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[87] 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[88] 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[89] 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[90] 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[91] 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.