Epidemics. 183 



tinacious vehemence of the disease ; the same remedies 

 were productive of contrary effects, and the event capri- 

 ciously 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 authorized 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 prospects 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.* During his sickness the public consternation 

 was expressed in the habits of the citizens ; and their idle- 

 ness and despondence occasioned a general scarcity in the 

 capital of the East. 



"Contagion is the inseparable symptom of the plague; 

 which, by mutual respiration, is transfused from the in- 

 fected persons to the lungs and stomach of those who 

 approach them. While philosophers believe and tremble, it 

 is singular that the existence of a real danger should have 

 been denied by a people most prone to vain and imaginary 

 terrors. t Yet the fellow-citizens of Procopius were satisfied, 



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., 2. i.) Dr. Mead 

 accounts for the peculiar salubrity of religious houses by the two 

 advantages of seclusion and abstinence (p. 18, 19). 



f Mead proves that the plague is contagious, from Thucydides, Lu- 

 cretius, Aristotle, Galen, and common experience (p. 10 20) ; and he 

 refutes (Preface, p. 2 13) the contrary opinion of the French phy- 

 sicians who visited Marseilles in the year 1720. Yet these were the 

 recent and enlightened spectators of a plague which, in a few months, 

 swept away fifty thousand inhabitants (" Sur la Peste de Marseille," Paris, 

 1786) of a city "that, in the present hour of prosperity and trade, con- 

 tains no more than ninety thousand souls. (Necker, " Sur les Finances," 

 torn, i., p. 231.) 



a It must be borne in mind in Gibbon's days that the assumed philosophers had put 

 an extinguisher upon Providence, which has since been protected with a wet sheet, 

 because the extinguisher was just beginning to melt from heat within. 



