In his picture of the mythical plague that afflicted the people of Aegina, Ovid[93] exacts contributions alike from Thucydides, Lucretius, and Vergil, while there are certain features that bear a strong resemblance to Diodorus Siculus. His story is that Minos, King of Crete, the second king of the name, goes in quest of allies to the island of Aegina, and courts unsuccessfully the aid of its king Aeacus. As soon as he has departed, Cephalus comes as ambassador from Athens and obtains help from Aeacus, who gives him an account of the pestilence that had formerly raged in Aegina, and dwells on its marvellous repeopling. Ovid maintains sufficient independence of his models for us to be able to gather something at least of current ideas of pestilence, set though it is in an atmosphere of antiquity. At first the disease was referred to natural causation and so was combated by medicines:
Dum visum mortale malum tantaeque latebat Causa nocens cladis, pugnatum est arte medendi. Exitium superabat opem, quae victa iacebat.
The tendency was now to regard pestilence as a natural process, until it overstepped habitual limitations, and triumphantly defied the resources of orthodox medicine. Then popular imagination saw in it the hand of a god, and forthwith set it outside the confines of recognized pathology. So now Ovid ascribes the Aeginetan plague to the anger of Juno, because the island was named after her adulterous rival Aegina, who was carried there by Jupiter, and by him became the mother of Aeacus, King of Aegina. But side by side with this Ovid lays stress on various meteorological phenomena, that accompanied or preluded the pestilence—the earth encompassed with gross darkness, a drowsy heat in the clouds, and persistent hot winds, as though he believed in some close causal connexion. He conceives the virus to be communicable in water, for fountains and lakes were deemed to be infected, and the rivers tainted with the venom of innumerable snakes. He dwells at length on the epizootic, and elaborates this feature far more even than Livy, and true to the habitual character of Roman pestilence, he makes it precede the human epidemic. He holds fast the doctrine of contagion, which he conceives to be transmitted by the dead as well as the living. Ovid’s description of pestilence unmasks his shallow nature. He shows himself to be no more and no less than an elegant literary trifler. One feels in the easy flow of his verse and the light vagaries of his picturesque imagination an unconcern and indifference to the horrible realities he handles. He has no power, like Thucydides, to plumb the depths of pathos, and the reader turns from his catalogue of sufferings with no emotion of horror, still less with one of sympathy. One looks in vain for some vestige of the moral earnestness of Lucretius. Even for his deities the springs of action reside in the lowlier human passions. Caprice and jealousy move Juno to send the pestilence: humanity is the sport of these infirmities. When man’s conception of Divine Providence had sunk so low, it was well that Imperial Rome should be without religion.
Manilius,in his Astronomica,[94] composed about the Christian era, asserts with confidence, that comets presage pestilence. The belief is probably far older than Manilius, though it is difficult to cite exact authorities. Livy[95] speaks of a bright light in the sky before the plague of 462 b.c.; ‘coelum ardere visum est plurimo igni’: and Dionysius of Halicarnassus[96] recounts the lighting up of a fire in the heavens before that of 450 b.c.: ἐν οὐρανῷ σέλα φερόμενα καὶ πυρὸς ἀνάψεις. Allusions such as these would seem to signify the appearance of a comet. Vergil[97] is even more explicit:
Non secus ac liquida si quando nocte cometae Sanguinei lugubre rubent, aut Sirius ardor, Ille sitim morbosque ferens mortalibus aegris Nascitur, et laevo contristat lumine coelum.
Of their supposed malign influence on human affairs in general there is no doubt. Tacitus[98] assigns to them even a political significance, for he says that in popular opinion they always portend a revolution to kingdoms.
Seneca,[99] in his Physical Science, makes the specific statement that ‘after great earthquakes it is usual for a pestilence to occur’. The concurrence of the two had been mentioned previously by Thucydides, Diodorus Siculus, Livy, and others, but Seneca would seem to be the first to attempt to define the exact relation of the one to the other. In the Campanian earthquake of a.d. 63 a flock of 600 sheep had perished mysteriously, near Pompeii. Seneca conceives that earthquakes liberate poisonous fumes imprisoned in the earth, or pent up in marshes, which serve to taint the air. Flocks suffer most, he thinks, because they live in the open, and also drink the poison-laden water. They feed too with heads close to the ground and so receive the concentrated venom, before it has become diluted: and then he adds: ‘If it had issued in greater volume, it would have injured man too, but the abundant supply of pure air counteracted it, before it could rise high enough to be breathed by any human being.’ And he proceeds: ‘The better is ever conquered by the worse. Even that pure air of heaven changes then to pestilential. Thence come sudden and continuous deaths, and portentous forms of disease, that spring from unexampled causes. The disaster is long-or short-lived according to the strength of the sources of infection. Nor does the plague cease, until the freedom of heaven and the tossing of the winds have banished that fatal air.’
Seneca had probably stumbled on the true explanation of the death of the Campanian sheep, for Geikie says that after an eruption of Mount Vesuvius the escape of carbonic acid gas has been known to suffocate hundreds of hares, partridges, and pheasants. Seneca, in conformity with the learned opinion of his time, regards volcanoes and earthquakes as closely allied phenomena. Earthquakes were regarded as the product in the main of violent commotion of the air. Niebuhr, like Seneca, expressed a firm belief in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions as causes of pestilence, a thesis that many writers have sought to substantiate. It is tempting, even to-day, to speculate on migrations of rats set in motion by subterranean activity. But a careful survey of a sufficient series of earthquakes and plagues lends little support to such a proposition. Each may occur alike before or after, with or without the other, and their frequent concurrence in ancient history denotes no more than that the eyes of historians were focused, almost exclusively, on a narrow tract of land around the shores of the Mediterranean, in which earthquakes were and are notoriously of frequent occurrence. Two years after the great earthquake Campania was devastated by a hurricane, and Rome desolated by pestilence. Tacitus[100] says that the pestilence swept away ‘all classes of human beings without any such derangement of the atmosphere as to be visibly apparent. Yet the houses were filled with dead bodies and the streets with funerals.’ Tacitus declares unhesitatingly for the production of pestilence by natural and not by supernatural agency.
The year a.d. 79 is ever memorable for the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii. It was followed by pestilence, which Dion Cassius attributes to ashes from Vesuvius. Dust had been suspect from the remotest ages of antiquity. At the time of the Exodus Moses was told to sprinkle dust before heaven. ‘And it shall become dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man.’ Livy and Plutarch each attributed the plague that broke out among the Gauls, when besieging Rome under Brennus, to the dust and ashes of the houses they had burnt. Philo, too, ascribes a pestilence of about the year a.d. 92 to hot dust irritating the skin.
Dion Cassius[101] mentions a plague that broke out in the reign of Domitian (a.d. 81-96), and which may be the same as that mentioned by Philo. ‘Certain individuals’, he says, ‘poisoned needles and set to work to prick whomsoever they wished: several who were pricked died without knowing anything about it: but some of the scoundrels were denounced and punished; and that happened not only in Rome, but over all the world so to say.’ Some initial punctiform eruption may perhaps have simulated a needle-prick. Belief in the dissemination of pestilence by the cutaneous inoculation of poison was destined to flourish for many centuries. Dion Cassius[102] himself repeats the statement in the case of another pestilence in the reign of Commodus (a.d. 187): ‘In the reign of Commodus occurred the most violent sickness I have ever known: at Rome two thousand persons often died in a single day. But many died, not only in Rome, but in all parts of the empire, in another manner: scoundrels, poisoning little needles with certain noxious substances, transmitted the disease in this way for pay: this had been done already in the reign of Domitian.’ For three years then famine and pestilence worked hand in hand to ruin Rome, and the people in their fury clamoured for a victim. A pleasant sacrifice was handy in the Phrygian freedman Cleander, the greedy and infamous minister of Commodus. It was eagerly bruited that Cleander had hoarded wheat, and the maddened populace, surging to the palace of Commodus, clamoured for the head of the hated favourite. The Emperor, fearful for his own life, at the instance of the women of his court demanded that the head of Cleander should be thrown from the palace to the people. The spectacle of this bloody expiation appeased the fury of the rabble. On the advice of his physicians[103] Commodus himself beat a hasty retreat to Laurentum, to seek an antidote in the scent of its abundant laurels. Those who remained in Rome filled their noses and ears with sweet ointments, to neutralize the pestilential exhalations from infected bodies and from the contagious atmosphere. At last a Roman emperor is found, in presence of pestilence, consulting—not the Sibylline books, not the oracle, not the omens—but a physician, and obeying his instruction. Medicine has tardily come into her own, and Pliny’s sarcasm, that Rome prospered for 600 years without physicians, has lost its sting. But we shall see presently that the hour for professional exaltation is not yet.