Page:A Discourse of Constancy in Two Books Chiefly containing Consolations Against Publick Evils.pdf/289

268 plague that (they are Zonaras his words) the living did not suffice to bury the dead. To conclude in Petrarchs time (as himself reports it) so direful a one sate brooding upon Italy, that of every thousand men scarce ten survived. I come now to speak of Famine: Certainly we of this Age have seen nothing, if we consider the times past. When Honorius was Emperour, there was such a dearth and scarcity of all sorts of provisions, that men were ready to eat one another, For it was openly cried at the Cirque, set the price of mans flesh. In the reign of Iustinian throughout Italy (after the Goths had wasted it) there was one so great, that in Picenum alone, there were fifty thousand men famished to death: and all about, they eat not only the flesh of men, but their own excrements. Two women (I tremble to speak it) had at several times by night treacherously killed seventeen men and ea- Rh