OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
438
fication quickly ensued, and the fifth day was commonly the term of his life. The fever was often accompanied with lethargy or delirium; the bodies of the sick were covered with black pustules or carbuncles, the symptoms of immediate death; and, in the constitutions too feeble to produce an eruption, the vomiting of blood was followed by a mortification of the bowels. To pregnant women the plague was generally mortal; yet one infant was drawn alive from his dead mother, and three mothers survived the loss of their infected fœtus. Youth was the most perilous season, and the female sex was less susceptible than the male; but every rank and profession was attacked with indiscriminate rage, and many of those who escaped were deprived of the use of their speech, without being secure from a return of the disorder.[1] The physicians of Constantinople were zealous and skilful, but their art was baffled by the various symptoms and pertinacious vehemence of the disease; the same remedies were productive of contrary effects, and the event capriciously disappointed their prognostics of death or recovery. The order of funerals and the right of sepulchres were confounded; those who were left without friends or servants lay unburied in the streets or in their desolate houses; and a magistrate was authorised to collect the promiscuous heaps of dead bodies, to transport them by land or water, and to inter them in deep pits beyond the precincts of the city. Their own danger and the prospect of public distress awakened some remorse in the minds of the most vicious of mankind; the confidence of health again revived their passions and habits; but philosophy must disdain the observation of Procopius that the lives of such men were guarded by the peculiar favour of fortune or providence. He forgot, or perhaps he secretly recollected, that the plague had touched the person of Justinian himself; but the abstemious diet of the emperor may suggest, as in the case of Socrates, a more rational and honourable cause for his recovery.[2] During his sickness, the public consternation was expressed in the habits of the
- ↑ Thucydides (c. 51) affirms that the infection could only be once taken; but Evagrius, who had family experience of the plague, observes that some persons who had escaped the first, sunk under the second, attack; and this repetition is confirmed by Fabius Paullinus (p. 588). I observe that on this head physicians are divided; and the nature and operation of the disease may not always be similar.
- ↑ It was thus that Socrates had been saved by his temperance, in the plague of Athens (Aul. Gellius, Noct. Attic, ii. 1). Dr. Mead accounts for the peculiar salubrity of religious houses, by the two advantages of seclusion and abstinence (p. 18, 19).
