place yielded to you, and honour done you,
especially if you are clothed in rags. You are lord of yourself
and lord of others. You can watch the folk’s strange antics and
laugh at others’ fear. Life has then new laws: every pleasure
is allowed.... Above all, there need be no work done. It is
a choice life, serene and large: time passes very gaily from
dinner time to supper.’[170]

In A. D. 1530 there was plague in Geneva,[171] which is memorable as
the occasion of an accusation against certain persons of disseminating
the disease by means of concocted poisons. In the spring of the year
a dissolute young man, one Michael Caddod, was seen to throw down a
handkerchief near a shop. Some one picked it up, and its foul smell
aroused suspicion. Caddod was forthwith put to torture, and in his
agony implicated Jean Placet, an unqualified surgeon in charge of the
pest-house, together with his wife, son, and servant, and one Dom Jehan
Dufour, priest and confessor to the pest-house. Under the influence of
torture, they were driven to admit, that they had sworn solemnly on a
Book of Hours to join in spreading the plague, so as to enable them to
pillage the sick. Placet and his wife, they said, had prepared the poison
from poultices that had been used on discharging buboes, by drying them
to powder and then adding veratrum. Caddod and his wife undertook to
spread it about the streets, while Placet and his wife administered it to
patients in the pest-house with promptly fatal results. Suspicion fell
on Placet, and a barber-surgeon, Bastian Granger, with his assistant,
was instructed to keep an eye on his doings. Madame Placet was equal to
the occasion and gave the pair short shrift with a dose of poison in
their food. In the end Placet and Caddod were convicted. Their hands were
first cut off in front of the houses of their supposed victims. Next
their flesh was cruelly lacerated with red-hot pincers, and finally the
headsman’s axe put a merciful end to their sufferings. Young Placet’s age
obtained for him the lenient treatment of hanging, while Dufour was first
unfrocked and then hanged. A rapid decline of the plague ensued on so
acceptable a sacrifice.

A few years later, in January 1545, a recurrence of plague in Geneva
raised anew the phantom of another plague plot. This time the bailiff
ordered the arrest of the two men, Bernard Dallinge and Jehan Lentille.
They were alleged to have cut off the foot of a corpse that had fallen
from the gallows, and used it as an ingredient of a plague ointment
that they smeared on the handles of doors. By March, confessions
extracted from them by torture had served to implicate no less than
forty persons. All were accused of having sworn to spread the disease
broadcast, and of having actually smeared door-handles and locks. When
searched, boxes of ointment were found in their possession. The craze
for carrying antipestilential remedies made this an easy matter, but
for all that their guilt was manifest. Calvin, in a letter of March 27,
1545, addressed to Myconius, seems to credit their guilt, but the State
records of Geneva show that he mercifully advocated strangling instead
of mutilation and the stake. As in the case of Servetus, he was less
concerned about their deaths than the manner of their dying. Nineteen
men and seven women—Catholics perhaps—profited by his clemency, and were
executed without preliminary torture. The _Nuremberg Chronicle_ says that
in 1494 all the beggars were driven out of Nuremberg, because they were
believed to spread the plague.

The leaders of medicine were no more exempt than the people from the
promptings of fanatical fear. Ambroise Paré[172] echoes the crude
suspicions that Guy de Chauliac had expressed at the time of the Black
Death. This is his advice to the magistrates in time of pestilence:
‘What shall I add? They must keep an eye on certain thieves, murderers,
poisoners, worse than inhuman, who grease and smear the walls and
doors of rich houses with matter from buboes and carbuncles and other
excretions of the plague-stricken, so as to infect the houses and thus be
enabled to break into them, pillage and strip them, and even strangle the
poor sick in their beds: which was done at Lyons in the year 1565. God!
what punishment such fellows deserve: but this I leave to the discretion
of the magistrates, who have charge of such duties.’

Paré recommended, as a prophylactic, the wearing of an amulet of arsenic.
It was to be worn over the heart in order that ‘the heart might become
accustomed to poison, and so be the less injured when other poisons
sought it’.

The pandemic of A. D. 1565 was the occasion of a great impetus to the
production of the so-called Mystery and Miracle plays, particularly in
the south-east parts of France. Mystery plays aimed for the most part
at setting forth the central mysteries of the New Testament, such as
the Incarnation, the Nativity, the Passion, and the Redemption. Miracle
plays dealt with the legends of the great saints of the Church, but in
practice the distinction of Miracle and Mystery came to be ignored in
the play. The purpose of each, in time of plague, was to appease an
angered God by glorifying His majesty, either directly or through the
medium of His saints. The origin and prime purpose of these plays had
almost certainly been educational, for the instruction of a populace
unable to read for themselves: and they originated out of the worship of
the Christian Church. Christianity, when adopted as the State religion,
had dealt the death-blow to the vicious spectacles of the amphitheatre
that were all that survived of the ancient classical drama. Christianity
was also destined to become the parent of the modern drama, by the
introduction into public worship, not later than the fifth century A.
D., of living pictures to illustrate and expound its teaching. Mystery
and Miracle plays alike were evolved from this simple liturgical origin.
The transformation had been effected at any rate as early as the twelfth
century, and by A. D. 1380 a complete Miracle play was produced in the
presence of Charles IV.

Successive epidemics of plague had led to the adoption of these plays
as instruments of intercession, and the pandemic of 1565 gave a great
impetus to this development. When the district of Maurienne was in the
grip of the plague in 1564, the people vowed to present in the following
year the Miracle play of their patron saint St. Martin, if only their
town were spared. No less than seventy-four actors, all drawn from the
working class, devoted themselves to learning and rehearsing the various
parts of the play. Money as well as time was freely afforded, for the
people themselves undertook the expenses of staging, scenery, and music.
The marginal notes of the play, which has been recently published, show
that the stage was erected beside the wall of a church. Later, as the
control of the performances passed out of the hands of the Church into
those of lay associations, the plays came to be performed away from the
churches, a separation that paved the way for the secularization of
the drama by the introduction of a non-religious atmosphere. This play
is in dialect and arranged for presentation on two days. At the first
performance the central theme was the life of St. Martin as a soldier, at
the second his life as a bishop, and with it were shown certain of his
miraculous cures.

This play is but one of many that have recently been published: other
towns followed the example of St. Martin de la Porte. Villard-le-Lans
vowed and played the ‘Mystery of the Passion’ and the ‘Miracle of Saint
Sebastian’: Modane the ‘Mystery of the Last Judgement’: Termignan and
Sollières the ‘Miracle of Saint Laurence’, and so on. Local authors,
commonly the priest or the notary, compiled the various plays.

At Villard-le-Lans is a chapel of St. Sebastian. It has no windows, and
a doorway hewn in the rock. It was prepared as a theatre for presenting
a Mystery play in A. D. 1446. But following the plague of 1565 it was
converted, in fulfilment of a rich man’s vow, into a chapel adorned with
frescoes illustrating the story of St. Sebastian. The frescoes survive to
this day, and have been fully described by M. l’Archiviste de Jussin.

If we may credit local legend, the Oberammergau Passion Play had
a similar origin in A. D. 1633. One Gaspard Schueler, a native of
Oberammergau, but living at Eschenlohe, where plague was rife, determined
to pay a hasty and surreptitious visit to his wife and children. He
did so, and carried the plague to Oberammergau, where he died of it
himself. Between the day of his death and the festival of SS. Simon
and Jude, thirty-three days later, eighty-four persons died of plague
at Oberammergau. A meeting of the inhabitants was summoned, and six
women and twelve men took a solemn vow to produce every ten years a
play representing the sufferings of Christ. They were rewarded by the
immediate cessation of the plague.

CHAPTER X

Throughout the fourteenth and two succeeding centuries Venice was visited
by a constant succession of epidemics of plague. This was the price she
was doomed to pay for the enjoyment of her Oriental commerce. Standing,
as she stood, at the meeting-place of east and west, so long as the
commerce of the east passed to the west by way of Syria and Egypt, Venice
knew no rival but Genoa, until the Turk appeared at Constantinople to
challenge her ascendancy. Plague and commerce alike passed through Venice
on their way to the countries of Central and Northern Europe. Plague was
in some sense the measure of Venetian opulence, and with the loss of this
opulence the number of her plagues declined.

Venice had two main trade routes by sea,[173] one to the east and one to
the west, and two land routes to the north.

The first maritime route lay down the Adriatic, past the Ionian Isles,
and round Cape Matapan to Crete, where it divided into four branch
routes: (_a_) northwards to the Dardanelles, Constantinople, the Black
Sea, and the Sea of Azov; (_b_) along the shores of the Morea and through
the Aegean Islands to the Dardanelles; (_c_) to the ports of Asia Minor,
Smyrna, and Aleppo, Cyprus, Syria, Alexandretta, and Beirut; (_d_) to
Alexandria and Egypt. These two last branches linked Venice to the
caravan routes that led from Ormuz on the Persian Gulf to Aleppo and
Beirut, and from Suez to Alexandria, and at their far end penetrated into
the heart of Asia, Persia, India, and Cathay.

The second maritime route lay by way of the Adriatic westward to Sicily,
where it divided into two branch routes: (_a_) to Tunis, Tripoli, and
the ports of Spain; (_b_) through the Straits of Gibraltar northwards as
far as England and Flanders, bringing London and Bruges into touch with
the east.

The land routes from Venice to Central Europe lay for the most part
outside the confines of Venetian territory. One passed by way of the
Ampezzo valley northward to the Pusterthal and on to Innsbruck and
Munich; the other along the Po to Brescia and Bergamo, and thence by
Lake Como and the Splügen Pass to Constance. From Constance trade lines
diverged to all parts of Northern Europe.

A knowledge of these routes is necessary to understand the leading part
that Venice and Constance played in the carriage and distribution of
plague.

The discovery of the Cape route to the east in 1486, was the death-blow
to the trade monopoly of Venice. The lines of commerce shifted step by
step from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and away from the ships of
Venice into those of the Portuguese, Spaniards, English, and Dutch.

The history of plague in Venice is in large part written in her public
monuments: her archives tell the rest. Venice has virtually no literature
of her own: two or three patriotic diarists, and that is all. Her
Renaissance gave birth to no harvest of men of letters: painting and
architecture sapped all her strength. Artists vied with architects to
write her history on canvas or on stone, not for the enjoyment of private
patrons, but for the embellishment of the city of their birth.

In A. D. 1410 plague swept over Venice and Chioggia. In 1423 another
epidemic was imported from the east. It was this visitation that led the
Venetians to establish a pest-house or lazaretto on the island of Santa
Maria di Nazaret for infected persons and goods. It was supplied with
food, medicine, and medical attendance out of the revenue from salt. This
was the first institution of the kind in Europe, but it quickly led to
the establishment of more elsewhere.

The Government of Venice was never wont to fold its hands when plague
was at its door. So far back as the Black Death they had appointed
three nobles as _provveditori sopra la salute della terra_ to fight
the scourge. In 1468 these were supplemented by the addition of two
inhabitants of each _sestiere_, and in 1485 this commission was
reorganized as a permanent Board of Health. So by the end of the
fifteenth century Venice had organized and equipped an efficient
defensive system against the constant recurrence of plague.

A second lazaretto was established during the plague of 1576 on the
island of Sant’ Erasmo, and in the same year the Republic summoned
learned professors of medicine from Padua—Girolamo Mercuriale and
Giovanni Capodivacca—to identify the disease, and it was no fault of the
Republic that they pronounced it not to be plague.

A curious evidence of the mutual influence of religion and therapeutics
on each other is the fixing of quarantine at forty days, because this was
the period that Christ dwelt apart in the wilderness.

Venetian doctors for the most part seem now to have mended their ways
and devoted themselves loyally to the service of the sick. In a book
published in Venice in A. D. 1493, _Fasciculus medicus Johannis de
Ketam_, the physician Pietro da Fossignano is shown visiting a plague
patient. As he feels the pulse, he holds to his mouth and nostrils
a sponge, steeped in some antipestilential aromatic. Pietro’s death
about A. D. 1400 helps towards fixing the date of this simple clinical
precaution. In later years a special plague dress was devised for
doctors, which was adopted from Italy by France, and of which several
engravings exist of about the time of the 1720 plague of Marseilles (see
pp. 206-8). Ambroise Paré recommends that the material should be camlet,
serge, satin, taffeta, or morocco, but not cloth, frieze, or fur, which
might harbour the poison and carry death to the healthy.

Venice had also her street ambulance in the brotherhood of S. Rocco,
instituted for the purpose of conveying the sick to hospital and the
dead to burial. Their services were sorely taxed in times of plague.
A specimen of the working dress of the Order may still be seen in the
Treasury of the Scuola di San Rocco. It is a loose white cotton overall
with full hanging sleeves. On each side of the chest is an oval white
satin badge, embroidered with red silk and edged with red lace. On
one the figure of Christ is embroidered in silk: on the other that of
S. Rocco with his dog. It is bound at the waist with a corded girdle
of white cotton with heavily ornamented cotton tassels at each end.
A deep peaked hood of the same material completely covers the head,
having only slits as apertures for the eyes. White leather gloves
complete the costume. A similar dress was worn by many of the charitable
confraternities of Central Italy, and is to be seen in several Sienese
pictures (see Plate VIII). It has its modern counterpart in the operating
dress of the aseptic surgeon, but by a queer turn of the whirligig of
time its purpose is no longer to keep infection out, but to keep it in.

The Guild of San Rocco had come into existence at least as early as
A. D. 1415, but it was not till 1478 that leave was obtained from the
Government to enlist a confraternity under the standard of San Rocco. Its
first meeting-place was the church of San Giuliano, but in 1485 the guild
undertook to build a church for the custody of the body of the saint,
which some Venetians had surreptitiously removed from Montpellier. Five
years sufficed to complete the church, and the saint’s body was laid
in it with great solemnity. The precious relic was destined to bestow
great prestige on its possessors. Of the five great charitable guilds of
Venice, that of S. Rocco was by far the greatest. From 1516 to the end
of the Republic each Doge was enrolled a member, along with many of the
richest merchants of Venice. In this year the brethren determined to
erect a meeting house adjacent to the church, which should be an added
ornament to the city. So the building of the Scuola was commenced in 1517
by Bartolommeo Bon, only to be finished in 1550 by Antonio Scarpagnino.

While the Scuola was in course of construction, the original church
of S. Rocco was found to be insecure, and was rebuilt, but not in its
present form, which is no older than 1725. In 1559 the Confraternity
entrusted its decoration to Tintoretto, and there are still to be seen
there, on the rare occasions when daylight suffices, the four pictures
in which the artist set himself to illustrate the life of the saint.
These are (1) St. Roch in hospital; (2) St. Roch healing animals; (3)
The capture of St. Roch; (4) The appearance of an angel to St. Roch in
prison. The small picture that hangs by a side-altar—the ‘Betrayal of
Christ’, by Titian—has received all the homage that should have been
paid to Tintoretto’s subjects: indeed, the offerings rendered to this
‘miraculous’ picture enabled the guild to rebuild their Scuola. To this
church the Doge came yearly on August 16 to implore St. Roch to ward off
plague from the Republic.

In 1560 the growing wealth of the guild induced them to call in
competition the leading painters of Venice to decorate the halls of the
Scuola. Andrea Schiavone, Federigo Zuccaro, Giuseppe Salviati, Paolo
Veronese, and Tintoretto were all invited to prepare drawings and submit
them to the judges on the appointed day. While the others had merely
sketched designs, Tintoretto had finished a complete picture, ‘St. Roch
in glory’, that now occupies the centre of the ceiling of the refectory.
To ensure still further his success, Tintoretto presented the picture to
the guild. From this time until 1588 the decoration of the Scuola formed
the chief part of Tintoretto’s work. By the beginning of 1566 he had
completed the superb ‘Crucifixion’ in the refectory of the upper hall,
and on its completion he was admitted to the Confraternity, and assigned
an annual subsidy of 100 ducats (about £50) in payment for three finished
pictures each year. Here, at any rate, he found scope for the expression
of an inexhaustible fancy: but those who have attempted to study the
paintings of the Scuola will appreciate something of the difficulties he
had to surmount owing to the defective light which, as in the church,
renders the pictures invisible except on the brightest days.

As Michelangelo had done in the Sistine Chapel, so Tintoretto thought out
in advance a comprehensive and harmonious scheme for the entire adornment
of the halls. The key-note of it all is the dedication of the Scuola to
San Rocco, the patron saint of the plague-stricken, and also of those who
ministered to them. So the paintings in the upper hall represent acts
of mercy and deliverance, illustrated in Christ’s life on earth. Those
in the lower hall of entrance, eight in number, setting forth mainly
the history of the Virgin and her infant Son, form thus an appropriate
prelude to the upper series. Giovanni Marchiori and his pupils have
faithfully pursued the scheme in the twenty subjects from the life of St.
Roch carved in the panelling of the upper hall. The great staircase that
joins the two halls is decorated with frescoes of plague scenes by Zanchi
(1666) and Negri (1673), of little artistic merit. Yet another memorial
of plague survives in the rows of wooden standard lamps, set round the
upper hall, which the brethren used to carry in processions to the honour
of their patron saint.

Tintoretto was still at his work in the Scuola when the appalling plague
of 1575-7 fell on Venice, carrying Titian to his grave, within close hail
of his centenary. While others were hurried away to obscure burial in the
common plague pits of Sant’ Erasmo and the outlying islands, the body of
the old man, who had brought so great glory to Venice, was accorded the
honour of a public funeral by order of the Signoria. After lying in state
it was carried to the beautiful Gothic church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei
Frari, wearing the insignia of Imperial Knighthood, conferred on him by
Charles V, and placed in a tomb at the foot of the altar of the Cross.
Here Titian sleeps his last sleep unmindful, be it hoped, of the outrage
in marble inflicted on his memory by Ferdinand I of Austria, at the hands
of Luigi and Pietro Zandomeneghi. Titian’s eldest son died with him,
and his second son, Pomponio, a canon of Milan, hastened to Venice, as
soon as he was assured that all danger was past, and quickly dissipated
the fortune that the painter had amassed by the thrift and labour of a
lifetime.

For three years this plague devastated Venice, carrying off no less
than 50,000 souls, one quarter of her whole population. The Doge,
Luigi Mocenigo, displayed throughout the utmost courage and devotion.
He himself superintended all the efforts to arrest the plague, and
ministered in person to the sick. He went in solemn procession with
all the confraternities of Venice to the church of S. Rocco, to vow
the erection of another church, if only the saint would intercede for
them. As Cyprian and Gregory had done before him, he addressed words
of consolation and encouragement to his people in the sanctuary of his
cathedral church. But Luigi was dead when the day came for his successor
to summon the people of Venice to St. Mark’s to fulfil Luigi’s vow.

Picture to yourself Venice one July Sunday under a cloudless sky. From
the pulpit of St. Mark’s some aged patriarch has proclaimed the freedom
of the city from plague. Out of the coloured gloom of the church files
the procession into the dazzling glare of the Piazza. All Venice is
there: Venice is in jubilant mood. St. Mark’s, Ducal Palace, Campanile,
and all the buildings around are gay with carpets and tapestries, with
pictures and gilded shields. Banners of gorgeous colours flutter to
the crisp sea-breeze from the columns of Theodore and the Lion. Amid
wild shouting of people and roar of cannon, and ringing of bells the
procession wheels to the Piazzetta. Before it lies the lagoon, stretching
over to S. Giorgio Maggiore, and away to the Lido beyond, sparkling and
shimmering in the sunlight, like some great scintillating jewel. God and
man seem to have joined hands there to create the fairest spot of earth.
From Piazzetta to Giudecca a bridge of boats has been thrown over, near
half a mile in length. On to the bridge goes the procession.[174] The
guilds and confraternities, displaying their respective standards and
carrying crosses, images of the Madonna and saints, and reliquaries, lead
the way, followed by magistrates, nobles, and their ladies. Next come
the patriarchs, the Church dignitaries, and canons in their rochets,
the friars, chanting, under the banners of their fourteen orders, the
clergy robed in rich copes embroidered with gold and sewn with jewels,
under their eleven banners. Last of all, accompanied by senators and
ambassadors, comes the Doge, Sebastiano Venier, hero of Lepanto, a noble
figure, robed in white with a splendid mantle of silver brocade hanging
from his shoulders. In a temporary wooden oratory built close to the
place where the Redentore Church was to rise from the plans of Palladio,
Mass was sung this day to music by Giuseppe Zarlino of Chioggia, the
Doge’s chief musician. And the sound of this jubilant day has echoed
down the ages and may be still heard at the yearly _Festa del Redentore_
in July, as the procession passes over its bridges of boats from San
Zobenigo to Zattere, and Zattere to Giudecca, but shorn of much of its
former glory. Where stood the wooden chauntry stands now Palladio’s
church, a plague-spot on the face of nature. Théophile Gautier,
nevertheless, saw beauty in its aspect by the light of the setting sun.
Within there are no pictures and no memorials of the plague to which it
owes its being. A Venetian medal, showing the Doge with the banner of St.
Mark kneeling before Christ, commemorates this plague.

Venice has other churches to commemorate her plagues besides San Rocco
and the Redentore; oldest of all, S. Giobbe, church and convent, built in
the middle of the fifteenth century (1462-71) by Doge Cristoforo Moro,
the friend of S. Bernardino, and dedicated to the Job of Scripture who
was plagued with all manner of diseases. Over the high altar was once the
famous picture by Giovanni Bellini, now in the Accademia, of the Madonna
and Child enthroned between St. Job, St. John Baptist, St. Sebastian, St.
Francis, and St. Louis of Toulouse. Venice brought the cult of S. Giobbe
along with plague from the east: he is hardly known elsewhere in Italy.

Only a few years later (1506-18) another plague church, that of S.
Sebastiano, was built for the Order of St. Jerome by the two architects,
F. da Castiglione and A. Scarpagnino. It is the burial-place of Veronese,
to whom most of its decoration is due. The ceilings of both church and
sacristy are enriched with his pictures, set in deep gilded mouldings.
Over the high altar is an ‘Apotheosis of St. Sebastian’, to whom the
Madonna appears in heaven, along with St. Mark, St. Jerome, St. John
Baptist, and St. Catharine of Alexandria. To the left of the altar is
Veronese’s famous ‘Martyrdom of Marcus and Marcellinus’.

While this church was building Giorgione died of plague. About his four
and thirtieth year he had become wildly enamoured of a young woman, and
when the plague seized her he still paid her secret visits, and taking
the sickness from her lips with her kisses, he paid for his love with his
life.

Last, but best known of all, is the church of S. Maria della Salute,
begun by Baldassare Longhena in 1632, to commemorate the plague of
1630-1, which carried off 46,490 in Venice, and 94,235 in the whole
lagoons. Doge Niccolò Contarini had vowed a church to the Madonna of
Health, if she would deliver the Republic from the plague. During its
building a temporary wooden oratory was built on a piece of land, which
the Knights Templar had bestowed on the Republic, and Doge, Council,
nobles, and people crossed over the Grand Canal by a bridge of boats
to hear a solemn Mass. In the sacristy of Longhena’s church are two
seventeenth-century prints, one showing the procession as it crosses
the pontoon bridge, the other, as it files up into the church. Each
year in November the procession starts from St. Mark’s and crosses the
Grand Canal by the Redentore route, and circles round the church to the
entrance facing the Canal. Modern Venice has transformed a solemn pageant
into a fancy fair. These prints show the church as it now stands, on a
platform at the top of a great flight of stairs leading up from the Grand
Canal, but a statue of the Madonna has replaced the Angel of Pestilence
on the summit of its larger dome.

S. Maria della Salute contains many memorials of plague. Over the high
altar is a heavy group of marble statuary by Giusto il Corto. In the
centre sits the Madonna holding her Child, with cherubs at her feet. On
one side kneels a woman entreating her aid: on the other a cherub with
flaming torch expels a plague demon of human form.

In the vault of the choir is a ceiling painting by Fiammingo showing
Venice imploring liberation from plague.

In the sacristy is Titian’s picture of St. Mark with St. Sebastian, St.
Roch, Cosmas, and St. Damian, commemorating the plague of 1512, in which
Giorgione perished (see Plate IX). Here, too, is Marco Basaiti’s (second
half of fifteenth century) votive picture of St. Sebastian, a fine figure
in a beautiful Umbrian landscape, but not the peer of Sodoma’s saint:
and yet another picture of St. Roch, St. Sebastian, and St. Jerome by
Girolamo da Treviso (1497-1544).

CHAPTER XI

Milan had suffered from the Black Death far less than other cities
of Italy: maybe she had acquired a transient immunity. For the three
succeeding centuries her history is one long catalogue of plagues, of
which two claim special notice.

In 1576 plague broke out in late July. Carlo Borromeo was archbishop
at the time. The son of Ghiberto Borromeo, Count of Arona, and Mary
de Medici, Carlo was of noble parentage. His influence gained for him
in early life the archbishopric of Milan. Amid all his wealth his own
personal life was ordered with temperance and humility. Stern, or as some
say cruel, to track out and repress all the abuses that had invaded the
Church in his diocese, he earned the jealous dislike of his clergy and
of the religious orders. The Brothers of Humility made open attempt on
his life, but by a miracle he escaped them. Carlo was away at Lodi when
news reached him that plague had broken out in Milan. Hastening back to
the city he found that the governor, many officials, and all the rich had
fled. All was in chaos. The people turned in despair to their spiritual
father, and entrusted the care of the town to him. He set them to work
at once to adapt the great hospital of St. Gregory for the reception of
the sick, and later to build six lazarettos of wood outside the walls.
All these he equipped and furnished with linen from his own palace. For
its better administration he divided the city into four quarters, and put
over each an overseer with a staff of helpers. His example of courage and
personal devotion served to attract many of the secular clergy, monks,
and nuns to the service of the sick. Even lay men and women organized a
nursing guild among themselves. Carlo himself went everywhere, giving
directions for housing the sick and burying the dead. He visited even
those parishes beyond the walls, where the disease was raging, providing
for the sick, feeding the needy, and rousing the clergy to the loyal
discharge of their duty. Famine soon came to add another horror to
pestilence. Borromeo collected all the destitute into an encampment and
arranged the supply of food. First he had all his own silver plate melted
down to provide the necessary money. When this ran out, he begged it
from door to door, and finally incurred huge debts on his own personal
security. Beyond such material aids as these, Carlo Borromeo brought to
the stricken Milanese the spiritual comforts of religion. From the pulpit
of his cathedral he expounded to them the Lamentations of Jeremiah,
showing them how they applied to Milan. From the altar steps he chanted
with quivering voice the penitential psalms, and kneeling before the
altar offered himself to God as a sacrifice for his people. Through the
streets of the city he marched at the head of penitential processions
with bare feet and the rope of the criminal around his neck. But through
it all he passed unscathed, himself and his eight-and-twenty attendant
priests. Only 17,000 died in Milan, and 8,000 in the districts round
about: that so few died out of so vast a multitude of sick was attributed
to the ministrations of their archbishop.

As the traveller comes down from the Alps, skirting the shores of Lago
Maggiore, where gardens are radiant in spring with camellias, magnolias,
mimosa, and myrtle, one feature only blurs the faultless landscape. On
a ridge, high over the lake at Arona, towers on its pedestal the statue
of Carlo Borromeo, a senseless, soulless colossus, in copper and bronze,
mocking the skies. Your guide-book tells you you may go up inside its
body. If you do so on a hot day you may learn something of the sufferings
of Phalaris, roasted in the belly of his own brazen bull. But perhaps
you will do as well to stay beneath and pray that something rather of
the spirit of Borromeo may enter into your soul.

[Illustration: PLATE XXI

PROCESSION TO S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE, VENICE

From a seventeenth-century engraving

(Face Page 172)]

[Illustration: PLATE XXII

CARLO BORROMEO. BY ANNIBALE CARRACCI

(Face Page 173)]

Religion has canonized S. Carlo Borromeo; Art has ensured him
immortality. In the churches and galleries of Milan he figures as
patron saint against plague, sometimes alone, sometimes conjointly
with St. Roch. In Venice he gives place to St. Roch, in Florence to
St. Sebastian. In parts of Central Italy S. Carlo reappears, attended
often by local saints, interceding with the Madonna. In the church of
S. Dominico in Perugia a picture shows him along with S. Catharine of
Siena, supplicating the Virgin. At S. Carlo in Corso at Rome, along with
S. Ambrose, he intercedes with Christ, and another picture in the same
church represents his apotheosis.

Memorials of Borromeo are innumerable. The sacristy of Milan Cathedral
contains a life-size effigy in mitre and robes, all in wrought silver:
also a gilded wooden cross, on which the various emblems of the Passion
are carved in relief, which he carried in plague processions: also a silk
embroidered portrait of him in his mitre. S. Carlo Catinari at Rome has
one of his mitres, and part of the rope that he wore as a halter.

Beneath the floor of Milan Cathedral, below the dome and in front of the
choir, is the Cappella of Carlo Borromeo. His remains lie in a silver
coffin, supported on a silver altar, each elaborately engraved and
embossed. The hexagonal chamber has the whole surface of its walls coated
with plates of silver, on which are reliefs representing a series of
scenes from his life. In one he is giving alms to the plague-stricken: in
a second he is baptizing children in a plague hospital: in a third he is
walking with feet and head bare, and with a halter round his neck, in a
plague procession, preceding the sacred relics that are carried beneath a
canopy.

Portraits of S. Carlo in Milan, those in the Cathedral, in the Borromeo
Palace and elsewhere, all in profile, show the prominent nose and
receding forehead and a degree of ugliness that would almost seem to
forbid enrolment in the catalogue of the saints. A rugged full-faced
portrait by Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), now in the Hermitage at St.
Petersburg, seems less discordant with the halo.

Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669) painted a picture of Borromeo heading a
plague procession, which is one of the best of its kind. It is now over
the altar of S. Carlo Catinari at Rome, but hidden from view by a brazen
symbol of rays of glory.

The familiar theme of innumerable pictures both in Italy and France is
Carlo Borromeo carrying the Sacrament to the plague-stricken. Some of
the best known are those by Jakob van Oost (le Vieux) (1600-71) in the
Louvre: by Lemonnier in the Musée at Rouen: by Cigoli (1559-1613) in the
church of Santa Maria Nuova at Cortona: by Francesco Gossi in the church
of Poveri at Bologna: and by Baldassare Franceschini in the church of the
Barnabites at Pescia.

The Flemish painter Gaspard de Crayer (1585-1669) has varied somewhat the
hackneyed features of the subject. In his picture, Carlo Borromeo, in red
episcopal robes, followed by two acolytes carrying the taper and cross,
bends down and offers the Sacrament to a dying man, who kneels before him
with head bandaged and shirt thrown open over his bare chest. Behind the
man are two women, one of whom supports his body, while the other in the
shadow of a doorway carries a glass of water in her hand. Kneeling beside
the man, with hands joined in prayer, a little boy awaits the Sacrament:
in the foreground lies a dead child. Before this little corpse a man is
seated on the ground, supporting his head, his legs bare and covered
with ulcers. Behind him are two women, one of whom covers her mouth with
a handkerchief, while the other stretches out her hands to an attendant
deacon, who is distributing alms. The background is a street of Milan
with a vista of open country beyond.

[Illustration: PLATE XXIII

BORROMEO LEADING A PLAGUE PROCESSION

By Pietro da Cortona

(Face Page 174)]

[Illustration: PLATE XXIV

BORROMEO INTERCEDING FOR THE PLAGUE-STRICKEN

A marble bas-relief by P. Puget

(Face Page 175)]

Puget (1622-94) has represented the same subject in a marble bas-relief,
now in the Santé at Marseilles. Borromeo kneels in earnest supplication
amid a group of dead and dying. His eyes are fixed on a cross borne aloft
by cherubs. He is attended by acolytes, who carry a cross and chalice,
and a child clings to his robes. In the foreground a convict drags off a
corpse for burial. In the background a woman bends in wild despair over a
bed, on which a dead man is stretched.

* * * * *

In 1630 occurred the Great Plague of Milan, well known to many by
the description of Manzoni (1785-1873) in his _Promessi Sposi_. For
his information he has drawn on many sources, and not least on the
contemporary record of Canon Ripamonti, written by request of the
Magistracy as a supplement to his History of Milan.

This volume on the plague bears an emblematic engraving on the
title-page. A skeleton holds in his hands weapons, armour, bones, and
books all strung together. The toes of his feet protrude from beneath
a carpet on which lies a plague-stricken man. In front of the skeleton
is an altar, on which stand taper and crucifix. Beside the altar sits
a woman, a drawn sword in her right hand, her left arm embracing a
stork: a naked child is by her side. On the frontal of the altar is the
title of the book: ‘Josephi Ripamontii, Canonici Scalensis Chronistae
Urbis Mediolani, De Peste Quae Fuit Anno cIↄIↄcxxx Libri v, Desumpti Ex
Annalibus Urbis Quos LX Decurionum Autoritate Scribebat.’

In his _Storia della Colonna Infame_, published in 1840, Manzoni has
told the trial and punishment of the two _Untori_, accused of spreading
the plague by means of ointments. The home of one of them was destroyed
by order of the State, and the ground on which it stood declared
accursed. On it a stone column was erected in 1630, bearing the following
inscription:[175]

‘Here, where this plot of ground extends, formerly stood
the shop of the barber, Giangiacomo Mora, who had conspired
with Guglielmo Piazza, Commissary of the Public Health, and
with others, while a frightful plague exercised its ravages,
by means of deadly ointments spread on all sides, to hurl
many citizens to a cruel death. For this, the Senate, having
declared them both to be enemies of their country, decreed
that, placed on an elevated car, their flesh should be torn
with red-hot pincers, their right hands be cut off, and their
bones be broken: that they should be extended on the wheel, and
at the end of six hours be put to death and burnt. Then, and
that there might remain no trace of these guilty men, their
possessions should be sold at public sale, and their ashes be
thrown into the river; and to perpetuate the memory of their
deed the Senate wills, that the house in which the crime was
projected shall be razed to the ground, shall never be rebuilt,
and that in its place a column shall be erected, which shall be
called Infamous. Keep afar off, then, afar off, good citizens,
lest this accursed ground should pollute you with its infamy.
August 1630.’

This cursing of the site recalls the curse of Joshua[176] on the site
of Jericho after its capture: ‘Cursed be the man before the Lord, that
riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation
thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the
gates of it.’ And the Constitutions of Moses[177] pronounced a similar
curse on cities that turned aside from the true religion.

In 1777 Count Pietro Verri, Counsellor of State in the service of Maria
Theresa, published a treatise on Torture, in which special reference was
made to this case at Milan in 1630. His work, however, did not see the
light till 1804. Then in 1839 the _Processo originate degli Untori nella
peste del 1630_ was issued in Milan, giving a full official account of
the trial of these Anointers. Fletcher, in 1895, drew up a summary of
evidence from all the sources in his _Tragedy of the Great Plague of
Milan_.

Early in the morning of June 21, 1630, one Catarina Rosa, a woman of the
lower classes, saw from the balcony of her house a man going down the
street writing on a sheet of paper. He stopped to wipe his fingers on the
wall of a house, probably to get rid of ink-stains, but the woman’s fear
at once conjured up the superstitious image of a deadly ointment smeared
on the walls to spread the plague. A crowd of excited women flocked to
the Council Chamber to inform the Senate, who at once ordered the man’s
arrest. Henceforth no one dared touch a wall. Ripamonti tells how three
young French travellers fared, who in admiring the marble of a temple
unsuspectingly ventured to touch it. Someone saw them do it, and raised
the alarm. Forthwith they were savagely set upon and hurled into gaol,
and only released when it was found that there was no vestige of evidence
to suggest anything but innocent curiosity.

Again, an old man of eighty was seen to dust a bench in the church of St.
Anthony with his cloak before sitting down. Immediately the women cried
out that he was anointing the benches, and the worshippers set on him
there and then in the church, and after beating him brutally dragged him
before the magistrates. Ripamonti believes that he died of his injuries.

The search for the suspected Anointer resulted in the arrest of one
Guglielmo Piazza, a scrivener who carried an ink-horn at his belt. He was
also a commissioner of health, that is to say, a petty official employed
to report cases of plague. Throughout two applications of torture he
stoutly denied the offence, but in his cell, broken with suffering and
fearing a renewal of torture, he yielded to the suggestions of those
around him. He confessed his guilt, and declared that he obtained
the deadly ointment from the barber Giangiacomo Mora. This man was
straightway arrested and carried to the court, but there vehemently
asserted his innocence and vowed that he had never seen Piazza. Under
torture, however, he gave way, and vied with the unhappy Mora in
concocting falsehoods. Among others, they implicated Count Padilla, son
of the Commandant of the Castle, but in the end he was acquitted, and it
is from the notes of his trial that Verri obtained the material for the
narrative of Piazza and Mora.

Mora, like most barbers of his day, dabbled in medicine, so that
medicinal jars and vessels were found in his shop. These, he asserted,
contained preservatives against the plague, and probably with truth, for
during epidemics of plague they were in great demand. Ambroise Paré gives
an elaborate formula for a preservative water, with which to wash the
body frequently and rinse the mouth, and a few drops of it were to be
placed as well in the nostrils and ears. Similar nostrums were in great
demand during the Great Plague of London and that of Marseilles in 1720.

Piazza had occasionally visited Mora’s shop as a customer of the barber,
and both stated that Mora had undertaken to prepare a pot of his
preservative for Piazza. On this innocent transaction was to be built up
a charge of wholesale murder. Mora was induced by torture to admit that
Piazza had supplied him with foam from the mouths of plague victims to
mix with his ointment.

In the intervals of torture Mora and Piazza more than once recanted and
declared that their confessions were false, but a renewal of torture
soon induced them to retract. The ignorant ferocity of the populace
called aloud for satisfaction. At the conclusion of their examination
the unhappy victims were carried off for the execution of a terrible
sentence, in spite of the pledge of impunity. With the merciful prospect
of death before them, they openly asserted that all their admissions
incriminating others were false and had been extracted from them by their
terror of further torture.

[Illustration: PLATE XXV

TORTURE AND EXECUTION OF THE ANOINTERS

(Face Page 179)]

At the end of the _Processo originale degl’ Untori_ is a folded plate
representing in all its details the execution of Piazza and Mora. It is
a rough reproduction of an older undated engraving, which Fletcher has
reproduced from a copy in the collection of medical prints and engravings
in the library of the Surgeon-General’s Office at Washington. The
engraver of this was Orazio Colombo, and it was published in Rome by the
authority of the Nuncio of the Roman College.

On the top of the engraving is its title, which may be translated, ‘The
sentence pronounced on those, who had poisoned many persons in Milan
in the year 1630.’ Fletcher appends this further description: ‘This is
followed by the names of the Magnificos, who sat in judgement, and the
particulars of the punishment decreed. Each scene in the picture has its
letter, which is referred to in an explanatory legend below. The entire
disregard of the unities of time and place, which characterized such
productions, is well displayed in this curious engraving. On the right is
the shop of the barber Mora, and in front of it the “Column of Infamy” is
already erected. A large platform car, drawn by two oxen, exhibits the
victims, executioners, and priests. A brazier of live charcoal contains
the pincers with which the flesh was to be torn. The barber’s right hand
is on the block, and a chopper held over the wrist is about to be struck
down by a mallet held aloft by the executioner. Further on is seen a
large platform, on which the two victims are having their limbs broken by
an iron bar, preparatory to their exposure on the wheel for six hours.
The wheels are also displayed, one of them already on a pole, with the
men bound upon them. Still further on are the fires consuming the bodies,
and, last scene of all, on the extreme left is a fussy little stream,
foaming under bridges, which is supposed to be a river, and into it a man
is throwing the ashes of the two malefactors.’

One dark night in 1788 Nature for very shame let loose a storm that
wrecked the Column: her minion Man then tardily demolished the monument
of his own infamy. The balcony of Catarina Rosa’s house was also taken
down, so that no structure stands to call to mind the hideous tragedy.
The corner-house of the Vedra de’ Cittadini, on the left hand as one
comes from the Corso di Porta Ticinese, occupies the site of poor Mora’s
house. A dwelling has rested on the accursed site since 1803.

It is surprising to find that not only does not Ripamonti deny the guilt
of the victims, but now and again he seems to hint at its reality. It
has to be borne in mind that in his position as official historiographer
of Milan it was hardly permissible for him to express sentiments opposed
to popular conviction and the decisions of the courts of justice. As
late as 1832, during an epidemic of cholera in St. Petersburg, the most
circumstantial statements of miscreants putting poison in the food and
drink of the people were in every mouth.

Manzoni’s _Colonna Infame_ is a simple unadorned narrative of the trial
and execution of the two Anointers, quite different in literary form from
his _Promessi Sposi_. It is written with a definite purpose in view.
Verri had introduced the story into his _Observations on Torture_, merely
as an illustration of the way in which the confession of a crime, both
physically and morally impossible, may be extracted by torture. Manzoni
retells the tale, in the interest of humanity at large, to show that no
matter how deep may have been the belief in the efficacy of ointments,
and despite the existence of a legislature that countenanced and approved
torture, it was competent to the judges to convict them, only by recourse
to artifices and expedients, of the injustice of which they were
perfectly well aware.

Manzoni’s _Promessi Sposi_ is a happy blend of antiquarian research
and imaginative description, and the incidents of the plague are
dexterously woven into the fabric of his story. Manzoni wrote at a
time when literature, freed from the trammels of convention, was being
slowly brought into harmony with the outlook of modern thought. Though
an aristocrat by birth, his upbringing had taught him to regard life
with the eyes of the peasant, and not with those of his overlord. In his
genius for romance and in his reverence for the past Manzoni has much in
common with Scott, but with this difference, that Scott sees the social
fabric from above, Manzoni from below. To Scott life was a pageant in
which knights of chivalry and courtly dames shared all the leading parts:
Manzoni’s stage is filled with men struggling to be rid of the yoke of
feudal oppression. The plague of Milan, falling alike on rich and poor,
afforded him the text from which to preach the essential equality of all
men. His whole narrative is so moulded as to throw into striking contrast
the vices of the rich with the virtues of the poor. The plague scenes,
too, give him scope for his remarkable insight into the psychology of
crowds, and for his skill in marshalling men in masses, a gift in which
he rivals Tintoretto. It is the genius of Manzoni that he persuades
without preaching.

The total mortality of this pestilence in Milan has been estimated
roughly at 150,000 persons. The Sanità, or Board of Health, profiting by
the lessons of the previous plague, seem to have acted with sense and
energy, though hampered by the ignorant obstinacy of the Senate, the
Council of Decurions, and the Magistrates, who were afraid of driving
away trade, if the presence of plague were admitted. One strange remedial
measure was the organization of an immense procession through the streets
in honour of San Carlo. During the procession all the sequestered
houses were fastened up with nails to prevent the infected inmates from
joining in it. Deaths were so numerous at the height of the plague that
the burial-pits were filled, and bodies lay putrefying in the houses
and streets. The Sanità sought the help of two priests, who undertook
to dispose of all the corpses in four days. With the assistance of
peasants, whom they summoned from the country in the name of religion,
three immense pits were dug. The Sanità employed _monatti_ to bring out
the dead and cart them to the pits, and the priests accomplished their
task within the appointed time. Besides the _monatti_ they appointed
_apparitores_, or summoners, who went in advance of the _monatti_
ringing a bell to warn the people to bring out their dead. _Commissari_
supervised both _apparitores_ and _monatti_. Piazza was one of these
overseers.

* * * * *

The plagues of the seventeenth century have left behind them very many
memorials both in literature and in art: among them the great plague of
Milan is only one of many.

Southern France was attacked again and again, and in 1643 plague raged
fiercely at Lyons. Over the portico of the church of Notre-Dame de
Fourvière, which stands high up on the precipitous hill that overhangs
the town, is a frieze commemorating this plague.

In Italy, city after city succumbed. Guido’s picture, ‘Il Pallione del
Voto,’ reminds us that Bologna suffered along with Milan. Venice suffered
too, and out of her ruin rose the church of S. Maria della Salute.

Florence retains in the Bargello a hideous reminiscence of her visitation
in a wax representation of ‘Pestilenza’ by Zumbo Gaetano Giulio
(1656-1701). Corpses are lying about in various stages of decomposition:
among them lies a dead mother beside her infant child. A man, whose
nostrils are covered with a bandage, attempts to carry away a corpse. In
the background great bonfires are burning. The modelling of the carcases
is anatomically exact, but the production as a whole is utterly repulsive.

In 1656 Naples assumes the leading rôle in this hideous Dance of Death.
Soldiers brought the plague on a transport from Sardinia. At first the
viceroy attempted to disguise the true character of the disease. The
first doctor who dared to pronounce the sickness plague was promptly
put in prison. Malcontents spread the report that the Spaniards had
designedly introduced the plague, and were employing people to go
through the city in disguise, sowing broadcast poisoned dust. The
infuriated populace turned on the Spanish soldiery, who sought safety
by transferring the accusation to the French. Nothing but blood would
satisfy the mob, and Angelucci di Tivoli, reputed author of the plague
powder, was broken on the wheel as a peace-offering to their bloodthirsty
fury. The Spaniards were accused also of poisoning the holy water in
the churches by means of the deadly powder. Superstition was rampant in
every form. One said that he had been miraculously cured by drinking
holy water before an image of the Virgin. Another saw a marble statue of
the Madonna and Child in the church of S. Severo covered with sweat, and
the faces of both livid and marked by the plague. A doctor, Francesco
Mosca, who printed a formula for curing the plague, was honourably
entitled _Protomedico_. A nun prophesied that the building of a convent
on the hill of St. Martin for her sisterhood would bring to an end the
pestilence. The building was taken in hand in eager haste, rich and poor
vying in bodily labour, but in spite of all their efforts the mortality
grew apace. By a strange perversity of reasoning penitential processions
paraded both day and night the very streets in which priests, in terror
of the contagion, were administering the Sacrament on the end of a stick.
The death-roll of six months was 400,000 lives. Various writers have
described this plague, among them Muratori, Giannone, and de Renzi in his
_Naples in the year 1656_, published in 1667. The Papal Nuncio in Naples
at the time thought fit to write a pamphlet on it, and of modern writers
Shorthouse has made poor use of it in his _John Inglesant_.

Micco Spadara (1612-79), who actually witnessed this plague, has left
a picture of it, which is now in the National Museum at Naples. It
represents the Piazza Mercatello, a veritable pandemonium of dead and
dying. _Monatti_, drawn from the galley-slaves, are dragging the corpses
with hooks to carts in which to carry them to the burial-pits. Here and
there sedan chairs are seen. These were used to carry the sick to the
lazarettos. At first chair-bearers were selected from the citizens who
volunteered for the task, but when all these were dead, galley-slaves and
convicts took their place. In the plague of Marseilles in 1720 sedans
were put at the disposal of the doctors, ‘for their more easy conveyance
everywhere’, by order of the Town Council.

There was plague in Rome as well as Naples in 1656. Nicolas Poussin
(1594-1665) was resident in Rome, and has left the testimony of an
eyewitness in his picture, ‘The Plague of Rome,’ now in the Czernin
Collection at Vienna. It is a landscape with architectural features, of
which Denio[178] gives this brief notice: ‘Two men are seen dragging a
corpse to the mouth of a vault, whose opening is already barred by dead
bodies. A man, enveloped in a white mantle, directs the bearers where
to go: by his side is a jackal-like dog. On the high platform of the
receptacle we notice a group of six men. Broken columns take the place of
the half-seen trees in other works, while sarcophagi and tombs indicate a
cemetery. Beyond the arch stretches the Campagna.’ Poussin has introduced
into the picture the Castle of S. Angelo, mindful, no doubt, of the
legend of Gregory’s vision.

[Illustration: PLATE XXVI

PLAGUE OF NAPLES, 1656. BY MICCO SPADARA

Photograph by Brogi, Florence

(Face Page 184)]

The church of Santa Maria in Campitelli at Rome was rebuilt, in its
present form, in 1659, by Carlo Rainaldi, to accommodate a miraculous
image of the Virgin, to which the cessation of the plague of 1656 was
ascribed. The church is sometimes called S. Maria in Portico, because of
the neighbouring Portico of Octavia. The miraculous Madonna is placed
now beneath the canopy over the high altar. It is still believed to
protect Rome from the contagion of pestilence. Here, too, came constantly
the Elder Pretender and his son Henry, who took his Cardinal’s title from
this church, to offer prayers to this self-same image of the Madonna,
for the liberation of England from the plague of Protestant apostasy.
To this end James instituted in perpetuity an office of prayer, and
ordained that every Saturday Mass should be said at 11 of the morning
before the picture, with the Sacrament exposed, and that after recital
of the prayers a blessing should be given along with the Sacrament. This
ceremony has ever since been regularly performed.

In the sacristy is a framed engraving of the miraculous Madonna, dated
1747. It is surrounded by a series of small pictures, one of which shows
the appearance of the image to S. Galla in the pontificate of John I
(523-6), as she ministered to the wants of twelve poor men in her house.
Another shows Pope John dedicating the miraculous picture in the oratory
of S. Galla, which was transformed later into the church of S. Maria
in Campitelli. The remaining pictures represent scenes in successive
pontificates, in which this miraculous Madonna brought about a cessation
of plague. A brief explanation in Latin is attached to each.

The plague of 1656 occurred in the pontificate of Alexander VII. This
Pope did much to atone for the craven spirit of his papal predecessors
by his courage and devotion to his people throughout the epidemic. It is
surprising that no memorial has been erected to commemorate his services.

Two rare contemporary prints represent scenes in the course of this
visitation. One is figured by Lanciani in his _Golden Days of the
Renaissance_:[179] the other is reproduced here.[180] Both were to be
seen in the Medical Exhibition in the Castel S. Angelo in the spring of
1912. Lanciani’s print shows the following scenes:

1. Inspection of the city gates by Prince Chigi.

2. Barge-loads of corpses from the lazaretto on the island of S.
Bartolommeo.

3-5. Various methods of fighting the plague in infected districts.

6. The ‘Field of Death’ near St. Paul-outside-the-Walls.

The second print is of even greater interest than this: the first two
rows of plates give some idea of the character of the lazarettos, and
show how they were guarded by palisades and sentries: they also show
the carts for transport of the sick attended by armed soldiers. The
disinfection of the books and personal ornaments of the sick, a dead dog
being dragged away to be thrown into the river, and a sick-cart marked
with a cross, are other details of interest. The third row indicates the
removal of infected goods to places outside the city, where they were
either washed or cleansed; places where other things were deposited;
a country residence of the Popes converted into a convalescent home;
and the ruined palace of the Antonines, where woollen goods were taken
for disinfection. The fourth row represents chiefly wash-houses and
washing-places, to which clothes and bedding were removed for cleansing.
The fifth row, the execution of those who transgressed the sanitary
regulations, the shooting of sick criminals, and the various measures
taken to restrict the river traffic. A cable is thrown across the river,
and palisades are erected on the shores, so as to break all contact
between the city and boats bringing in provisions. The huts are shown,
in which soldiers and officials were lodged, whose duty it was to compel
obedience to the prescribed regulations.

[Illustration: PLATE XXVII

PLAGUE SCENES IN ROME, 1656

From an old engraving

(Face Page 186)]

CHAPTER XII

The Great Plague of London, which reached its height in 1665, has left
an abundant aftermath both in literature and art. The main story of its
ravages is too well known to call for repetition.

There were still some ready to see in the plague, as they were in
the case of the fire, evidence of the handiwork of malevolent Jews.
Since their expulsion from England by Edward I, the Jews had never yet
obtained the legal right of re-entry, their open petition to Cromwell
having failed. With the restoration of Charles II to the throne, they
seem to have taken the matter into their own hands and found their way
quietly back, so that at the time of the plague there were many resident
in London, to the great advantage of trade and to the relief of an
ever-needy Government. But three centuries of plague, punctuated by
fierce outbreaks at regularly recurring intervals, had served to unravel
much of the mystery of pestilence, and the people had learnt that it was
not to be exorcised by a holocaust of Jews, or by the brutal murder of
imaginary poisoners.

Celestial portents were not lacking to presage the plague. A blazing
comet appeared for several months before the plague. Men affected to see,
in its dull colour and slow solemn movement, a prediction of the heavy
punishment of pestilence; whereas that which preceded the fire was swift
and flaming and foretold a rapid retribution.

Superstition raked up images afresh from the scrap-heap of discarded
fancies. Women saw flaming swords in the heavens, some even saw angels
brandishing them over their heads. Astrologers had strange tales of
malignant conjunctions of the planets. Medical opinion was still divided
along the same lines of cleavage, as it had been for 2,000 years before.
There were those who referred the disease to some occult poison, and
those who referred it to an excess of some manifest quality, such as
heat, or cold, or moisture, in each case corrupting the body humours.
Speculation was rife as to the nature of the causal poison. Some, as
Lucretius had done, conceived it to be pestiferous corpuscles of atomic
character, outside the range of human vision, generated either in the
heavens by a malignant conjunction of planets, or in the soil, and so
often liberated by the agency of earthquakes. These poisons, however
generated, found their way into the human body through the medium of the
distempered atmosphere.

Some had noticed an unusual absence of birds before the epidemic, as
Thucydides and Livy had done in their times. Boyle observed a great
diminution of flies in 1665, Boghurst a superabundance of flies and
ants in 1664. Sir George Ent and others attributed the disease to
minute invisible insects, but Blackmore conceived these to be rather a
consequence than a cause.

Insects, so called, had been vaguely associated with pestilence from
remote antiquity, more especially flies, lice, and locusts; but in the
medical literature of the sixteenth century and after they are assigned
a much more definite rôle. Mercurialis[181] states that huge numbers of
caterpillars paraded the streets of Venice during the plague of 1576.
Goclenus[182] mentions swarms of spiders during the plague of Hesse
in 1612, and Hildanus swarms of flies and caterpillars this same year
in plague-stricken Lausanne. Bacon speaks of flies and locusts, as
characteristic of pestilential years, and Diemerbroeck[182] of flies,
gnats, butterflies, beetles, grasshoppers, and hornets in the same
connexion. Gottwald[183] reported the presence of multitudes of spiders
during the plague of Dantzig in 1709. Arabian physicians considered the
putrefaction of swarms of dead locusts an important cause of pestilence.
Hancock,[184] as late as 1821, argued that locusts caused famine by
destroying the crops, and so prepared the way for human pestilence.

Talismans, amulets, reliquaries, and all the stock-in-trade of magic were
in brisk demand among the populace. Quack vendors of antipestilential
remedies innumerable effectively replaced physicians, most of whom took
refuge in flight. All honour to those who stood fast at their posts and
reclaimed for medicine what Galen had renounced, the captaincy of its own
soul. These are the men who had no fear for ‘the pestilence that walketh
in darkness or the arrow that flieth by day’:

1. Dr. Francis Glisson ⎫ Presidents of the Royal College of
2. Sir Thomas Witherley ⎭ Physicians.
3. Dr. Nicholas Davys ⎫
4. Dr. Edward Deantry ⎪
5. Dr. Thomas Allen ⎪
6. Sir John Baber ⎪
7. Dr. Peter Barwick ⎪
8. Dr. Humphrey Brooks ⎬ Fellows of the Royal College of
9. Dr. Alexander Burnett ⎪ Physicians.
10. Dr. Elisha Coysh ⎪
11. Dr. John Glover ⎪
12. Dr. Nathaniel Hodges ⎪
13. Dr. Nathan Paget ⎪
14. Dr. Thomas Wharton ⎭
15. Dr. William Conyers Member of the Royal College of Physicians.
16. Dr. O’Dowd
17. Dr. Samuel Peck
18. John Fife ⎫
19. Thomas Gray ⎬ Members of Barber-Surgeons’ Company.
20. Edward Hannan ⎪
21. Edward Higgs ⎭

And yet a few beside these, whose names are inscribed on no human
document, but whose deeds are imprinted in imperishable type on the
deathless record of righteous human endeavour.

Nathaniel Hodges[185] shows us something of the daily life of a
physician in the course of this plague. He himself rose early, took his
antipestilential dose, attended to the affairs of his household, and
then repaired to his consulting room, where crowds awaited him. Some,
who were sick, he treated, others he reassured and sent away. Breakfast
followed, then visits to patients at their homes. On entering a house he
would vaporize some aromatic disinfectant on a charcoal brazier: if he
arrived out of breath, he would rest a while, and then place a lozenge in
his mouth, before proceeding to the examination of his patients. After a
round of several hours’ duration, he would return home, drink a glass of
sack, and then dine on roast meat and pickles or some similar condiments,
all of which were reputed antidotal. More wine followed the preliminary
curtain-raiser. Afternoon and evening, till eight or nine o’clock,
were devoted to a second round of visits. His late hours he spent at
home, a stranger to noxious fumes of tobacco, quaffing sack, to ensure
cheerfulness and certainty of sleep. Twice the fatal infection seemed
to have slipped past his outposts, but Hodges had still his remedy: he
merely doubled the dose.

Of all the literature of pestilence none has been more widely read than
Defoe’s _Journal of the Plague Year_: all later records take their
colour from Defoe. Nevertheless, a careful study and comparison of other
contemporary accounts leaves little room for doubt that Defoe’s picture
does not accurately represent the general state of London during the
plague. His picture is far more true of Marseilles in 1720 than of London
in 1665, and in this connexion one should remember that he had sedulously
collected materials for a diary of the plague of Marseilles, which have
been printed in some editions of his works. These can hardly have failed
to colour his _Journal_, which was not submitted to the public till 1722,
two years after the plague of Marseilles.

Defoe himself was but six years old at the time of the plague, so that
his own childish memories can have aided him but little in his task. He
will have had, at most, a dim recollection of some hideous catastrophe,
round which ranged tales of parents and friends in his boyhood. To
these he will have added facts and incidents borrowed from the chief
records available in print. Intrinsic evidence goes to show that these
were three: London’s _Dreadful Visitation_, Hodges’s _Loimologia_, and
Vincent’s _God’s Terrible Voice in the City_. The first of these will
have given him the Bills of Mortality and other general information: the
second, the aspect of the plague from a physician’s point of view: the
third, a vision of the plague as it appealed to popular imagination.

That Defoe intended to write history and not fiction, there is no reason
to doubt. Judged only by the accuracy of his facts it is history, but it
is in the facts that he omits, just because he had never heard of them,
that he unconsciously lapses into fiction. Comparison of details and
incidents with the unimpeachable record of Pepys confirms his accuracy,
but it shows also that, by separating incidents from their surroundings
and by compressing his description to the exclusion of all but selected
incidents, the picture, as a whole, does not accurately represent the
aspect of the city, as it was. Pepys, who was an actual eyewitness, has
noted not only the most striking events but those of everyday commonplace
interest, so that his narrative is far more true to life. Defoe, on the
other hand, has removed his picture from its setting. Pepys shows us
that, though the spectre of plague was everywhere, everyday life went on,
though in subdued fashion. Defoe would have us believe that all activity
was paralysed.

For all this, however, as one reads the _Journal_ the narrative has such
an air of verisimilitude, that one instinctively pictures the writer
as describing what he has seen with his own eyes, so perfect is the
illusion. Mead, indeed, himself an authority on the plague and so soon
after the event, believed that the _Journal_ was the authentic record
of an eyewitness. Defoe’s faculty of visualizing what he has not seen
is inferior only to the vividness with which he describes what he has
visualized.

What is the secret of this vividness? More than all else, extreme
simplicity of language. The simple style was Defoe’s natural style, and
for that reason his use of it is fluent and easy, and knowing this he
fitly puts his story into the mouth of a simple saddler. Defoe wrote for
a growing class of readers of a lowly social order. He is the apostle
of the common people: that is why he imitates their way of speaking.
Not only is his narrative colloquial, but it deliberately affects the
language a saddler would use in reciting to his intimates the memories
of what he had lived through. There is no striving for dramatic effect,
no drawing of lurid pictures, no literary artifice, but always the same
sustained simplicity of diction, even in describing the most appalling
occurrences. There must be no chance of missing the smallest point, so he
even does such thinking as is necessary by running comments on his own
story.

The educated reader, particularly in these days, when even literature is
administered in tabloid form, must needs be wearied by the prolixity,
and irritated by the redundancy of the narrative. But again it must be
pleaded in extenuation that these very defects are deliberate. Constant
repetition, as every teacher knows, sooner or later penetrates the
densest brain.

But the _Journal_ is something more than a mere chronicle, vivid enough
at that, of what happened, and how men behaved, during the plague. Defoe
regards the plague as the judgement of God, and this attitude imparts
a strong moral purpose to the work. This is why he dwells so much on
the mental and moral effects of the catastrophe, inculcating his lesson
without the appearance of undue insistence. Pepys, as we know, could find
heart to make merry during the plague, just as Boccaccio depicted his
company of Florentines: to Defoe the mere idea of merriment is revolting.
Pepys, on New Year’s Eve, as he looked back over the abomination of
desolation, could make this entry in his _Diary_:

‘December 31, 1665. I have never lived so merrily (besides
that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time ...
and great store of dancings we have had at my cost (which I am
willing to indulge myself and wife) at my lodgings. The great
evil of this year, and the only one indeed, is the fall of my
Lord of Sandwich, whose mistake about the prizes hath undone
him.’

Pepys was a stranger to imagination: his pleasures and his griefs were
things of the surface and matters of the moment. His creed is egoistic
hedonism in all its naked brutishness. He is far more concerned over
the fire, where there is a chance of losing his property, than over
the plague where the chance is of losing his life. His New Year’s Eve
retrospect is not the only glimpse he gives us of callous indifference to
the horrors of the plague. Look at September 30, 1665, when the fiercest
spell was only just past:

‘So to sleep with a good deal of content, and saving only this
night and a day or two about the same business a month or six
weeks ago, I do end this month with the greatest content, and
may say that these three months, for joy, health, and profit,
have been much the greatest that ever I received in all my
life, having nothing upon me but the consideration of the
sicklinesse of the season during this great plague to mortify
mee. For all which the Lord God be praised!’

It was not that Pepys was unconscious of the terrible scenes of suffering
around him, only that he was unmoved by them. Into one short letter to
Lady Cartaret, at the height of the plague, he compresses all the grim
details that fill a volume for Defoe.

Historians frequently lay it down that the fire of London swept away
the plague. As a fact it probably had little to do with its departure.
Several English towns were as hard hit as London, and yet in the absence
of any conflagration subsidence and disappearance of plague followed the
same course as in London. At Salonica,[186] about A. D. 1500, a fire
which destroyed 8,000 houses was actually followed by an outbreak of
plague. It was a common contemporary belief that the departure of plague
from London was hastened by the coming of pit-coal into general use, so
that the atmosphere was constantly permeated by sulphurous fumes.

Records in art of the Great Plague of London, though numerous, are mostly
unimportant. Generally artists have been content to illustrate its
copious literature. In 1863 Frederic Shields commenced an intended series
of illustrations of the _Journal_ of Defoe. Ruskin lavished great praise
on the woodcuts, for their imaginative power and for the superlative
excellence of the design. Proofs of six of these woodcuts were to be
seen at the Memorial Exhibition of the works of Shields (Alpine Club,
September-October 1911). The set of six comprised the following scenes:

1. _The Decision of Faith_

A man is seated at a table, on which lies a Bill of Mortality,
with his Bible open before him. He says to himself, ‘Well I
know not what to do, Lord direct me.’ His finger points to the
answer in the open Bible: ‘Because thou hast made the Lord,
which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation: there
shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh
thy dwelling.’

2. _The Death of the First-born_

A youth lies in convulsions on a bed, while a woman kneels
beside it. In the background are bearers carrying away
a corpse: both are smoking pipes. On the ground lies an
hour-glass.

3. _Solomon Eagle warning the Impenitent_

Solomon Eagle stands with a brazier of live coals on his head
in a fierce preaching attitude before a group of lewd young
women at an open window.

4. _The End of a Refugee_

A man with a long hooked pole is dragging a corpse along.
Beside him stands a grave-digger with spade, dog, and
dinner-basket.

5. _The Plague Pit_

Bodies are being shot from a cart into a pit by the light of a
torch, which a man is holding.

6. _Escape of an Imprisoned Family_

The door of a house has been hacked down, and is lying on a
dead body.

George Cruickshank contributed four plates to Brayley’s edition of the
_Journal of the Plague Year_. Three of them, the ‘Dead Cart’, the ‘Great
Pit in Aldgate’, and ‘Solomon Eagle’ are vivid and powerful; the fourth,
‘The Waterman’s Wife’, feeble and commonplace.

The preaching of Solomon Eagle is the subject of a picture by P. F.
Poole, R.A., in the Mappin Gallery at Sheffield. The scene depicted
is taken from Harrison Ainsworth’s novel _Old Saint Paul’s_. It shows
Solomon Eagle, with the brazier of live coals on his head, nude but for
a loin-cloth; and discoursing to the terrified citizens outside old St
Paul’s Cathedral, during the plague. All around are strewn bodies of dead
and dying: a house displays the damning red cross and the words ‘Lord
have mercy upon us’. In the background bearers are carrying away a corpse
to burial.

An incident, that Pepys describes in his _Diary_ under September 3, 1665,
as follows, is represented in a modern picture by Miss Florence Reason.

‘Among other stories, one was very passionate, methought, of
a complaint brought against a man in the towne for taking a
child from London from an infected house. Alderman Hooker told
us it was the child of a very able citizen in Gracious Street,
a saddler, who had buried all the rest of his children of the
plague, and himself and his wife now being shut up and in
despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this
little child: and so prevailed to have it received stark-naked
into the arms of a friend, who brought it (having put it into
new fresh clothes) to Greenwich; where, upon hearing the story,
we did agree it should be permitted to be received and kept in
the towne.’

In 1679 a terrible epidemic of plague broke out in Vienna, then an
opulent city, with a population of some 210,000, and the seat of Leopold,
the Holy Roman Emperor. Our chief knowledge of the visitation is derived
from Sorbait (_Consilium medicum oder freundliches Gespräch_), Abraham
a St. Clara (Merk’s _Wien_), and Fuhrmann (_Alt- und Neu-Wien_). The
disease was preceded by an epidemic of the ‘Hot Sickness’, (_Hitzige
Krankheit_), which was very fatal. Bubonic plague followed in its wake
and Vienna presented the spectacle of one huge lazaretto for the sick,
one gigantic plague-pit for the dead. Convicts, as at Naples, were
employed both to nurse the sick and bury the dead. Clothing, furniture,
and bedding lay littered in the streets mixed with the dead and dying.
When carts failed, the bodies were thrown into the Danube. A Plague
Committee strove in vain to shut up all infected houses and segregate
the inmates in lazarettos and stations of quarantine. Death by public
hanging was the penalty of disobedience. Some of the royal princes, and
foremost among them Prince Ferdinand of Schwartzenburg, together with
many of the nobility, devoted themselves courageously to fighting the
plague, undertaking even the most menial duties. But many of the citizens
and the Emperor himself fled. Leopold conceived his obligations to his
people discharged by a pilgrimage to Maria-Zell to pray for cessation of
the plague. Then he moved his court to Prague, whence plague drove him to
Linz.

During the plague the Viennese set up a wooden column, to which frequent
processions were made, observing the ancient ritual of the Flagellants.
At the end of the plague Leopold made a vow at St. Stephan’s to replace
it by a marble column, which was duly erected in the Graben between
1687-93.

An incident of this plague, the story of the street-singer Augustin,
who was thrown alive, but drunk, into the plague-pit, but escaped none
the worse for his experience, recalls the like occurrence in Defoe. The
man is said to have composed the familiar ‘O du lieber Augustin’ in a
beer-house on the very night he was thrown into the plague-pit.

Amulets of various kinds were extensively employed in the seventeenth
century. In South Germany a common form was the so-called Pest Penny.
These had on one face, as a rule, the figure of St. Benedict or St.
Zacharias, and on the reverse some formula of exorcism.

Vienna[187] fell a victim to outbreak after outbreak of plague, but the
experience gained in the visitation of 1679 enabled the authorities to
stamp out the infection in 1691 and 1709, before it had grown out of
hand. But in 1713 all preventive measures failed to check its spread.
Then, in the month of May, processions and litanies were organized
to the plague column. The Emperor Charles VI remained in Vienna, and
pronounced a solemn vow in St. Stephan’s, that if the plague ceased he
would erect a church as a thank-offering. Such was the origin of the
Karlskirche. This church is a rich square edifice with a huge dome. It
is the _chef-d’œuvre_ of J. B. Fischer von Erlach, commenced in 1715.
The ravages of the plague are portrayed in relief, by Stanetti, in
the tympanum. Flanking the portico are two domed belfries, resembling
Trajan’s column, 108 feet high, with reliefs from the life of S. Carlo
Borromeo by Mader and Schletter. In March 1714, when the plague died out
after a total mortality of 120,000, a thanksgiving _Te Deum_ was sung in
St. Stephan’s, at which the emperor was present. Two series of memorial
coins were struck, the one showing the votive column, the other the
church dedicated to S. Carlo Borromeo.

The Plague Regulations, published in separate form at Vienna at the
time of this epidemic, give a good idea of current popular opinion
as to the nature of plague. There was no lack of adherents for each
belief of every preceding period. There were those who regarded it as a
signal evidence of God’s displeasure. There were those who attributed
it to poison in the air or food, generated in the stars and spread by
the malice of grave-diggers for their own purposes. Even the Jews were
incriminated. There were those who read its origin in the conjunction
of certain stars. Others ascribed it to famines, to poisonous fumes set
free by earthquakes, to comets, and even to dry seasons through the
multiplication of insects. Come how it might, clouds taking the form of
biers and funeral processions, noises in churchyards, and dreary sounds
in the air foretold its coming. On infected bodies the virus was often
visible as blue sulphurous fumes. There were clearly also some who
conceived a natural origin. A doctor, named Gregorovius, dissected three
dead bodies in search of the cause, but failed to find it. His intrepid
zeal was duly rewarded by the Emperor and by the Faculty of Medicine in
Vienna.

Conformably with the varying conceptions of cause, remedies were varied
and multifarious. Some pinned their faith to a devout life, aided by
processions and penitential sermons. Some lit fires to cleanse the air,
at times adding sulphur. A host of herbs, chief among them Angelica,
enjoyed repute as antipestilential remedies. The simple life appealed to
some, purgatives and blood-letting to others.

But side by side with this ill-assorted medley of measures, a code of
sanitary precautions had slowly grown up. Early notification by the
doctors, quarantine of suspects and segregation of the sick, cleanliness
and disinfection were all recommended and sedulously executed, and
supplied in embryo the essential principles of modern sanitary science.
Doctors were enjoined to keep sober, to fumigate themselves, and to wear
silk or taffetas, to which the virus would not cling. We have arrived
indeed at the parting of the ways, and henceforth the stream of medical
science, polluted less and less by the surface waters of superstition,
flows on clear and full in its appointed channel. The sun of science
emerges at length from its protracted winter solstice.

CHAPTER XIII

In the year 1720 plague found its way to Marseilles. It was believed to
have been brought by a ship, the _Grand-Saint-Antoine_, which arrived
on May 25 from the Levant. As usual, the attempt was made to hush it up
for the sake of trade. At the beginning of August something had to be
done, so on the advice of two physicians, Sicard, father and son, it was
decided to light bonfires throughout the city. For lack of firewood this
was not done, but also for lack of faith, for it was found that despite
their vaunted specific, the Sicards had fled the city. So sulphur was
served out to the poor instead, wherewith to ‘perfume’ their houses.

As early as August 2 the Town Council found it necessary to adopt special
measures to keep physicians and surgeons to their task. Accordingly,
they decided that the city should pay them a fixed salary in place of
fees from the sick, and allow them smocks of oiled cloth, and sedan
chairs to carry them on their rounds. There are several illustrations
extant of the dress adopted by doctors in the plague of Marseilles. The
same dress, with trifling variations, was worn elsewhere in France, in
Switzerland, and in Germany, and had originated in Italy. It is shown
in an old Venetian woodcut of A. D. 1493, from the works of Joannes de
Ketham (_Fasciculus Medicinae_, 1493). This woodcut shows a physician
in a long overall, but wearing only a skull-cap on his head, visiting
a plague patient in bed. He is accompanied by attendants who carry
lighted torches, while he himself holds a medicated sponge before his
mouth and nose, as he feels the pulse. Grillot figured the dress as the
frontispiece of his _Lyon affligé de la peste 1629_, and Manget[188]
has borrowed it from him. From his description it would seem that the
mantle, breeches, shirt, boots, gloves, and hat were all of morocco
leather. The beak attached to the mask was filled with aromatics, over
which the air passed in respiration, and had an aperture for each eye,
fitted with a disk of crystal.

[Illustration: PLATE XXVIII

1. DRESS OF A MARSEILLES DOCTOR, 1720

2. GERMAN CARICATURE OF THE SAME

(Face Page 200)]

M. Reber[189] describes an engraving by John Melchior Fuesslin,
representing a doctor in the plague of Marseilles. The legend beneath
it, in German, is (translated) ‘Sketch of a Cordovan-leather-clad doctor
of Marseilles, having also a nose-case filled with smoking material to
keep off the plague. With the wand he is to feel the pulse.’ Reber’s and
Manget’s plates are both reproduced in the Bristol _Medico-Chirurgical
Journal_, March 1898, from the _Janus_ blocks. Gaffarel[190] gives the
costumes both of a doctor and of a hospital attendant: they closely
resemble the dress of the Italian charitable guilds of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.

By August 9 some of the physicians and almost all the master-surgeons
had fled, and an ordinance was issued demanding their return, or in
default their expulsion from their respective corporations, and other
special penalties as well. Two physicians named Gayon volunteered their
services for the Hôpital des Convalescents, but forthwith paid the
penalty with their lives. In the absence of sufficient physicians in
Marseilles, others were summoned from Montpellier, Paris, and elsewhere.
These exhausted their energies in a dispute over the contagious
character of plague. Chicoyneau and Chirac maintained that it was not
contagious. Deidier proved, by successfully inoculating dogs with bile
taken from plague subjects, that at any rate it was communicable. Each
subsequently expounded his views in a formal discourse before the School
of Montpellier.

Existing hospital accommodation was quite unequal to the needs.
Emergency tents were erected outside the town, with mattresses for the
sick. Chevalier Rose equipped and maintained a hospital in the district
entrusted to him, at his own expense. A large temporary hospital of
timber covered with sail-cloth was hurriedly erected, but when almost
finished towards the end of September it was blown down by a gale, and
was not rebuilt till October 4. This hospital, together with the Hôpital
Général de la Charité of 800 beds, provided ultimately sufficient
accommodation, so that none need remain in the streets.

From the first the mortality was such that it was wellnigh impossible to
bury the dead. On August 8 the Assembly resolved that carts should be
used to carry the dead to burial, and that pits should be dug in which
the bodies could be buried in lime. So two huge pits were dug outside
the walls, between the gate of Aix and that of Joliette, M. Moustier
overseeing the diggers and compelling them to work. Chevalier Rose also
had pits dug and organized a corps of buriers in his own district. The
duties of burial were at first entrusted to sturdy beggars, but in a
brief space of time the supply of these failed, so that bodies began to
accumulate in the houses and streets. Then convicts were requisitioned in
relays from time to time.

These convicts were promised their liberty, to excite them to work—a
promise that was never fulfilled in the case of the few who survived
the task. Their ignorance of the management of carts and horses, their
idleness and lust of robbery rendered them so unfit for the task, that
Moustier and the other sheriffs and Chevalier Rose were compelled to
be always present on horseback, to superintend the work. By August 21
corpses had already begun to accumulate in old parts of the city, where
the streets were too narrow and steep for the carts to go. Accordingly,
an order was issued that the vaults of the churches in the upper town
should be used for burials in quicklime, and that, when full, they
should be sealed up with cement. By the end of August the streets
were literally strewn with dead bodies, some in an advanced stage of
putrefaction, mingled with cats and dogs that had been killed, and
bedding thrown out from the houses. The square in front of the building
called the Loge, as also the Palissadoes of the port, were filled with
bodies brought ashore from ships in the roadstead, to which whole
families had fled in the belief that plague would not reach them on the
water.

By September 6 more than 2,000 dead bodies were lying in the streets,
exclusive of those in the houses. On the esplanade called La Tourette,
lying towards the sea between the houses and the rampart, 1,000 corpses
had lain rotting for weeks in the sun and emitting a frightful stench.
They were too rotten even to be lifted into carts, and too foul to be
carried to distant pits. Chevalier Rose, mindful maybe of Procopius,
conceived the idea of throwing them into two huge vaults in the old
bastions close to the esplanade, after breaking in their roofs. The
task was carried out in fierce haste by 100 galley-slaves, who tied
handkerchiefs dipped in vinegar over their mouths and noses. At the same
time fishermen netted 10,000 dead dogs floating in the port and towed
them out to sea.

In the parish of St. Ferriol, the finest quarter of the city, Michel
Serre the painter undertook to see to the burial of the dead, with carts
and galley-slaves placed at his disposal, himself providing food and
lodging for the workers. A grateful city has repaid him by hanging his
two large pictures of Marseilles during the plague close beneath the
ceiling of an underground cellar, where it is impossible to decipher
their details.

When all the bodies were disposed of, the sheriffs employed the
galley-slaves to clear the filth from the streets and throw it into
barges, which carried it out to sea.

In the early days of the epidemic, the sheriffs had forbidden the annual
procession on August 16, in honour of St. Roch, at which the saint’s bust
and relics were carried through the streets; but the people raised such
an outcry that the procession was celebrated, the sheriffs attending with
their halberdiers to prevent a crowd following. By September 7 even the
civil authorities had come to regard the plague as an instrument of God’s
wrath, and the magistrates, to appease it, vowed that every year the city
should give 2,000 livres to a House of Charity, to be established under
the protection of our Lady of Good Help, for orphans of the province.

At the height of the plague many parish priests and some of the monks
fled: the services of the Church were mostly suspended. But many secular
clergy and monks remained and devoted themselves unflinchingly to the
sick. The bishop, Belsunce, nobly played his part. Wherever the poorest
lay, there he went confessing, consoling, and exhorting them to patience.
To the dying he carried the Sacrament, to the destitute the whole of his
money in alms. Though plague invaded his palace and carried off those
about him, it spared him. It is of him that Pope[191] asks,

Why drew Marseilles’ good Bishop purer breath
When nature sickened, and each gale was death?

On All Saints’ Day, Belsunce headed a procession through the streets
from his palace, walking barefoot, as Borromeo of old, with a halter
about his neck, and carrying the cross in his arms. He wished to appear
among his people as a scapegoat laden with their sins, and as a victim
destined to expiate them. Accompanied by the priests and canons of the
Church he led the way to a place where an altar had been erected. There,
after exhorting the people to repentance, he celebrated Mass before
them all. Then he solemnly consecrated the city to the Sacred Heart of
Jesus, in honour of which he had instituted a yearly festival. The tears
coursing down his face as he spoke moved all to cry aloud to the Lord
for mercy. On November 16 Belsunce was emboldened to exorcise the waning
plague. Calling together all that remained of the clergy to the church
of Acoulles, he read all the prayers that the Pope had prescribed for
deliverance from plague. Then after an eloquent and moving exhortation
he carried up the Holy Sacrament to the cathedral’s roof, and there,
under the open sky, with all the city lying before him, uttered a solemn
benediction, and performed the full ritual of exorcism according to the
forms of the Roman Catholic Church.

Belsunce was not the first human scapegoat to tread the streets of
Marseilles in voluntary expiation for its people. In times of pestilence,
in the old Greek colony of Massilia, one of the lower orders offered
himself on behalf of his fellow citizens. Dressed in sacred garments
and decked with sacred boughs he was led through the streets, amid the
prayers of the people that their ills might fall on him, and then cast
out of the city.

There stands this day on a lofty crest of land in the open square, right
in front of the episcopal palace of Marseilles, a statue of Belsunce in
bronze, by Ramus. The stone pedestal bears a commemorative inscription
and two reliefs in bronze. In one, Marseilles in woman’s form is lying
among her stricken children, while Belsunce and his attendant priests
implore the Sacred Heart to stay the plague. In the other, Belsunce bears
the Sacrament to sick and dying.

The statue of Belsunce, clad in full episcopal robes, stands with
face raised and arms outstretched to heaven, in attitude of earnest
supplication. Before him Nature has set a landscape of surpassing beauty:
sea, earth, and sky give freely of their best. Far down below a polyglot
people move hither and thither around the harbour quays, like ants,
at their appointed tasks. Beyond it spreads a matchless expanse of
Mediterranean sea, now smooth and silvery as a mirror, now fretful with
the rising tide. Away over the sea and over the low land that bounds the
bay, the evening sun lights up the face of Belsunce with a last lingering
radiance, as it goes down to its setting in a glory of golden hues. If
man’s graven image may enjoy the perfect happiness denied to man, then
surely Belsunce has his reward.

Marseilles is rich in reminiscence of her bishop. In the Bureau
d’Intendance Sanitaire hangs a pleasing portrait of Belsunce by Gobert;
while in the Musée may be seen a poor picture, by Mansian, of him giving
the Sacrament to the victims of the plague. François Gérard (1770-1837)
presented his ‘Peste de Marseille’ to the Bureau d’Intendance Sanitaire,
where now it hangs. The wan dismal colouring of the picture accords ill
with the striking vigour of the composition. In the foreground is set
forth the whole tragedy of a family stricken with plague. On the ground
lies the father writhing with agony: his hands are clenched, his eyes are
starting from their sockets: the dressing in the right armpit indicates
one site of the disease. The mother, seated on a chest, clasps to her
body her elder boy, wrapped in a blanket, too weak to stand: the younger
child leans against his mother, his eyes fixed in terror on his dying
father. Anguish is depicted in the death-like pallor of the mother’s
face. In the background Belsunce in full robes distributes to the sick
and starving poor the bread which an attendant is carrying. To the left
of the foreground bodies of the dead are lying huddled up beneath an
awning, while to the right convicts are dragging corpses away for burial.
The sublime serenity of the good bishop seems to bring to his stricken
people in their anguish some promise of that peace which passeth all
understanding.

J. F. de Troy the younger (1679-1752), himself an eyewitness of this
plague, painted a masterly picture, which is now in the city Musée. It
was executed for Chevalier Rose in 1722. It depicts him seated on a
white horse calmly directing the work of the convicts, who have been
assigned to him, as they clear the esplanade of La Tourette of the
accumulation of decomposing corpses. The sheriffs, also on horseback,
aid the Chevalier in his task. The ground is strewn with corpses, which
the convicts seize and hurl into the gaping mouths of the open vaults
in the bastions. They work in furious haste, impelled by the foul odour
of the bodies and the knowledge of the hazard of their task. Ferocity
is depicted in their faces, haste in all the movements of their bodies.
The whole scene is full of life and movement and spirit. In the sky
hover angels shaking flaming torches. The colouring has been managed
with wonderful effect to convey the feeling that sky and earth alike are
filled with a poisonous and sickly miasma.

[Illustration: PLATE XXIX

PESTE DE MARSEILLE. BY FRANÇOIS GÉRARD

Photograph by Giraudon, Paris

(Face Page 206)]

[Illustration: PLATE XXX

LA PESTE DANS LA VILLE DE MARSEILLE EN 1720

By J. F. de Troy

(Face Page 207)]

In another picture in the Santé at Marseilles Guérin has treated the same
subject in a dull conventional manner. Chevalier Rose, bearing the dead
body of a woman, fills the centre of the picture. Behind him a ludicrous
boy is holding a white horse with one hand, and his nose with the other,
and is bestowing on his nose a tenacious grip that would have been more
appropriately bestowed on the horse. Convicts are dragging away the dead
bodies that litter the ground.

The two large pictures by Michel Serre are of interest rather as
pictorial records of old Marseilles, than as contributions to the
artistic presentation of plague. One represents the Cours de Marseille,
now known as the Cours Belsunce, during the plague. It is a handsome
boulevard bordered on either side by trees, beneath which are seen tents
hastily erected as temporary dwellings by those who have fled from their
plague-contaminated dwellings to the shelter of the streets. Death and
disease have followed them and are rampant on every side. Buriers are
seen collecting the dead and carrying them off in carts. This picture
has been engraved by Rigaud, and is figured in Crowle’s _Illustrated
Pennant’s London_, vol. x, p. 93; also in Gaffarel’s _La Peste de 1720_,
p. 304.

The other picture by Serre shows the open space in front of the Hôtel de
Ville together with part of the port of Marseilles. The scenes resemble
those of his other picture, and we are reminded also that many took
refuge in boats and anchored off the harbour, in the vain belief that
plague could not reach them there. The space before the Town Hall became
one heap of decomposing bodies that were landed from the boats or had
drifted ashore from the waters of the harbour. Crowle[192] figures this
picture as well as the preceding, so, too, does Gaffarel.[193]

With the departure of plague from Marseilles, the disease had wellnigh
disappeared from Europe. In the Levant it still flourished for a while.
Patrick Russell, physician to the British factory at Aleppo, wrote a
treatise on an epidemic that occurred during his residence there from
1760-2. Again, in 1771 it gained a footing at Moscow, claiming there no
less than 80,000 victims. It was in vain that the people thronged the
miraculous _ikon_ of the Virgin at the Varvarka gate. Fearing the great
concourse, the archbishop had the _ikon_ removed to the Chudok monastery,
but such was the fury of the maddened people, that they threatened to
raze the building to the ground if the _ikon_ were not restored. The
archbishop yielded, but too late, for the mob dragged him from his
monastery and massacred him in the open street. From that day the plague
began to wane. So plague was banished from Europe by the worship of a
picture, and with dramatic appropriateness the curtain fell on the final
act in a scene of human sacrifice.

[Illustration: PLATE XXXI

LES PESTIFÉRÉS DE JAFFA

By Baron Gros

(Face Page 208)]

The celebrated picture ‘Les Pestiférés de Jaffa’ by Baron Gros, now
in the Louvre, has been the subject of much acrimonious controversy.
The picture was ordered by Napoleon when First Consul, and excited
extravagant enthusiasm on its exhibition in the Salon in 1804. Artists
placed a palm-branch over it, and the public covered the whole frame
with wreaths. It is, in fact, a large unattractive canvas, devoid of any
exceptional merit either of composition or colour. It shows Napoleon
accompanied by some of his staff standing among the plague-stricken
soldiers in the interior of a mosque. One of the men is raising his right
arm, so as to expose the bubo in his armpit, and Napoleon is laying his
fingers on it.

There is also in existence a rough sketch,[194] which shows that Gros at
the outset intended to present his subject differently. Napoleon, like
St. Louis in the modern fresco in St. Sulpice, holds in his arms the body
of a plague victim, which an Arab helps him to support. The general’s
impassive features contrast strongly with the frightened appearance of
his attendants.

Each of these two representations would seem to be actual historical
occurrences during Napoleon’s campaign in Syria. Plague had broken
out among the troops in Jaffa, where Napoleon had established a
large hospital, and the generals had issued an alarming report as to
its spread. It was Napoleon’s purpose to restore the _moral_ of his
army, which had been seriously affected by the outbreak. Norvin[195]
represents Napoleon as visiting all the wards, accompanied by the
generals Berthier and Bezzières, the director-general Daure, and the
head doctor Desgenettes. Napoleon spoke to the sick, encouraged them,
and touched their wounds, saying, ‘You see, it is nothing.’ When he
left the hospital, they blamed his imprudence. He replied coldly, ‘It
is my duty, I am the general-in-chief.’ This studied indifference to
the contagion, coupled with the fine behaviour of the head doctor
Desgenettes, who inoculated himself with plague in the presence of the
soldiers and applied to himself the same remedies as he prescribed for
them, successfully accomplished Napoleon’s purpose. The account of the
incident given in a letter[196] by Comte d’Aure is slightly different. It
runs, ‘He did more than touch the buboes: assisted by a Turkish orderly,
General Buonaparte picked up and carried away a plague patient, who was
lying across a doorway of one of the wards: we were much frightened at
his acting thus, because the sick man’s clothing was covered with foam
and the disgusting discharge from a broken bubo. The general continued
his visit unmoved and interested, spoke to the sick, and sought in
addressing them with words of consolation, to dissipate the panic that
the plague was casting on their spirits.’ Bourrienne,[197] Napoleon’s
secretary, however, says, ‘I walked by the general’s side, and I assert
that I never saw him touch any of the infected.’

The Duc de Rovigo in his _Memoirs_ practically corroborates the Comte
d’Aure. He says: ‘In order to convince them by the most obvious proof
that their apprehensions were groundless, he desired that the bleeding
tumour of one of his soldiers should be uncovered before him, and pressed
it with his own hands.’ Desgenettes and General Andréossy, who were both
present, confirm Rovigo and Comte d’Aure as against Bourrienne.

Napoleon’s secretary carries the narrative a stage further. He says that
only sixty of those in the hospital had plague, and that as their removal
involved a risk of infecting the whole army, Napoleon deliberated with
his staff and the medical men, and decided to put them out of their
misery by poison. Bourrienne says that he does not know who administered
the poison, but that there was no question of their destruction.
Bourrienne’s statements on any subject, as is generally recognized, need
careful sifting, but out of the mass of conflicting testimony the plain
fact would seem to emerge, that Napoleon did suggest that the death of
some seven or eight, who were bound to die, should be accelerated, so
that they might not infect the whole army. Napoleon himself, at St.
Helena, did not deny this, and defended his action on the ground of
humanity, stigmatizing the story of wholesale poisoning as an invention.

APPENDIX[198]

The statement of Thucydides, that all other diseases took on the
similitude of the dominating pestilence, is one that reappears constantly
in the literature of epidemic disease. We have already noted the
frequent concurrence of plague and typhus, leading such acute observers
as Diemerbroeck and Sydenham to believe that the one disease might be
transformed into the other. The same close association of relapsing fever
and typhus was constantly noted, and we know now that the explanation
lies in the fact that each disease is transmitted by the body-louse, as
plague is transmitted by the flea. Bearing in mind the close and constant
association of these and other acute infectious fevers it is no matter
for surprise that they should have been regarded as states and stages of
one pestilential process, differing from one another, not in kind, but
only in degree. As Bacon says, ‘putrefaction rises not to its height at
once.’

The acute, often abrupt, onset of the Athenian pestilence, with profound
depression, severe headache, and suffused conjunctivae, though met with
in a moiety of cases of plague, is eminently characteristic of typhus.
The striking appearance of the bloodshot eyeballs has led to much
confusion between the two diseases.

The aspect of the tongue and fauces inclines rather to the side of
typhus. In each disease the tongue is at first heavily coated with a
thick white fur, and tends later to become dry and parched. But in typhus
there is a special tendency, as the disease advances, for the tongue to
bleed from fissures at the edges. So frequently is this the case, that
this feature has been regarded as of diagnostic value in the presence of
an outbreak of typhus. A boggy reddened appearance of the fauces is usual
in typhus, and is seen also in a proportion of plague patients.

Unnatural and even foetid breath may be met with in any acute infectious
fever, but foetor is in no way characteristic of any. Doubtless it was
far more common in times when the alphabet of oral hygiene had not yet
found acceptance as a necessary detail of medical regimen. Murchison
describes the breath of typhus patients as foetid, and in addition it is
well known that a repulsive odour may be given off from their bodies.
Salius Diversus mentioned it three centuries ago, and it has been a
commonplace of many subsequent writers. Curschmann failed to detect it,
and attributed its absence to the free ventilation of the sick wards.
A layman, as Thucydides was, might well ascribe to the breath a foetor
permeating the whole atmosphere around the patient.

Sneezing has long been associated in popular tradition with plague,
and an old legend refers the association to the plague of Rome at the
commencement of the pontificate of Gregory the Great, when it is said
that those who sneezed died. The most careful and observant of modern
physicians do not, however, confirm the connexion. Russell states that
he was on the look out for it during the plague of Aleppo and did not
observe it: Simpson does not even mention it. Nor does it appear to be
noteworthy as a symptom either of typhus or of any other acute infectious
fever, though it would be in accord with the swollen and congested state
of the nasal mucosa in typhus, to which Curschmann has drawn special
attention. Perhaps the tradition is a mere old wives’ tale, for sneezing
has been regarded as an ominous sign from great antiquity, and as far
back at least as the composition of the _Odyssey_. Aristotle frankly
confessed himself unable to explain the connexion.

Curschmann met with hoarseness and laryngeal catarrh commonly in typhus,
but though catarrh of the whole respiratory tract may occur in plague, it
is not an outstanding feature. Cough is frequent in either disease; so
also is vomiting, often of great severity: and if protracted will exhibit
a succession of changes of colour, such as Thucydides has described,
first the food contents of the stomach, then green bilious vomit, and
finally blood, either red or altered to brown or black. Hiccough and
empty retching are liable to ensue on severe vomiting from any enduring
cause.

It is not clear to what Thucydides appropriates the term σπασμός: the
context would suggest that spasm of the diaphragm, such as accompanies
protracted vomiting, is indicated. But it may also signify true
convulsions, which are an occasional complication of both diseases.
Convulsive tremor of the limbs, and indeed of the whole body, is habitual
at the height of typhus, and is not infrequent in plague.

We should naturally look to the appearance of the skin and of the
eruption to afford criteria for a sure diagnosis, but such is not the
case. True, there is a remarkable resemblance to Murchison’s description
of the skin of typhus patients, in an English hospital. ‘The face’, he
says, ‘is often flushed. The flushing is general over the entire face.
It is never pink: sometimes it is reddish or reddish brown, but more
commonly it is of a dusky, earthy, or leaden hue: in grave cases it may
be livid.’ No corresponding appearance of the skin is to be seen in
plague.

Thucydides has described the eruption as consisting of φλύκταιναι μικραὶ
καὶ ἕλκη, words that have generally been rendered as ‘small blisters
and ulcers’, and for this reason have been held to exclude positively a
diagnosis of typhus fever. So certain a conclusion is hardly justified
by the facts. Outbreaks of gangrenous dermatitis, in which multiple
bullae or blisters, leaving an ulcerated base, have broken out over the
body surface, have been not uncommon features of a typhus epidemic,
and from their virulently contagious character such outbreaks would
have been more prone to occur amid all the neglect and destitution of a
beleaguered garrison. Murchison has described the resulting appearances
in the following words: ‘I have seen bullae filled with light or dark
fluid, or large pustules appear on various parts of the body during the
progress of the fever. Stokes has observed bullae of this description
followed after bursting by deep ulcers with sharp margins.’ But extensive
ulceration such as this must inevitably have left permanent scarring,
at least as marked as the ‘pitting’ produced by small-pox, and we can
hardly presume that this could have escaped the critical Greek eye of so
keen an observer as Thucydides. The whole question arises of the exact
significance of the words ἕλκος and φλύκταιναι.

In his treatise Περὶ Ἑλκῶν Hippocrates uses the term ἕλκος not only
for open wounds and ulcers, but also for burns, wheals, and wounds in
general.

Homer uses it for wounds of every kind. It so happens that the wounds of
the _Iliad_ are almost all the open wounds produced by spear and arrow,
but Homer also uses it for the bite of a snake[199] and for the wound
inflicted by lightning.[200]

Bion[201] uses it in consecutive lines for the wound caused by a spear,
and in the generic sense:

Ἄγριον, ἄγριον ἕλκος ἔχει κατὰ μηρὸν Ἄδωνις,
μεῖζον δ’ ἁ Κυθέρεια φέρει ποτικάρδιον ἕλκος.

Aeschylus[202] and Sophocles[203] use it also in the wider sense, as in

πόλει μὲν ἕλκος ἓν τὸ δήμιον τυχεῖν,

and

τί γὰρ
γένοιτ’ ἂν ἕλκος μεῖζον ἢ φίλος κακός;

The inference to be drawn from these passages is that ἕλκος, although
usually indicating an open wound, is used with no precise significance.

The same difficulty attaches to the word φλύκταινα. Though Hippocrates
uses the word frequently, there is no single passage in which the precise
significance is clear beyond all doubt. He applies it to chilblains,[204]
to an eruption on the skin of subjects of empyema,[205] to lesions
appearing on the tongue in fatal septic cases, and so on. In one passage,
in which he speaks of a φλύκταινα arising from rubbing the skin with
vinegar, he seems to indicate a blister.

The first clear definition of the term we have is from the pen of
Celsus, who defines it as a discoloured pustule that breaks and leaves
an ulcerated base (‘genus pustularum, cum plures similes varis oriuntur
nonnunquam maiores, lividae aut pallidae aut nigrae aut aliter naturali
colore mutato: subestque iis humor, ubi hae ruptae sunt, infra quasi
exulcerata caro apparet’). There are several passages in Aristophanes,
which indicate that he at any rate applied the term as we do to a
blister lesion: but at the same time, there are other passages in
which this exclusive use is by no means so sure. The lesion resulting
from rowing[206] or carrying a lance[207] cannot well be other than a
blister. And there is a passage in the _Ecclesiazusae_,[208] which seems
even clearer:

ἀλλ’ ἔμπουσά τις
ἐξ αἵματος φλύκταιναν ἠμφιεσμένη,

‘Some vampire bloated with blood like a blister.’ The image must be
that of a vampire, so bloated with blood, that its body seems actually
enveloped in it, simulating a blood-blister.

Aristotle applies the term to the bite of a shrew-mouse, which would
presumably produce a solid local swelling, and not a blister. Procopius
uses φλύκταινα for the black cutaneous lesions of Oriental plague, known
nowadays as pustules: he says, too, that they were of the size of a
lentil, but does not mention terminal ulceration. Procopius is so precise
in his medical terminology, that it is improbable he borrowed the term
from Thucydides without appreciating its exact significance: far more
likely he adopted it from the medical terminology of his day.

There is something to be said for appropriating the terms used by
Thucydides to the pustular lesions of Oriental plague. Many writers,
ancient as well as modern, have described the so-called pustules as
commencing in some cases as blisters and terminating in eroding ulcers.
But, on the other hand, we know nothing of epidemics of plague without
a considerable proportion of bubonic cases, while we do know from
the narrative of Procopius that plague has maintained its characters
unchanged for 1,500 years. In an epidemic of plague, in which death did
not supervene till the seventh or ninth day the presence of buboes would
be the outstanding feature of the disease, and Thucydides does not even
mention them.

Assuming that typhus fever also has maintained its characters unchanged,
and that the external manifestations of the Athenian pestilence were not
of the exceptional type we have alluded to, but of the type habitually
associated with the disease, can it reasonably be contended that the
terms φλύκταιναι and ἕλκη are applicable to these?

Murchison says that ‘according to its colour, the eruption may be said
to pass through three stages, viz. 1, Pale dirty pink or florid; 2,
reddish brown or rusty; 3, livid or petechial’. In the first stage, it
is generally admitted that except on careful observation, and in a good
light, the faint diffuse maculae (spots) are apt to escape detection, so
that the impression is of a general suffusion of the skin—what in fact
Thucydides terms ὑπέρυθρον.

In the second stage, the deeper coloration of the spots throws them into
relief as individual lesions against the paler background of general
suffusion of the skin. Can it be that this is indicated by the vague term
φλύκταινα? Be it remembered that Thucydides was a layman, describing, as
he says, the lesions of a hitherto unknown disease. Every physician is
well aware of the restricted terminology that the laity possess for the
description of multifarious lesions. Medicine itself is not exempt from
the same confusion, for when physicians glibly speak of the subcutaneous
haemorrhages of typhus as petechiae they forget that the word throws back
to _petigo_ (a scab).

There remains then for the third stage of the eruption—the haemorrhagic
stage—the term ἕλκος, a generic term applicable to almost any lesion, and
having no philological affinity to the Latin _ulcus_, and the English
‘ulcer’, with which medical usage has confused it.

Reviewing, then, all the facts, it cannot be held that the description
of the eruption, as given by Thucydides, is sufficient to negative a
diagnosis of typhus fever, which disease is otherwise depicted to the
life in all else that he says of its clinical course and characters.

Thucydides was so impressed with the intensity of the internal fever,
that he expected certainly to find a corresponding temperature of the
body surface: hence his surprise is obvious at finding it not excessively
hot. For all that, sufferers were ready to cast off every shred of
clothing, till they were naked, and longed to throw themselves into cold
water. Some did actually plunge into cisterns, but no amount of water
sufficed to slake their thirst. Procopius mentions this same fierce
longing to fling themselves into water among the plague victims of
Byzantium, but raving delirium of this kind is far more characteristic
of typhus than of plague. Curschmann depicts the fierce medley of wild
ravings, mingled with frantic efforts at self-destruction, which give an
unmistakable character to a ward of typhus patients. Murchison, quoting
from Bancroft, says: ‘Some leaving their beds would beat their keepers or
nurses and drive them from their presence: others, like madmen, would
run about the streets, markets, lanes, and other places: and some again
would leap headlong into deep waters.’ Intolerable restlessness and
insomnia fill up the cup of misery to overflowing. Curschmann confirms
the observation of Thucydides, that typhus cadavers exhibit very little
emaciation, but this does not help to differentiate typhus from other
acute fevers of equally brief duration.

Death commonly occurred on the seventh or the ninth day. One recognizes
here submission to the authoritative doctrine of critical days.
Hippocrates[209] defined them on the basis of equal and unequal numbers:

Equal—4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 28, 30, 48, 60, 80, 100.

Unequal—5, 7, 9, 11, 17, 21, 27, 31.

Taking the mean of the numbers, the plague of Athens claimed its victims
for the most part about the eighth day of the disease. A layman would
hardly have had the opportunity, or indeed the inclination, to make
an exact statistical computation, and in this fact perhaps lies this
unexpected lapse of Thucydides into subservience to medical orthodoxy.

With regard to the day of death in typhus fever, Curschmann says: ‘When
death is caused simply by the severity of the disease, it occurs usually
in the middle or second half of the second week. A fatal termination
before the ninth day, or as early as the fifth or sixth day, occurs only
in the most severe forms of the disease, or in individuals with little
resisting power.’ Now, not only was the Athenian pestilence severe in
type, but there was also an almost complete absence of the nursing and
medical regimen that will have served to prolong the duration of cases,
that have ultimately proved fatal, in recent epidemics. In plague death
usually occurs between the second and sixth days, seldom later, and few
patients survive to the seventh or ninth day without the appearance of
buboes.

If the victims survived this period, the disease fastened on the bowels
and produced violent ulceration (ἕλκωσις). Initial constipation,
followed, as the disease develops, by diarrhoea, which is sometimes
profuse and intractable, is met with both in typhus and plague.

The disease began in the head and gradually passed through the whole
body. If the sufferer survived so long, it would often seize the
extremities and make its mark, attacking the privy parts and fingers
and toes. Some escaped with the loss of these and with the loss of
their eyes. This terminal gangrene of the extremities is of frequent
occurrence in typhus, but is rare in plague, and very rare in other acute
infectious fevers. Curschmann says: ‘Many patients continue to suffer
for some time after defervescence (of typhus fever) from gangrene of the
ears, fingers, toes, tip of the nose, and skin of the penis and scrotum,
arising during the febrile period.’ Gangrenous changes around a carbuncle
are occasional in plague, but not as an independent affection of the
extremities. Neglected plague buboes, even nowadays in Indian epidemics,
do exceptionally become gangrenous, as the result of an intercurrent
erysipelas. Necrotic ulceration of the eyeballs is well authenticated as
a complication of typhus as well as of plague.

Some recovered from the disease, but with complete loss of memory.
This again is a frequent consequence, usually temporary, but sometimes
permanent, of typhus. According to Curschmann, ‘the patient’s
recollection of his illness is almost always very limited in severe
or moderately severe cases. True psychoses appear to be rare during
convalescence. Mild melancholia and hallucinations are sometimes seen,
and even mania has been observed.’

The combination of gangrene with mental symptoms inevitably suggests
the thought of ergotism (poisoning by a fungus of rye-grain), and Read
and Kobert have expended much ingenuity in support of this hypothesis.
One of the Athenian corn routes did actually tap the northern shores of
the Euxine, and southern Russia has been one of the chief centres of
epidemics of ergotism. But there is no need to invoke this condition, to
explain symptoms which are commonly encountered in typhus, and no warrant
either for so doing, seeing that the clinical features of the visitation
had little in common with ergotism. Kobert’s ingenious arguments in
favour of ergotism, superimposed on some other unidentified disease,
merely substitute one _impasse_ for another.

Thucydides observes that one feature distinguished the Athenian
pestilence from ordinary diseases. Birds and beasts of prey, which feed
on human flesh, would not as a rule touch the bodies, but, if they did,
they died. In fact, the birds of prey disappeared altogether, and were
not to be seen either about the bodies or anywhere else. In the case of
the dogs this was particularly noticeable, because they live with man.
The paragraph is curiously involved, but contains three statements of
fact:

1. That vultures were nowhere to be seen.

2. That dogs avoided the dead bodies, as a rule, but that, when they did
not, they took the disease.

3. That other animals, which feed on carrion, and within the walls of
Athens these can hardly have been other than rats and cats, and possibly
pigs, were affected like the dogs.

There is no evidence as to the effect on cattle, horses, sheep, and
goats, because all these had been removed to Euboea.

The phenomenon of the disappearance of birds of prey before and during
outbreaks of epidemic pestilence has been asserted again and again in
literature. Yet it is very doubtful if the observation rests on any
sure evidence. Search has brought to light only one occasion on which
the truth of the fact has been deliberately tested, and then it was
directly contradicted. Russell says that at the commencement of the
plague of Aleppo, in which true plague was ushered in by typhus, no
desertion of birds was observed, and no mortality among cattle. The
old-time fancy that pestilence engendered in the clouds distempered the
atmosphere almost necessarily involved the presumption that the feathered
inhabitants of the air would be the first to feel its ill effects. In
the same way the belief that pestilence might reach the atmosphere in
the exhalations from marshes, led to similar fables attaching themselves
to the marsh-dwelling frog. Aristotle alludes to the increased number of
frogs in pestilential years, and Bacon and Horstius repeat his statement.
These children of the marsh are conceived of as products of its undue
activity. Horstius went so far as to assert the same of snails.

Livy[210] clearly asserts the disappearance of vultures from Rome before
and during the epidemic of 174 B. C. ‘Cadavera, intacta a canibus
et vulturibus, tabes absumebat: satisque constabat, nec illo, nec
priore anno, in tanta strage boum hominumque vulturium usquam visum.’
[Dead bodies rotted away, untouched by dogs and vultures: and it was
generally agreed that no vultures were to be seen either in that or the
preceding year in spite of so great a mortality of men and cattle.] In
this instance, then, it was not that they scented death from afar and
held aloof, but that they disappeared beforehand. If some undetected
epizootic—say of rats—had preceded the outbreak among cattle and men, the
vultures may well have perished at the outset from feeding on infected
material.

Other authors extend the observation to birds in general, and not only
to birds of prey, as though their affection was truly epizootic. Thus
Schenkius[211] says that in the plagues of 1505 and 1522 birds deserted
their nests and young ones. Goclenius says the same of the plague of
1612, and that they fell suddenly to the ground dead. Mercurialis says
that Venice was deserted by birds in 1576, and Short repeats this of
Dantzig in 1709. Diemerbroeck says that cage-birds died in the epidemics
of 1635 and 1636, and Sorbait records the same fact of the Viennese
pestilence of 1679. Most, if not all this succession of epidemics, were
unquestionably true Oriental plague, with or without typhus.

At present there is very little evidence of any extensive affection
of the lower animals by typhus. Mosler, many years ago, failed to
communicate it to dogs by injecting fresh typhus blood into their veins,
or by feeding them on fresh typhus excreta, although death with typhoid
symptoms followed, when the blood and stools had first been allowed
to decompose. In the last few years experimenters have succeeded in
communicating the disease to various monkeys by the agency of lice, but
dogs, rats, and guinea-pigs have hitherto proved refractory to infection.

On the other hand, there is abundant evidence of animal infection
with Oriental plague. Epizootics among rats and cats are well known.
Boccaccio asserted the susceptibility of pigs, and Michoud confirmed the
observation in the Yunnan epidemic of 1893. Dogs, poultry, deer, cattle,
monkeys, squirrels, and marmots have all been shown by various observers
to be prone to contagion.

Before accepting the evidence of Thucydides as to the disappearance of
birds as weighty evidence in favour of the presence of true plague, one
must consider the state of the country district around Athens, devastated
by fire and the sword, and denuded of all its stock, so as to offer
no promise of sustenance to bird visitors. But even so, one is still
confronted by his statement as to the domestic dogs, which are known to
be susceptible to plague and not known to be susceptible to typhus.

Thucydides says that no one was attacked a second time, or if he were
the result was not fatal. Immunity of this kind, comparatively complete,
is alike characteristic of typhus and plague: the question is one that
has provoked considerable controversy right down to modern times. Both
Curschmann and Murchison are agreed as to the extreme rarity of relapses
and reinfections in typhus: curiously, Murchison himself had two typical
severe attacks.

In the case of plague, Alexander Massaria,[212] from his experience at
Vicenza, came to the conclusion that one attack rendered a man immune
with very few exceptions, but that a second attack might be mortal.
Mercurialis and Van Helmont were in agreement as to the rarity of second
attacks. Diemerbroeck[213] recorded two cases of reinfection in the same
year of the plague at Nymwegen, and several cases at an interval of a few
years. During the plague of Marseilles in 1720, various writers observed
cases of reinfection, and relapse was also said to be frequent. In the
plague of 1771 at Moscow, Samilowitz, prejudiced by his own advocacy
of inoculation, denied the existence of reinfection, and suffered
retribution for his dogmatism by three relapses in his own person. In the
same plague both Mertens and Orraeus recorded cases of reinfection. In
the plague of Aleppo, Russell noted 28 cases of reinfection within three
years among 4,400 victims of plague. Thus the idea of complete immunity,
so prevalent popularly both in Europe and the Levant, must be accepted
with some reservation.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Metamorphoses_, vii. 520.

[2] _Hist. Francorum_, x. 1.

[3] _De Gestis Langobardorum_, iii. 24.

[4] A. Bastian, _Ein Besuch in San Salvador_, p. 318; and Frazer,
_Commentary on Pausanias_, ii. 10. 3.

[5] _The Great African Island_, p. 268.

[6] Gordon Cumming, _In the Hebrides_, pp. 53 seq.

[7] Aristophanes, _Plutus_, 733.

[8] Frazer, _Pausanias_, ii. 2. 8.

[9] Gordon Cumming, _loc. cit._

[10] _Iliad_, i. 44 seq.

[11] Derby, Homer’s _Iliad_.

[12] VII. xi. 2, tr. Bloomfield.

[13] Synonyms for Rudra.

[14] _Atharvaveda_, V. xi. 10.

[15] xvii. 41.

[16] _Hist. Anim._ vi. 37. 580 B.

[17] _Geographica_, xiii. 1. 48, and iii. 104.

[18] _Zoologist_, September 1892.

[19] Strabo, _Geographica_, iii. 104.

[20] 2 Kings xix. 35.

[21] ii. 141; and Rawlinson’s _Herodotus_, ed. 1880, vol. ii. 219-20.

[22] _Geographica_, xiii. 64.

[23] _Journal Asiatique_, 1st series, iii. 307.

[24] i. 39.

[25] _Revue Numismatique_, N.S. iii.

[26] _Nat. Anim._ xii. 5.

[27] _Geographica_, xiii. 1. 64.

[28] Newton, _Travels and Discoveries in the Levant_, i. 130.

[29] Thomas, _Two Years in Palestine_, p. 6.

[30] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, ed. 1900, ii. 423.

[31] _Iliad_, i. 39.

[32] Strabo, _loc. cit._

[33] Aeschylus, _Theb._ 145.

[34] Pausanias, v. 14. 1.

[35] Strabo, _loc. cit._

[36] Varro, _Rerum rusticarum_ i. 1. 6.

[37] Aymonier, _Revue de l’histoire des religions_, xxiv (1891) 236.

[38] _Morals: Essay on Envy and Hatred._

[39] 2 Samuel xxiv; and 1 Chronicles xxi.

[40] _Works_, 243.

[41] Tr. L. Campbell.

[42] _Life of Pericles._

[43] Tr. W. R. Frazer.

[44] xii. 58.

[45] _History of Greece._

[46] Jowett’s _Thucydides_. We have ventured to introduce one or two
slight modifications into Professor Jowett’s translation, indicating them
by italics. In medicine it makes a world of difference, whether a disease
is the _same_ or _similar_: its _course_ too, is something quite distinct
from its character.

[47] ii. 48 end.

[48] The discussion of clinical details has been relegated to an
Appendix, as they are rather of medical than of literary or artistic
interest. They are, nevertheless, essential to a full appreciation of the
merits of the description that Thucydides gives of the pestilence.

[49] viii. 41. 7.

[50] ii. 54.

[51] i. 3. 3.

[52] Pausanias, ix. 22. 1.

[53] _Life of Numa._

[54] Frazer, _Golden Bough_.

[55] Pausanias, ix. 22. 1.

[56] _Odes_, I. 37.

[57] I. vi. § 40.

[58] Livy, i. 31.

[59] Livy, i. 56, and Dion. Halic. _Antiq. Rom._ iv. 68.

[60] _Antiq. Rom._ ix. 40.

[61] Porphyry, _De Abstinentia_, ii. 56.

[62] Deuteronomy xii. 31; Leviticus xviii. 21; 2 Kings ii. 5-17.

[63] I. v. 2.

[64] IX. viii. 2.

[65] _Vita Apollonii_, iv. 10.

[66] iii. 6.

[67] iii. 8.

[68] iii. 5.

[69] Agnes Arber, _Herbals_, 1912.

[70] _Antiq. Rom._ x. 53; and Livy, iv. 32.

[71] Livy, iv. 21-5.

[72] Livy, v. 13.

[73] xiv. 70.

[74] Livy, vii. 2.

[75] Leviticus xiv. 7, and 53.

[76] _Nat. Hist._ xxviii. 63.

[77] Frazer, _Golden Bough_, and E. C. Gurdon, _County Folk-lore,
Suffolk_, p. 14.

[78] _Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg_, ii. 120, § 428.

[79] Livy, vii. 27.

[80] Livy, viii. 18.

[81] Livy, ix. 28.

[82] x. 31.

[83] Livy, X. 47, and _Epit. Lib._ xi.

[84] Valerius Maximus, i. 8.

[85] See Duruy, _History of Rome_, i. 555.

[86] ii. 10. 3.

[87] xxv. 26-8.

[88] _Punic War_, v. 580-626.

[89] Livy, xxxix. 41; xl. 19; xl. 37.

[90] xli. 21.

[91] _De Re Rustica_, i. 12.

[92] _Metamorphoses_, vii. 520 seq.

[93] Bk. I.

[94] iii. 5.

[95] x. 2.

[96] _Aeneid_, x. 272 seq.

[97] _Annals_, xiv. 22.

[98] _Quaestiones Naturales_, vi. 27. 28, and Seneca, _Physical Science_,
Clarke and Geikie.

[99] _Annals_, Bk. XVI.

[100] lxvii. 11.

[101] lxxii. 14.

[102] Herodian, Bk. I.

[103] Evagrius, _Hist._ iv. 28.

[104] xxiii. 7.

[105] Merivale, _Hist. of Rome_, vii. 578.

[106] vii. 15.

[107] _Hist. of Rome_, v. 186.

[108] _Commentar. I. in Hippocrat. Lib. VI, Epidem. Aph._ 29.

[109] _De Praesag. ex pulsibus_, iii. 4.

[110] _De Simplicium Medicamentorum Temperamentis et Facultatibus_, ix. 1.

[111] _Method. Medendi_, v. 12.

[112] _Hist. Eccles._ vii. 22.

[113] Trebellius Pollio, _Gallienus_, tom. ii.

[114] Pomponius Laetus, _Rom. Hist._ tom. ii.

[115] Pontius, _Vita Caecilii Cypriani_.

[116] _Compend. Historiarum, ex versione Xylandri_, p. 258.

[117] _Gallienus_, iv and v.

[118] _Hist. Eccles._ ix. 8.

[119] _Œuvres de Oribase, Bussemaker et Daremberg_, lib. 44. c. 17.

[120] _De Differ. Febr._ i, tom. vii, p. 2; 96, ed. Kuhn.

[121] _De Bello Persico_, ii. 22-3.

[122] _Hist._ iv. 28.

[123] _Hist._ iv. 28.

[124] _Hist._ v. 12.

[125] _Hist. Francorum_, iv. 5.

[126] vi. 14.

[127] iv. 31.

[128] _Hist. Francorum_, x. 1.

[129] x. 23.

[130] _De Gestis Langobardorum_, ii. 4.

[131] _Hist. Eccles._ vii. 22.

[132] xiv. 37.

[133] _Hist. Francorum_, x. 1.

[134] _De Gestis Langobardorum_, iii. 24.

[135] _Hist._ vi.

[136] This penitential procession has been wonderfully depicted by Dudden
in his _Gregory the Great_, vol. i, p. 217.

[137] _Hist._ ii. 3, and iii. 1.

[138] Bk. I, c. 25.

[139] _Essai sur la mortalité à Strasbourg_, p. 79.

[140] _De Gestis Langobardorum_, vi. 5.

[141] Caxton, _Golden Legend_; Jameson, _Sacred and Legendary Art_.

[142] See Frontispiece.

[143] Bascombe, _History of Epidemic Diseases_.

[144] Kremer, _Ueber die grossen Seuchen des Orients, nach arabischen
Quellen_.

[145] Caxton, _Golden Legend_; Jameson, _Sacred and Legendary Art_.

[146] iv. 8.

[147] _Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome._

[148] _Epistolae de rebus familiaribus_, viii. 7.

[149] Bk. I, c. 4.

[150] Traité II, Doct. ii, ch. 5.

[151] _Epidemics of the Middle Ages._

[152] _Histoire des Juifs._

[153] Krafft-Ebing, _Geschichte der Pest in Wien_.

[154] _Chronicon_, 1580.

[155] E. S. Prior, _Cathedral Builders_.

[156] Prior and Gardner, _Mediaeval Figure Sculpture in England_, p. 390.

[157] Ode 4.

[158] Bk. I, Eleg. 3.

[159] _Aeneid_, vi. 644.

[160] Passus xxiii. 100-5.

[161] Rio, _L’Art chrétien_; and Crawfurd, _Proceedings of Roy. Soc. of
Med._, 1913, vol. vi, pp. 37-48.

[162] Duff Gordon, _Story of Perugia_ (translation).

[163] _Pestblätter des xv. Jahrhunderts._

[164] Vol. i, Bk. I, and Trollope, _History of Commonwealth of Florence_,
vol. iv.

[165] Gruyer, _Raphaël et l’Antiquité_.

[166] _Nat. Hist._, lib. xxxv.

[167] _Aeneid_, iii. 140.

[168] Lanciani, _Golden Days of the Renaissance_.

[169] Bk. I, § 27 seq.

[170] Translated by Miss Egerton Castle, _Italian Literature_.

[171] Léon Gautier, _La Médecine à Genève jusqu’à la fin du dix-huitième
siècle_.

[172] _Livre de la Peste._

[173] Horatio Brown, _The Venetian Republic_.

[174] Molmenti, _Venezia_.

[175] Translated in _A Tragedy of the Great Plague of Milan_, R.
Fletcher, M. D. 1895.

[176] Joshua vi. 26.

[177] Deuteronomy xiii. 15-18.

[178] Nicolas Poussin, p. 134.

[179] p. 84.

[180] From an engraving in the author’s possession.

[181] _De Peste._

[182] _De Peste._

[183] _Reports to Royal Society._

[184] _Researches into the Laws and Phenomena of Pestilence._

[185] _Loimologia, and Dict. of Nat. Biog._

[186] Rabbi Joshua, ii. 403.

[187] Krafft-Ebing, _Geschichte der Pest in Wien_.

[188] _Traité de la Peste_, 2 vols., Genève, 1721; _Johns Hopkins
Hospital Bulletin_, August 1898.

[189] _Janus_, 1897, p. 297; and _Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin_.

[190] _La Peste de 1720_, p. 96.

[191] _Essay on Man_, iv. 107-8.

[192] vol. x, p. 91.

[193] p. 214.

[194] Richer, _L’Art et la médecine_.

[195] _Histoire de Napoléon_, ed. 1834, vol. i, p. 354.

[196] _Bourrienne et ses erreurs._

[197] _Mémoires sur Napoléon._

[198] Curschmann’s contribution, in Nothnagel’s _Encyclopaedia of
Practical Medicine_, is perhaps the most graphic and succinct account
of Typhus Fever in modern medical literature. The record of Thucydides
should be studied closely side by side with this. Murchison’s article, in
his _Treatise on Continued Fever_, though admirable, is so diffuse as to
make comparison difficult.

[199] _Iliad_ ii. 723.

[200] _Iliad_ viii. 405 and 419.

[201] _Adonis_, 16-17.

[202] _Agamemnon_, 645.

[203] _Antigone_, 652.

[204] _On Ancient Medicine_, § 16.

[205] _Coacae Praenotiones_, § 396.

[206] _Frogs_, 236.

[207] _Wasps_, 1119.

[208] _Ecclesiazusae_, 1057.

[209] _Epidemics_, iii.

[210] xli. 21.

[211] _Obs._ p. 870.

[212] _Tract. de Peste_, ed. 1669, p. 509.

[213] _De Peste_, Lib. IV. Hist. 37. 45.

OXFORD: HORACE HART M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

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