Page:A Discourse of Constancy in Two Books Chiefly containing Consolations Against Publick Evils.pdf/288

Chap. 23. and for fifteen years together did incredibly exhaust them. Nor did I ever read of a mortality that lasted so long, or that spread it self so wide. But that which seised upon Constantinople and the neighbouring places in the reign of Iustinian the Emperour is more remarkable for the fury and fierceness of it: which was such that it made every day five thousand funerals and sometimes ten. I should not be forward to speak this; but should my self remain doubtful of the credit of this report: were it not confirmed by unquestionable witnesses, that lived in the same age. Nor was that African plague less wonderful, which began upon the ruine of Carthage and destroyed in Numidia alone eighty thousand men, in the Sea costs of Africa two hundred thousand: about Vtica thirty thousand Souldiers left there as the guard of those parts. Again in Greece in the reign of Michael Ducas there was so raging a Rh