Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/177

 SECOND AND THIRD YEARS OF THE WAR. Ig-y like most of those in Greece, with little regard to the conditions of salubrity, and in a state of mental chagrin from the forced abandonment and sacrifice of their properties in the country, transmitted the disorder with fatal facility from one to the other Beginning as it did about the middle of April, the increasing heat of summer farther aided the disorder, the symptoms of which, alike violent and sudden, made themselves the more remarked because the year was particularly exempt from mala- dies of every other description. 1 Of this plague, or, more properly, eruptive typhoid fever,3 remarked, that the Athenians, though their persons and movable property were crowded within the walls, had not driven in their sheep and cattle also, but had transported them over to Eubcea and the neighboring islands (Thucyd. ii, 14). Hence they escaped a serious aggravation of their epi- demic : for in the accounts of the epidemics which desolated Eome under similar circumstances, we find the accumulation of great numbers of cattle, along with human beings, specified as a terrible addition to the calamity (see Livy, iii, 66 ; Dionys. Hal. Ant. Eom. x, 53 : compare Niebuhr, Romisch. Gesch. vol. ii, p. 90). 1 Thucyd. ii, 49. Td /UEV jup Irof, UQ u/toho-yetTo, EK TTUVTUV fj.uA.iara <5r) knslvo uvoffov If rug tt^Aa? aodeveiaf erv-y^avev ov. Hippokrates, in his description of the epidemic fever at Thasos, makes a similar remark on the absence of all other disorders at the time (Epidem. i, 8, vol. ii, p. 640, ed. Littre). to the works of Hippokrates, torn, i, p. 122), est tellement bonne qu'elle suffit pleinement pour nous faire comprendre ce que cette ancienne maladie a e'te': et il est fort a regretter que des medecins tels qu'Hippocrate et Galien n'aient rien ecrit sur les grandes epidemics, dont ils ont etd les spec- tateurs. Hippocrate a etc temoin de cette peste racontee par Thucydide, et il ne nous en a pas laisse la description. Galien vit egalement la fievre Eruptive qui desola le monde sous Marc Aurele, et qu'il appelle lui-meme la longue peste. Cependant excepte quelques mots e'pars dans ses volumi- neux ouvrages, excepte quelques indications fugitives, il ne nous a rien transmis sur un venement medical aussi important ; a tel point que si nous n'avions pas le recit de Thucydide, il nous seroit fort difficile de nous faire une idee de celle qu'a vue Galen, et qui est la mSme (comme ]VL Hecker s'est attache' a le demontrer) que la maladie connue sous le nom de Peste d'Athenes. C'etait une fievre eruptive differente de la variole, et eteinte Aujourdhui. On a cru en voir les traces dans les cJiarbons (uv&paKCf) deg livres Hippocratiques." Both Krauss (Disquisitio de natura morbi Atheniensium. Stuttgard, 1831, p. 38) and Haeser (Historisch. Patholog. Untersuchungen. Dresden
 * " La description de Thucydide (observes M. Littre, in his introduction