206 hosack on the laws or contagion. 



ships to infest Peloponnesus." Even the Pelasgic, a hitherto vacant spot 

 of ground below the citadel, which it was thought profaneness to occupy, 

 and the settlement of which the Pythian oracle had specially prohibit- 

 ed, they were constrained, by urgent necessity, to turn into a dwel- 

 ling-place. By this influx from the neighbourhood of Athens its num- 

 ber of inhabitants, as stated by a late writer, was suddenly increased 

 from fifty thousand to more than four hundred thousand persons.* 

 In anothe^ place Thucydides observes, " Those who had come in 

 from the country had no houses, but dwelled all the summer sea- 

 son in booths, where there was scarcely room to breathe ;" he adds, 

 " The pestilence destroyed with the utmost disorder, so that they 

 lay together in heaps, the dying upon the dead, and the dead upon 

 the dying." Even in the public streets some were tumbling one over 

 another, or lay expiring round about every fountain, whither they had 

 crept to assuage their immoderate thirst ; the temples, too, in which 

 they had erected tents for their reception, were full of the bodies of 

 those who had expired there. Thucydides proceeds, " In a calamity so 

 outrageously violent, things sacred and holy had quite lost their distinc- 

 tion ; all regulations observed before in matters of sepulture were quite 

 confounded, since every one buried wherever he could find a place." 

 He also observes, " it raged the most, and for the longest time, in Athens, 

 but afterwards spread into the other towns, especially in the most popu- 

 lous, but never extended itself to Peloponnesus." We are told by the 

 same historian, that " at the siege of Potidaea, which took place during 

 the same season, the plague followed them even thither, and making 

 grievous havoc among the Athenians, destroyed the army ; and that 

 even those soldiers that had been there before, and had, from the be- 



* Medical Repository, vol.1, p. 16. 





