sity. But a new visitation had now
occurred, diverting their attention from the invader, though enormously
aggravating their sufferings. A few days after Archidamus entered
Attica, a pestilence or epidemic sickness broke out unexpectedly at
Athens.

It appears that this terrific disorder had been raging for some time
throughout the regions round the Mediterranean; having begun, as was
believed, in Ethiopia--thence passing into Egypt and Libya, and
overrunning a considerable portion of Asia under the Persian government.
About sixteen years before, there had been a similar calamity in Rome
and in various parts of Italy. Recently it had been felt in Lemnos and
some other islands of the Aegean, yet seemingly not with such intensity
as to excite much notice generally in the Grecian world: at length it
passed to Athens, and first showed itself in the Piraeus. The progress
of the disease was as rapid and destructive as its appearance had been
sudden; while the extraordinary 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 further 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.

Of this plague--or, more properly, eruptive typhoid fever, distinct
from, yet analogous to, the smallpox--a description no less clear than
impressive has been left by the historian Thucydides, himself not only a
spectator but a sufferer. It is not one of the least of his merits, that
his notice of the symptoms, given at so early a stage of medical science
and observation, is such as to instruct the medical reader of the
present age, and to enable the malady to be understood and identified.
The observations with which that notice is ushered in deserve particular
attention. "In respect to this distemper (he says), let every man,
physician or not, say what he thinks re