545 
especially dangerous period." and malaria is most common just before 
the autumnal equinox. Particular attention should be paid to the 
difficult passage 137 C,t the general drift of which seems to be that 
poor country-folk constantly fall ill during their exertions at harvest¬ 
time. Indigestion and constipation were evidently common com¬ 
plaints when the writer lived, as he tells us how the people took refuge 
in violent purgatives.* Now although there are many causes of 
these stomach complaints, derangement of the digestive organs is 
the invariable accompaniment of malarial cachexia. If any doubt 
still remains as to the kind of fever which is referred to, the use of 
<f>peKm<?§ in 124 B should dispel it at once. 1 his word is certainly 
employed by the medical writers to denote a very pernicious kind of 
remittent malaria.il 
I have tried to prove in the above discussion that the Greeks of 
the first century A.D., or at any rate some of them, were liable to 
malarial attacks whenever they put the body to unusual exertions , 
in other words that the country, or some part of it, was highly 
malarious. What must have been the consequence to the people at 
large? What nation can prosper or develop if strain has to be 
avoided at all costs? How are war, commerce and successful agri¬ 
culture to be carried on under such conditions? Surely nothing but 
stagnation is possible. Now the literary evidence shows that malaria 
was common in Greece during the fifth century, since tertian an 
quartan fevers are constantly referred to in the Hippocratic writing 
But there are only two allusions before 500 B.C. which can point to 
malaria (Trvper'o^ in Iliad xxii, 3 b and fyrlakos in Theogms I 74 )> 
and both of these are doubtful. Hesiod never mentions fever among 
1 137 B. 
toVa ^ ydp p.ucpoXoyta, Kal dveXevOepia * 
pftdvovaiv ot iroWol ire pi re avyicop.L&<is /cap7rwv aa 6pd teal 
^ovov,, dypvirviac, Kal rr epical* 
ov\a tov (Tcoparof, ov/c at-iop eerri oeotev r 1 
\o\oyoi Kal 7 toXvtlkoL / 
t <t>appaKeia<i, e<f>' a<> o! iroWol <f>epovrai Trpox ei P U) ' i ^ 
§ For <f)peviTl<; see Hippocrates, Kuhn II, *7» 28, 299, 300, 3 7 
" S “ Ul “' S V ° L «• . second m Of tie’ fifth 
* The word irvpeTOS does not occur again s t0 niea n “ heat.” Vi by 
'tuw b.c. In Homer it was said by some ancient comm» g t o a tradition that malaria 
1 they not assume the meaning to be fever. b > F 
1 not exist in Homer's time. 
