Page:1909historyofdec04gibbuoft.djvu/535

 Chap.xliii] OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 469 and infected by wars and emigrations ; and the pestilential odour which lurks for years in a bale of cotton was imported, by the abuse of trade, into the most distant regions. The mode of its propagation is explained by the remark of Procopius himself, that it always spread from the sea-coast to the inland country ; the most sequestered islands and mountains were successively visited ; the places which had escaped the fury of its first passage were alone exposed to the contagion of the ensuing year. The winds might defuse that subtle venom ; but, unless the atmos- phere be previously disposed for its reception, the plague would soon expire in the cold or temperate climates of the earth. Such was the universal corruption of the air that the pestilence which burst forth in the fifteenth year of Justinian was not checked or alleviated by any difference of the seasons. In time, its first malignity was abated and dispersed ; the disease alter- nately languished and revived ; but it was not till the end of a calamitous period of fifty-two years that mankind recovered their health or the air resumed its pure and salubrious quality. No facts have been preserved to sustain an account, or even a conjecture, of the numbers that perished in this extraordinary mortality. I only find that, during three months, five, and at length ten, thousand persons died each day at Constantinople ; that many cities of the East were left vacant ; and that in several districts of Italy the harvest and the vintage withered on the ground. The triple scourge of war, pestilence, and famine, afflicted the subjects of Justinian, and his reign is dis- graced by a visible decrease of the human species, which has never been repaired in some of the fairest countries of the globe. 135 138 After some figures of rhetorio, the sands of the sea, &c. Procopius (Anecdot. o. 18) attempts a more definite account : that pvpiddas p.vpidSwv ftvplas had been exterminated under the reign of the Imperial dsemon. The expression is obscure in grammar and arithmetic, and a literal interpretation would produce several millions of millions. Alemannus (p. 80) and Cousin (torn. iii. p. 178) translate this passage, " two hundred millions " ; but I am ignorant of their motives. If we drop the /AvpidSas the remaining /xvpidSaiv /xvpids, a myriad of myriads, would furnish one hundred millions, a number not wholly inadmissible. [The number in Procopius is purely imaginary. Cp. Panchenko in Vizantiiski Vremennik, iii. p. 311.]