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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

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 Insensibly the desire to understand supplanted the desire merely to record, and the desire to explain superseded the endeavour to understand.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.

LIST OF PLATES

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 , 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, in Gregory of Tours, in Paul the Deacon, and in many other writers. The Book of Numbers too 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, 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 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. 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.

Homer's aged priest Chryses, when he calls upon Apollo to avenge the ravishing of his daughter, invokes him as God of the Silver Bow . 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.

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.

Other gods than Rudra can stem the pestilence. 'Vayu 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 shall send their missiles astray, and Krandramas shall bar the way of the enemy that has not started.' 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.'

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.'

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 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, Aristotle, Strabo, Theophrastus, Pliny, and others testify to this. Loeffler 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 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 , 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.' 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.

Herodotus 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 has a story of mice eating up the bow-strings, and a variant of it appears also in Chinese annals, 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.

Many votive offerings in the form of mice have been found, at Alexandria Troas, in Palestine, 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, 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, Locust Apollo, Wolf Apollo, and Zeus Averter of Flies. Even lowlier pests are absorbed into the godhead, so that we have Apollo Erythibius , and the Romans personified it and worshipped it as Robigus . The Chams of Indo-China offer sacrifices to a rude pillar-idol, called Yang-tikuh , when swarms of rats infest the fields. 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 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 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.

One other Biblical 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 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.

FOOTNOTES:

Synonym for Rudra.

Synonym for Rudra.

xvii. 41.

i. 39.

Pausanias, v. 14. 1.

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 , that dispels the darkness of pestilence: in Sophocles his is the light that illumines the dark places of mind.

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.

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 , 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.

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