Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

An account of an offset of this pandemic at Antioch survives from the pen of the historian Evagrius,[124] who was born in a.d. 536 and spent the greater part of his life at Antioch. Apparently he knew nothing of the records of Procopius or Agathias, for he says that the history of this pestilence had not been written previously. He knew the narrative of the plague of Athens, for he says that this plague was ‘in some respects much like that which Thucydides described, in others quite unlike’: it cannot be said to have influenced either the form or the substance of his description. He says that it first reached Antioch in 540 b.c., whereas it did not appear at Byzantium till the spring of 542 b.c., and that the pandemic lasted altogether fifty-two years, exceeding ‘all the diseases that had ever been before Philostratus wondered at the plague, which was in his time, because it continued fifteen years’. This is presumed to have been the Antonine pestilence, for Philostratus was born in Lemnos about a.d. 170, but spent most of his life in Rome and died there in a.d. 245. Evagrius had the fullest opportunities of observing the plague at close quarters, for as a boy at school he himself suffered from an inguinal bubo, and in later years he lost his wife and several children of plague. He was but three years old when it first reached Antioch, so that his description must represent the disease after it had been rife for many years. Evagrius traces its origin further back than does Procopius, placing it in Ethiopia, so that it may actually have originated in an endemic area in Central Africa. Spreading over the whole world, it attacked cities quite irrespective of season, summer and winter alike. Evagrius has no doubt whatever of the contagiousness of the distemper. Those, he says, who escaped one year were attacked the next, and those who fled to places free from disease were the first to succumb, as they carried the contagion with them. Infection seemed to be taken in various ways—by sharing beds, by actual contact, by visiting infected houses, or even by casual meeting in the market-place. Some, however, escaped in spite of running every risk of infection.

The description that Evagrius gives of the symptoms of the disease, though brief, is wonderfully comprehensive. It shows that he was cognizant of the tonsillar, the bubonic, and the carbuncular or pustular types at least, and the rapidity of a fatal issue in a proportion of the cases suggests that pneumonic and septicaemic forms were also rife. ‘The disease’, he writes, ‘was compound and mixt with many other maladies. It took some men first in the head, made their eyes as red as blood and puffed up their cheeks: afterwards it fell at their throat, and whomsoever it took it dispatched him out of the way. It began with some with a fire and voiding of all that was within them, in others with swellings about the secret parts of the body, and there arose burning fires, so that they died thereof within two or three days of the furthest in such sort and of so perfect a remembrance as if they had not been sick at all; others died mad, and carbuncles that arose out of the flesh killed many.’

Agathias[125] (b. a.d. 536) describes a recrudescence of this pandemic in Byzantium in a.d. 558. He carried on the history of Procopius from its termination to a.d. 558. He says that the disease had never really disappeared since the first outbreak in a.d. 542, when it burst out furiously a second time in the spring of this year. Many persons fell as though stricken with apoplexy: those who held out longest died on the fifth day. Buboes and continuous fever were the outstanding features, as in the previous visitation. ‘People of all ages perished indiscriminately, but especially the young and vigorous and those in the flower of youth: and of them the males, for the females were not so much affected.’ With an epidemic recurrence such as this, the chief incidence would necessarily be on the young, who had neither resisted, nor acquired immunity from, a previous attack. The character of their occupation or of their habits of life would doubtless explain the special liability of the males to infection.

Gregory of Tours[126] (a.d. 540-94) testifies to the widespread character of the plague in France. In a.d. 549 he says that it depopulated the province of Arles, and afterwards devastated Narbonne. Here Felix, bishop of Nantes,[127] succumbed to the sloughing of his legs caused by the application of cantharides plasters to a crop of pustules.

In a.d. 566, before the plague invaded the Auvergne,[128] a succession of portents terrified the district. Three or four great brilliant lights made their appearance around the sun, which nevertheless underwent almost complete eclipse in October, looking dark and discoloured and like a bag. The heaven also seemed to be on fire, and many strange signs were seen. Then in a.d. 567 the epidemic raged throughout the district, causing an immense mortality. Lyons, Bourges, Chalons, and Dijon also lost a large part of their population. Coffins for the dead soon failed, and as many as ten bodies would be placed in the same grave. One Sunday no less than three hundred corpses were counted in the church of St. Peter at Clermont. Death seized the victims with dramatic suddenness. ‘There grew in the groin or armpit a lesion in the shape of a serpent, the effect of which was such that men yielded up their souls on the second or third day, and its violence completely took away their senses.’

In this epidemic buboes were evidently most frequently found in the groins, for Gregory repeatedly speaks of the disease as lues inguinaria or morbus inguinalis and the like.

Plague broke out at Marseilles[129] in a.d. 587, brought there by a merchant ship from Spain, which concealed its contact with a plague-stricken port. Several people made purchases from it, and in consequence eight inhabitants of one house were fatally infected. As in the epidemic of a.d. 1720, the disease did not spread immediately to the whole town. Bishop Theodore and a few of his suite shut themselves up in the church of St. Victor, and there, amid the general desolation, implored the mercy of God with prayer and vigil till the epidemic was at an end. On the return of the fugitive populace a belated outbreak exacted its appointed tribute.

Around Avignon[130] celestial portents foretold the plague that broke out in a.d. 590. The earth was illuminated at night by a light as bright as the midday. Balls of fire were seen tracking the sky during the night. A violent earthquake was felt at dawn in mid-June. The sun suffered almost complete eclipse in mid-August. Abundant autumn thunderstorms and rain raised the rivers in flood.

Meantime Italy, too, had been in like case. Paul the Deacon[131] (a.d. 720-90) briefly refers to a plague that had devastated Liguria in a.d. 565. He says that the plague was presaged by the sudden appearance of marks on houses, doors, utensils, and clothing, and the more they tried to efface them the more conspicuous they became. Eusebius[132] in like manner told of moulds on the walls of houses in a previous pestilence, and in Leviticus[133] we read of greenish and reddish marks on houses infected with leprosy. Towards the end of the year buboes began to attack the people, followed by a fever that killed in three days. The inhabitants fled, leaving property and cattle and crops, and desolation reigned supreme.

But it was on the head of hapless Rome that the full fury of the expiring storm was destined to spend its virulence. Both Gregory of Tours[134] and Paul the Deacon have left a record of the havoc. Gregory says that he obtained his information from his own deacon, who happened to be in Rome at the time. Paul the Deacon[135] seems to borrow his material from Gregory of Tours. An inundation of the Tiber in a.d. 589 resulted in the destruction of many old buildings on its banks and in the flooding of the granaries of the church, so that immense stores of grain were spoilt. The river yielded up a multitude of serpents, and a dragon of extraordinary size was seen to float through the city on its passage to the sea. Probably these were eels from the muddy bed of the Tiber, metamorphosed after the manner of Ovid into serpents: the dragon no one seems to have seen at close quarters. The inundation was followed in a.d. 590 by a severe outburst of bubonic plague (pestilentia, quam inguinariam vocant).