The Historians' History of the World 03

For the character of the disorder surpassed description; and while in other respects also it attacked every one in a degree more grievous than human nature could endure, in the following way, especially, it proved itself to be something different from any of the diseases familiar to man.[50] All the birds and beasts that prey on human bodies, either did not come near them, though there were many lying unburied, or died after they had tasted them. As a proof of this, there was a marked disappearance of birds of this kind, and they were not seen either engaged in this way, or in any other; while the dogs, from their domestic habits, more clearly afforded opportunity of marking the result I have mentioned.

The disease, then, to pass over many various points of peculiarity, as it happened to be different in one case from another, was in its general nature such as I have described. And no other of those to which they were accustomed afflicted them besides this at that time; or whatever there was, it ended in this. And of those who were seized by it some died in neglect, others in the midst of every attention. And there was no one settled remedy, so to speak, by applying which they were to give them relief: for what did good to one, did harm to another. And no constitution showed itself fortified against it, in point either of strength or weakness: but it seized on all alike, even those that were treated with all possible regard to diet. But the most dreadful part of the whole calamity was the dejection felt whenever any one found himself sickening (for by immediately falling into a feeling of despair, they abandoned themselves much more certainly to the disease, and did not resist it), and the fact of their being charged with infection from attending on one another, and so dying like sheep. And it was this that caused the greatest mortality amongst them; for if through fear they were unwilling to visit each other, they perished from being deserted, and many houses were emptied for want of some one to attend to the sufferers; or if they did visit them, they met their death, and especially such as made any pretensions to goodness; for through a feeling of shame they were unsparing of themselves, in going into their friends’ houses when deserted by all others; since even the members of the family were at length worn out by the very moanings of the dying, and were overcome by their excessive misery. Still more, however, than even these, did such as had escaped the disorder show pity for the dying and the suffering, both from their previous knowledge of what it was, and from their being now in no fear of it themselves: for it never seized the same person twice, so as to prove actually fatal. And such persons were felicitated by others; and themselves, in the excess of their present joy, entertained for the future also, to a certain degree, a vain hope that they would never now be carried off even by any other disease.

In addition to the original calamity, what oppressed them still more was the crowding into the city from the country, especially the newcomers. For as they had no houses, but lived in stifling cabins at the hot season of the year, the mortality amongst them spread without restraint; bodies lying on one another in the death agony, and half-dead creatures rolling about in the streets and round all the fountains, in their longing for water. The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves, were full of the corpses of those that died there in them: for in the surpassing violence of the calamity, men not knowing what was to become of them, came to disregard everything, both sacred and profane, alike. And all the laws were violated which they before observed respecting burials; and they buried them as each one could. And many from want of proper means, in consequence of so many of their friends having died, had recourse to shameless modes of sepulture; for on the piles prepared for others, some, anticipating those who had raised them, would lay their own dead relatives and set fire to them; and others, while the body of a stranger was burning, would throw on the top of it the one they were carrying, and go away.