ey
had never perfectly been reclaimed. Their craggy rocks, a branch of the
wide-extended Taurus, protected their inaccessible retreat. The tillage
of some fertile valleys supplied them with necessaries, and a habit of
rapine with the luxuries of life. In the heart of the Roman monarchy,
the Isaurians long continued a nation of wild barbarians. Succeeding
princes, unable to reduce them to obedience, either by arms or policy,
were compelled to acknowledge their weakness, by surrounding the hostile
and independent spot with a strong chain of fortifications, which often
proved insufficient to restrain the incursions of these domestic foes.
The Isaurians, gradually extending their territory to the sea-coast,
subdued the western and mountainous part of Cilicia, formerly the nest
of those daring pirates, against whom the republic had once been obliged
to exert its utmost force, under the conduct of the great Pompey.

Our habits of thinking so fondly connect the order of the universe with
the fate of man, that this gloomy period of history has been decorated
with inundations, earthquakes, uncommon meteors, preternatural darkness,
and a crowd of prodigies fictitious or exaggerated. 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.

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. Applying this authentic
fact to the most correct tables of mortality, it evidently proves, that