owd of prodigies fictitious or exaggerated. [180] But a long
and general famine was a calamity of a more serious kind. It was the
inevitable consequence of rapine and oppression, which extirpated the
produce of the present, and the hope of future harvests. Famine is
almost always followed by epidemical diseases, the effect of scanty and
unwholesome food. Other causes must, however, have contributed to the
furious plague, which, from the year two hundred and fifty to the
year two hundred and sixty-five, raged without interruption in every
province, every city, and almost every family, of the Roman empire.
During some time five thousand persons died daily in Rome; and many
towns, that had escaped the hands of the Barbarians, were entirely
depopulated. [181]

[Footnote 180: Hist August p 177.]

[Footnote 181: Hist. August. p. 177. Zosimus, l. i. p. 24. Zonaras,
l. xii. p. 623. Euseb. Chronicon. Victor in Epitom. Victor in Caesar.
Eutropius, ix. 5. Orosius, vii. 21.]

We have the knowledge of a very curious circumstance, of some use
perhaps in the melancholy calculation of human calamities. An exact
register was kept at Alexandria of all the citizens entitled to receive
the distribution of corn. It was found, that the ancient number of those
comprised between the ages of forty and seventy, had been equal to the
whole sum of claimants, from fourteen to fourscore years of age,
who remained alive after the reign of Gallienus. [182] Applying this
authentic fact to the most correct tables of mortality, it evidently
proves, that above half the people of Alexandria had perished; and
could we venture to extend the analogy to the other provinces, we might
suspect, that war, pestilence, and famine, had consumed, in a few
years, the moiety of the human species. [183]

[Footnote 182: Euseb. Hist. Eccles. vii. 21. The fact is taken from the
Letters of Dionysius, who, in the time of those troubles, was bishop of
Alexandria.]

[Footnote 183: In a great number of parishes, 11,000 persons were found
between fourteen and eighty; 5365 between forty and seventy. See Buffon,
Histoire Naturelle, tom. ii. p. 590.]

Chapter XI: Reign Of Claudius, Defeat Of The Goths.--Part I.

Reign Of Claudius.--Defeat Of The Goths.--Victories,
Triumph, And Death Of Aurelian.

Under the deplorable reigns of Valerian and Gallienus, the empire was
oppressed and almost destroyed by the soldiers, the tyrants, and the
barbarians. It was saved