lo History of Animal Plagues. 



stantaneously fatal to animals and men. It did great evil^ and 

 durino; its furv blood is said to have been rained. The red colour 

 of the rain was due^ no doubt, to the presence of a vegetable organ- 

 ism in the atmosphere, owing to some favourable conditions for 

 its development. Zonaras says that the earth and cattle were 

 barren: ^sterilitas agrorum et pecudum.' The crops failed,, and 

 the beautiful and ferti'e country of Campania, before greatly 

 depressed by the murder of Tatius, was now sadly troubled by 

 famine, pestilence, and the sword. 



From the earliest ages animal plagues recur in the history of 

 Rome, a city which was afterwards to become so famous for terrible 

 calamities that Livy styled it ' urbs assiduis exhausta funeribus.^ 

 Tacitus, in his description of Rome, intimates the almost regular 

 occurrence of ^ tempus grave aut annus pestilentiae.' Its situation, 

 no doubt, greatly favoured these attacks. Built on the low banks 

 of the Tiber, surrounded by malarious tracts of country, and 

 subject to inundations and commotions of the elements, it fur- 

 nished for centuries the most fearful examples of epidemic and 

 epizootic visitations. To the south lay the Pontine marshes^ a 

 tract of land extending from Nettuno to Terracina, about 45 

 miles long and from 4 to 11 broad, which at no distant period 

 before had been covered by the sea. In the early times of the 

 Roman Republic, according to Pliny, 0^^ cities existed there; but 

 these, either by wars or increasing miasma, very soon dis- 

 appeared. What are termed the marshes are formed by great 

 quantities of water, received from innumerable streams, which, 

 rising in the neighbouring mountains, run into the plain, where, 

 for want of a sufficient declivity towards the sea, their course is 

 very slow, until they become stagnant, and at length lose them- 

 selves in the sand. They now contain immense pastures, where 

 horses, cattle, and herds of buffaloes graze as in the early ages 

 of that once great empire. The air, particularly in some seasons 

 of the year, is even at present very unwholesome. The inhabit- 

 ants are pale and sallow, suffer much from fever, and the lower 

 animals are subject to various maladies peculiar to such situa- 

 tions. 



In the south part of Tuscany, and not far from the Eternal 

 City, lies the Maremma, another marshy region, which, by reason 



