“Qui fuerant autem præsto contagibus ibant.”
(L. 1241.)
Ovid, in like manner, says of the dead bodies:
“Afflatuque nocent et agunt contagia latè.”
(Metam. v, 551.)
And so also, Silius Italicus:
“Et posuere avidæ mortis contagia pestes.”
(Lib. xiv.)
The historians we must dismiss in a few words, with stating that allusions to the infectious nature of certain diseases are to be met with in Livy, Dionysius the Halicarnassian, Diodorus Siculus, Appian, Plutarch, Quintus Curtius, Dio Cassius, Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Evagrius. Procopius was a non-contagionist.
The philosopher Aristotle, in one of his problems, makes it a question why the plague is the only disease which infects those who approach the sick. (Probl. i.) There is a curious passage in the works of the orator Isocrates, which shows that consumption was reckoned contagious in his days. (Æginet.) The elder Pliny mentions the contagion of the pestilence. (Hist. Nat. xxxiii, 80.)