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THE DECLINE AND FALL
and revived; but it was not till the end of a calamitous period of fifty-two years that mankind recovered their health or the air resumed its pure and salubrious quality. No facts have been preserved to sustain an account, or even a conjecture, of the numbers that perished in this extraordinary mortality. I only find that, during three months, five, and at length ten, thousand persons died each day at Constantinople; that many cities of the East were left vacant; and that in several districts of Italy the harvest and the vintage withered on the ground. The triple scourge of war, pestilence, and famine, afflicted the subjects of Justinian, and his reign is disgraced by a visible decrease of the human species, which has never been repaired in some of the fairest countries of the globe.[1]
- ↑ After some figures of rhetoric, the sands of the sea, &c. Procopius (Anecdot. c. i8) attempts a more definite account: that μυριάδας μυριάδων μυρίας had been exterminated under the reign of the Imperial dæmon. The expression is obscure in grammar and arithmetic, and a literal interpretation would produce several millions of millions. Alemannus (p. 80) and Cousin (tom. iii. p. 178) translate this passage, "two hundred millions"; but I am ignorant of their motives. If we drop the μυριάδας the remaining μυριάδων μυριάς, a myriad of myriads, would furnish one hundred millions, a number not wholly inadmissible. [The number in Procopius is purely imaginary. Cp. Panchenko in Vizant. Vrem. iii. p. 311.]
