Epidemics. 181 



Gibbon, in his " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," 

 copies directly from Procopius, who gives a very faithful outline 

 of the plague as seen in his day. Let this description, then, 

 suffice for our present purpose : 



" Ethiopia and Egypt have been stigmatized in 

 every age, as the original source and seminary of the plague.* 

 In a damp, hot, stagnating air, this African fever is gene- 

 rated from the putrefaction of animal substances, and espe- 

 cially from the swarms of locusts, not less destructive to 

 mankind in their death than in their lives. The fatal disease 

 which depopulated the earth in the time of Justinian and 

 his successors, t first appeared in the neighbourhood of 

 Pelusium, between the Serbonian bog and the eastern 

 channel of the Nile. From thence, tracing as it were a 

 double path, it spread to the east, over Syria, Persia, and 



* I have read with pleasure Mead's short but elegant treatise, con- 

 cerning " Pestilential Disorders," the eighth edition, London, 1722. 



f The great plague which raged in 542, and the following years 

 (Pagi, Critica, torn, ii, p. 518), must be traced in Procopius (Persic, lib. 

 2, c. 22, 23), Agathias (lib. 5, p. 153, 154), Evagrius (lib. 4, c. 29), Paul 

 Diaconus (lib. 2, c. 4, p. 776, 777), Gregory of Tours (torn, ii., lib. 4, c. 

 5, p. 205), who styles it Lues Inguinaria, and the Chronicles of Victor 

 Tununensis (p. 9, in Thesaur. Temporum), of Marcellinus (p. 54), and 

 of Theophanes (p. 153). [The Lacus Sirbonis inspired terror among all 

 the nations of antiquity. It was the fabled abode of Typhon, the evil 

 genius of so many mythologies. Beneath its bed were boiling streams 

 of bitumen and springs of naphtha, which often sent up lurid flames 

 and heavy vapours ; these were imagined to be the breath of the demon. 

 (Herodotus, 2, 6 ; Plutarch, Anton., c. 3 ; Strabo. 16, 762.) In the 

 course of ages this formidable lake was reduced within very narrow 

 dimensions. (Pliny, 5, 14.) The retiring waters left a wide morass or 

 bog, over which the winds spread the sands of the neighbouring desert, 

 fatal to the unwary who ventured on their surface (Diodorus Siculus, 

 i, 30.) From this bog there issued, in the days of Justinian, a double 

 miasma. The decaying exuviae of the sea and the fumes of heated 

 bitumen combined to impregnate the atmosphere with noxious vapours. 

 These, inhaled by depressed and spirit-broken multitudes, living in 

 filth, and indulging in the artificial excitement of stimulating drinks, pro- 

 duced the disease, no less by moral than by physical infection, which 

 was carried, with such calamitous violence, from clime to clime. The 

 ancient lake of Sirbonis has nearly, if not entirely, disappeared. 

 (Cellarius, 2, 792.) But the name is still retained in maps, given to an 

 apparently more recent collection of pools and lagunes, separated from 

 the Mediterranean by a newly formed bank. These are called by the 

 Turks, Sebakhah Bardoual, or the lake of Baldwin, from that hero of 

 the Crusades having died, when King of Jerusalem, in 1177, at the 

 neighbouring town of Rhinocorura, the modern El Arisch. One of the 

 latest and most authentic accounts of them may be found in the " De- 

 scription de 1'Egypte," drawn up from the official papers of the memo- 

 rable French expedition (torn, xvi., p. 208). ED. 



