accumulation of people within the city and long walls, in consequence of the presence of the invaders in the country, was but too favorable to every form of contagion. Families crowded together in close cabins and places of temporary shelter,throughout a city constructed, 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 maladies of every other description. .

3. It is hardly within the province of an historian of Greece to repeat, after Thucyd'ides, the painful enumeration of symp toms, violent in the extreme, and pervading every portion of the bodily system, which marked this fearful disorder. Beginning in Piræus, it quickly passed into the city, and both the one and the other was speedily filled with sickness and suffering, the like of which had never before been known. The seizures were perfectly sudden, and a large proportion of the sufferers perished, after deplorable agonies, on the seventh or on the ninth day. Others, whose strength of constitution carried them over this period, found themselves the victims of exhausting and incurable diarrhoea afterward; with others, again, after traversing both these stages, the distemper fixed itself in some particular member, the eyes, the hands, or the feet, which were rendered permanently useless, or, in some cases, amputated, even where the patient himself recovered.

4. There were also some whose recovery was attended with a total loss of memory, so that they no more knew themselves or recognized their friends. No treatment or remedy appearing, except in accidental cases, to produce any beneficial effect, the physicians or surgeons whose aid was invoked became completely at fault; while trying their accustomed means without avail, they soon ended in catching the malady them

selves and perishing. Nor were the charms and incantations to which the unhappy patient resorted likely to be more effica cious.

5. While some asserted that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns of water, others referred the visitation to the wrath of the gods, and especially to Apollo, known by hearers of the Iliad as the author of pestilence in the Greek host before Troy. It was remembered that this Delphian god had promised the Lacedæmonians, in reply to their application immediately before the war, that he would assist them, whether invoked or uninvoked,-and the disorder now raging was ascribed to the intervention of their irresistible ally; while the elderly men called to mind an oracular verse sung in the time of their youth: "The Dorian war will come, and pestilence along with it." Under the distress which suggested, and was reciprocally aggravated by, these gloomy ideas, prophets were consulted, and supplications, with solemn procession, were held at the temples, to appease the divine wrath.

6. When it was found that neither the priest nor the physician could retard the spread, or mitigate the intensity, of the disorder, the Athenians abandoned themselves to utter despair, and the space within the walls became a scene of desolating misery. Every man attacked with the malady at once lost his courage, a state of depression, itself among the worst features of the case, which made him lie down and die without the least attempt to seek for any preservatives. And though at first, friends and relatives lent their aid to tend the sick with the usual family sympathies, yet so terrible was the number of these attendants who perished, "like sheep," from such contact, that at length no man would thus expose himself; while the most generous spirits, who persisted longest in the dis. charge of their duty, were carried off in the greatest numbers.

7. The patient was thus left to die alone and unheeded; sometimes all the inhabitants of a house were swept away one after the other, no man being willing to go near it; desertion on one hand, attendance on the other, both tended to aggravate the calamity. There remained only those who, having

had the disorder and recovered, were willing to tend the sufferers. These men formed the single exception to the all-pervading misery of the time,-for the disorder seldom attacked any one twice, and when it did, the second attack was never fatal. Elate with their own escape, they deemed themselves out of the reach of the disease, and were full of compassionate kindness for others whose sufferings were just beginning.

8. It was from them, too, that the principal attention to the bodies of deceased victims proceeded; for such was the state of dismay and sorrow, that even the nearest relatives neglected the sepulchral duties, sacred beyond all others in the eyes of a Greek. Nor is there any circumstance which conveys to us so vivid an idea of the prevalent agony and despair as when we read, in the words of an eye-witness, that the deaths took place among this close-packed crowd without the smallest decencies of attention, that the dead and the dying lay piled one upon another, not merely in the public roads, but even in the temples, in spite of the understood defilement of the sacred building, that half-dead sufferers were seen lying round all the springs, from insupportable thirst,-that the numerous corpses thus unburied and exposed, were in such a condition that the dogs which meddled with them died in consequence, while no vultures or other birds of like habits ever came near.

9. Those bodies which escaped entire neglect, were burned or buried without the customary mourning, and with unseemly carelessness. In some cases, the bearers of a body, passing by a funeral pile on which another body was burning, would put their own there to be burned also; or perhaps, if the pile was prepared ready for a body not yet arrived, would deposit their own upon it, set fire to the pile, and then depart. Such indecent confusion would have been intolerable to the feelings of the Athenians in any ordinary times.

10. To all these scenes of physical suffering, death, and reckless despair, was superadded another evil, which affected those who were fortunate enough to escape the rest. The bonds both of law and morality became relaxed, amidst such total uncertainty of every man both for his own life and that of

others. Men cared not to abstain from wrong, under circumstances in which punishment was not likely to overtake them,― nor to put a check upon their passions, and endure privations in obedience even to their strongest conviction, when the chance was so small of their living to reap reward er enjoy any future esteem.

11. An interval short and sweet, before their doom was realized—before they became plunged in the wide-spread misery which they witnessed around, and which affected indiscriminately the virtuous and the profligate-was all they looked to enjoy; embracing with avidity the immediate pleasures of sense, as well as such positive gains, however ill-gotten, as could be made the means of procuring them, and throwing aside all thought both of honor or of long-sighted advantage. Life and property were alike ephemeral, nor was there any hope left but to snatch a moment of enjoyment, before the outstretched hand of destiny should fall upon its victims.

12. The melancholy picture of society under the pressure of a murderous epidemic, with its train of physical torments, wretchedness, and demoralization, has been drawn by more than one eminent author, but by none with more impressive fidelity and conciseness than by Thucydides, who had no predecessor, and nothing but the reality to copy from. We may remark that, amidst all the melancholy accompaniments of the time, there are no human sacrifices, such as those offered up at Carthage during pestilence to appease the anger of the gods,there are no cruel persecutions against imaginary authors of the disease, such as those against the Untori (anointers of doors) in the plague of Milan in 1630.

13. Three years altogether did this calamity desolate Athens; continuously, during the entire second and third years of the war,—after which followed a period of marked abatement for a year and a half; but it then revived again, and lasted for another year, with the same fury as at first. The public loss, over and above the private misery, which this unexpected. enemy inflicted upon Athens, was incalculable. Out of twelve hundred horsemen, all among the rich men of the state, three

hundred died of the epidemic; besides four thousand and four hundred hoplites" out of the roll formerly kept, and a number of the poorer population so great as to defy computation. No efforts of the Peloponnesians could have done so much to ruin Athens, or to bring the war to a termination such as they desired; and the distemper told the more in their favor, as it never spread at all into Peloponnesus, though it passed from Athens to some of the more populous islands.

Death of Pericles.-Bloss.

[From Anderson's Bloss's "Ancient History."]

1. THE firm mind of Pericles was not to be depressed by the sword without, nor by the pestilence within, nor even by the irritation and despair of the Athenians, who accused him of being the author of their calamities, by drawing such multitudes into the city as to poison the very air. In the anguish of their feelings, they forgot all he had done and suffered for them; and by a public decree deposed him from his military command, and fined him an immense sum. Nor was this his only misfortune. His advisers fell victims to the pestilence, and the greater part of his family and friends died of the same dreadful disease. Still he neither wept nor performed any funeral rites, nor was he seen at the grave of any of his relatives until the death of Paralus, his last legitimate son.

2. He attempted, indeed, then to keep up his usual calm. behavior and serenity of mind, but in putting the garland upon the head of the deceased his firmness forsook him; he broke out into loud lamentations, and shed a torrent of tears. Athens made trial, in the course of a year, of the rest of her generals and orators, and finding none capable of extricating her from the difficulties in which she was involved, once more invited Pericles to take again the direction of affairs. He had shut himself up at home to indulge his sorrow, and it was with difficulty that Alcibi'ades and his other friends persuaded him to reassume the reins of government. During the following winter, the Potida'ans, after suffering most intensely from