ed upon any one who felt himself sickening;
for he instantly abandoned his mind to despair and, instead of holding
out, absolutely threw away his chance of life. Appalling too was the
rapidity with which men caught the infection, dying like sheep if they
attended on one another, and this was the principal cause of
mortality. When they were afraid to visit one another, the sufferers
died in their solitude, so that many houses were empty because there
had been no one left to take care of the sick; or if they ventured
they perished, especially those who aspired to heroism. For they went
to see their friends without thought of themselves and were ashamed to
leave them, even at a time when the very relatives of the dying were
at last growing weary and ceased to make lamentations, overwhelmed by
the vastness of the calamity. But whatever instances there may have
been of such devotion, more often the sick and the dying were tended
by the pitying care of those who had recovered, because they knew the
course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehension. For
no one was ever attacked a second time, or not with a fatal result.
All men congratulated them; and they themselves, in the excess of
their joy at the moment, had an innocent fancy that they could not die
of any other sickness.

The crowding of the people out of the country into the city aggravated
the misery, and the newly arrived suffered most. For, having no houses
of their own, but inhabiting, in the height of summer, stifling huts,
the mortality among them was dreadful, and they perished in wild
disorder. The dead lay as they had died, one upon another, while
others hardly alive wallowed in the streets and crawled about every
fountain craving for water. The temples in which they lodged were full
of the corpses of those who had died in them; for the violence of the
calamity was such that men, not knowing where to turn, grew reckless
of all law, human and divine. The customs which had hitherto been
observed at funerals were universally violated, and they buried their
dead each one as best he could. Many, having no proper appliances,
because the deaths in their household had been so frequent, made no
scruple of using the burial-place of others. When one man had raised a
funeral pile, others would come, and throwing on their dead first, set
fire to it; or when some other corpse was already burning, before they
could be stopt would throw their own dead upon it an