CHAPTER IX - ALARMS
THE next year was the year of the great pestilence. Pestilence, indeed, had ravaged Italy for five consecutive summers previous to that year. But the great pestilence, for two centuries afterwards spoken of merely as “the pestilence,” fell in the nine hundred and nineteenth year after the founding of Rome, the year 166 of our era, when Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had been co-Emperors for a little more than five years and Brinnaria had been almost five years a Vestal. It devastated the entire Empire from Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia to Segontium, opposite the isle of Anglesea. Every farm, hamlet and village suffered; in not one town did it leave more than half the inhabitants alive; few cities escaped with so much as a third of the population surviving. Famine accompanied the pestilence in all the western portions of the Roman world, and from famine perished many whom the plague had spared.
This disaster was, in fact, the real deathblow to Rome’s greatness and from it dates the decline of the Roman power. It broke the tradition of civilization and culture which had grown from the small beginnings of the primitive Greeks and Etruscans more than two thousand years before. During all those two thousand years there had been a more or less steady and a scarcely interrupted development of the agriculture, manufactures, arts, skill, knowledge and power of the mass of humanity about the Mediterranean Sea; men who fought with shields and spears and swords, also with arrows and slings, believed in approximately the same sort of gods; wore clothing rather wrapped round them than upholstered on their bodies as with us; reclined on sofas at meals; lived mostly out of doors all the year round; built their houses about courtyards, and made rows of columns the chief feature of their architecture, and sheltering themselves in colonnades, sunny or shady according to the time of the year, the chief feature of their personal comfort. Up to the year of the great pestilence that civilization had prospered, had produced a long series of generals, inventors, architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, poets, authors, and orators. Everywhere men had shown self-confidence, capacity, originality, power and competence and had achieved success for two thousand years.
The great pestilence of 166 so depleted the population that Rome never again pushed forward the boundaries of her Empire. Some lucky armies won occasional victories, but Rome never again put on the field an overwhelming army for foreign conquest, never again could fully man, even defensively, the long line of her frontiers.
All classes of the people suffered, but most of all the rich, the well-to-do, the educated and the cultured classes of the towns and cities. And the main point of difference between the great pestilence and the others which had preceded it was the universality of its incidence. For two thousand years pestilence had occurred at intervals, but previously not everywhere at once.
If one country suffered others did not; if half the Mediterranean world, even, was devastated, the other half escaped. From the immune regions competence and capacity had flowed into the ruined areas and civilization had gone on. But the great pestilence left no district unharmed. In six months it killed off all the brains and skill, all the culture and ingenuity in the Empire. There were so few capable men left in any line of activity that the next generation grew up practically untaught. The tradition of two thousand years was broken. In all the Mediterranean world, until centuries later, descendants of the savage invaders developed their new civilization on the ruins of the old; no man ever again made a great speech, wrote a great book or play or poem, painted a good picture, carved a good statue, or contrived a good campaign or battle. The brains of the Roman world died that year, the originality of the whole nation was killed at once, the tradition broke off.
Of course, the survivors did not realize the finality of the disaster, but they did realize its magnitude. In Italy, fed almost wholly by imported food, the famine was most severe. In Italy the pestilence was most virulent. Men disputed as to whether the great army of Lucius Verus, returned home from its splendid victories in Parthia, had brought with it a form of pestilence worse than that of the five previous years, or whether the returned soldiers had merely been a specially easy prey to the pestilence already abroad in Rome. Whichever was true, the veterans died like flies. So did the residents of Rome. Whole blocks of tenements were emptied of their last occupier and stood wholly vacant; many palaces of the wealthy were left without so much as a guardian, the last inmate dead; the splendid furnishings, even the silver plate, untouched in every room; for the plague had so ravaged Rome that there were not even robbers and thieves left to steal To the survivors, since genuine piety as they knew it was all but universal among the Romans, it was some small comfort, a faint ray of hope, a sign that the gods were not inexorably wrathful, that, after Rabulla’s death, there was no case of pestilence in the Atrium, not even among the servitors, that no Vestal so much as sickened. Through it all the six remained hale and sound.
But when the plague abated, only Manlia had any living relations left her. The other five had lost every kinsman and kinswoman, to the ninth and tenth degree.
Brinnaria’s parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins were all among the victims. This left her grave and sobered with grief, with no trace of her girlish wildness apparent.