introduced the well-constructed sentence and even flow of language from Greek into Roman oratory.
Cicero, Brutus, 25, 27, 86, 97; Vell. Pat. ii. 10; Appian, Hisp. 80-83; Livy, epit. 56.
3. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, father of the triumvir. In 81 B.C. he was praetor of Sicily, where he made himself detested by oppression and extortion. In the civil wars he sided with Sulla and bought much of the confiscated property of the Marian partisans. Afterwards he became leader of the popular party, and with the help of Pompey was elected consul for 78, in spite of the opposition of Sulla. When the dictator died, Lepidus tried in vain to prevent the burial of his body in the Campus Martius, and to alter the constitution established by him. His colleague Lutatius Catulus found a tribune to place his veto on Lepidus’s proposals; and the quarrel between the two parties in the state became so acute that the senate made the consuls swear not to take up arms. Lepidus was then ordered by the senate to go to his province, Transalpine Gaul; but he stopped in Etruria on his way from the city and began to levy an army. He was declared a public enemy early in 77, and forthwith marched against Rome. A battle took place in the Campus Martius, Pompey and Catulus commanding the senatorial army, and Lepidus was defeated. He sailed to Sardinia, in order to put himself into connexion with Sertorius in Spain, but here also suffered a repulse, and died shortly afterwards.
Plutarch, Sulla, 34, 38, Pompey, 15; Appian, B.C. i. 105, 107; Livy, epit. 90; Florus iii. 23; Cicero, Balbus, 15.
4. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, the triumvir. He joined the party of Julius Caesar in the civil wars, and was by the dictator thrice nominated magister equitum and raised to the consulship in 46 B.C. He was a man of great wealth and influence, and it was probably more on this ground than on account of his ability that Caesar raised him to such honours. In the beginning of 44 B.C. he was sent to Gallia Narbonensis, but before he had left the city with his army Caesar was murdered. Lepidus, as commander of the only army near Rome, became a man of great importance in the troubles which followed. Taking part with Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), he joined in the reconciliation which the latter effected with the senatorial party, and afterwards sided with him when open war broke out. Antony, after his defeat at Mutina, joined Lepidus in Gaul, and in August 43 Octavian (afterwards the emperor Augustus), who had forced the senate to make him consul, effected an arrangement with Antony and Lepidus, and their triumvirate was organized at Bononia. Antony and Octavian soon reduced Lepidus to an inferior position. His province of Gaul and Spain was taken from him; and, though he was included in the triumvirate when it was renewed in 37, his power was only nominal. He made an effort in the following year to regain some reality of power, conquered part of Sicily, and claimed the whole island as his province, but Octavian found means to sap the fidelity of his soldiers, and he was obliged to supplicate for his life. He was allowed to retain his fortune and the office of pontifex maximus to which he had been appointed in 44, but had to retire into private life. According to Suetonius (Augustus, 16) he died at Circeii in the year 13.
See Rome: History ii., “The Republic,” Period C, ad fin.; Appian, Bell. Civ. ii.-v.; Dio Cassius xli.-xlix.; Vell. Pat. ii. 64, 80; Orelli’s Onomasticon to Cicero.
LE PLAY, PIERRE GUILLAUME FRÉDÉRIC (1806–1882), French engineer and economist, was born at La Rivière-Saint-Sauveur (Calvados) on the 11th of April 1806, the son of a custom-house official. He was educated at the École Polytechnique, and from there passed into the State Department of Mines. In 1834 he was appointed head of the permanent committee of mining statistics, and in 1840 engineer-in-chief and professor of metallurgy at the school of mines, where he became inspector in 1848. For nearly a quarter of a century Le Play spent his vacations travelling in the various countries of Europe, and collected a vast quantity of material bearing upon the social condition of the working classes. In 1855 he published Les Ouvriers européens, which comprised a series of thirty-six monographs on the budgets of typical families selected from the most diverse industries. The Académie des Sciences conferred on him the Montyon prize. Napoleon III., who held him in high esteem, entrusted him with the organization of the Exhibition of 1855, and appointed him counsellor of state, commissioner general of the Exhibition of 1867, senator of the empire and grand officer of the Legion of Honour. He died in Paris on the 5th of April 1882.
In 1856 Le Play founded the Société internationale des études pratiques d’Économie sociale, which has devoted its energies principally to forwarding social studies on the lines laid down by its founder. The journal of the society, La Réforme sociale, founded in 1881, is published fortnightly. Other works of Le Play are La Réforme sociale (2 vols., 1864; 7th ed., 3 vols., 1887); L’Organisation de la famille (1871); La Constitution de l’Angleterre (in collaboration with M. Delaire, 1875). See article in Harvard Quarterly Journal of Economics (June 1890), by H. Higgs.
LEPROSY (Lepra Arabum, Elephantiasis Graecorum, Aussatz,
Spedalskhed), the greatest disease of medieval Christendom,
identified, on the one hand, with a disease endemic from the
earliest historical times (1500 B.C.) in the delta and valley
of the Nile, and, on the other hand, with a disease now common in Asia,
Africa, South America, the West Indies, and certain isolated
localities of Europe. An authentic representation of the leprosy
of the middle ages exists in a picture at Munich by Holbein,
painted at Augsburg in 1516; St Elizabeth gives bread and wine
to a prostrate group of lepers, including a bearded man whose face
is covered with large round reddish knobs, an old woman whose
arm is covered with brown blotches, the leg swathed in bandages
through which matter oozes, the bare knee also marked with
discoloured spots, and on the head a white rag or plaster, and,
thirdly, a young man whose neck and face (especially round the
somewhat hairless eyebrows) are spotted with brown patches
of various size. It is conjectured by Virchow that the painter
had made studies of lepers from the leper-houses then existing
at Augsburg. These external characters of medieval leprosy
agree with the descriptions of it by the ancients, and with the
pictures of modern leprosy given by Danielssen and Boeck for
Norway, by various authors for sporadic European cases, by
Anderson for Malacca, by Carter for India, by Wolff for Madeira
and by Hillis for British Guiana. There has been some confusion
in the technical naming of the disease; it is called Elephantiasis
(Leontiasis, Satyriasis) by the Greek writers, and Lepra by the
Arabians.
Leprosy is now included among the parasitic diseases (see Parasitic Diseases). The cause is believed to be infection by the bacillus leprae, a specific microbe discovered by Armauer Hansen in 1871. It is worthy of note that tuberculosis is very common among lepers, and especially attacks the serous membranes. The essential character of leprosy is a great multiplication of cells, resembling the “granulation cells” of lupus and syphilis, in the tissues affected, which become infiltrated and thickened, with degeneration and destruction of their normal elements. The new cells vary in size from ordinary leucocytes to giant cells three or four times larger. The bacilli are found in these cells, sometimes in small numbers, sometimes in masses. The structures most affected are the skin, nerves, mucous membranes and lymphatic glands.
The symptoms arise from the anatomical changes indicated, and they vary according to the parts attacked. Three types of disease are usually described—(1) nodular, (2) smooth or anaesthetic, (3) mixed. In the first the skin is chiefly affected, in the second the nerves; the third combines the features of both. It should be understood that this classification is purely a matter of convenience, and is based on the relative prominence of symptoms, which may be combined in all degrees. The incubation period of leprosy—assuming it to be due to infection—is unknown, but cases are on record which can only be explained on the hypothesis that it may be many years. The invasion is usually slow and intermittent. There are occasional feverish attacks, with the usual constitutional disturbance and other slight premonitory signs, such as changes in the colour of the skin and in its sensibility. Sometimes, but rarely, the onset is acute and the characteristic symptoms develop rapidly. These begin with
