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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 prin- cipal 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 with- out thought of themselves and were ashamed to leave them, even at a time when the very relations of the dying were at last growing weary and ceased to make lamentations, overwhelmed by the vastness of the ca- lamity. 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 re- covered, 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 per- ished in wild disorder. The dead lay as they had died, one upon another, while others hardly alive wal- lowed in the streets and crawled about every fountain craving for water. The temples in which they lodged were full of corpses of those who died in them ; for the violence of the calamity was such that men, not