re swept away one after the other, no man being willing to go
near it: desertion on the 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 anyone twice, and when it did the
second attack was never fatal. Elate with their own escape, they deemed
themselves out of the reach of all disease, and were full of
compassionate kindness for others whose sufferings were just beginning.
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 eyewitness, 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 the like habits ever came near.

Those bodies which escaped entire neglect were burnt 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 burnt 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.

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, amid such total uncertainty of every man both for his own life
and that of others. Men cared not to abstain from wrong, under
c