ass well-to-do in the
world. The taxes, too, and contributions, the capitation tax, the
percentage upon corn, the various articles of revenues due to Rome, how
are they to be paid? How are cattle to be provided for the sacrifices and
for the tables of the wealthy? One-half, at least, of the supply of Sicca
is cut off. No longer slaves are seen coming into the city from the
country in troops with their baskets on their shoulders, or beating
forward the horse, or mule, or ox, overladen with its burden, or driving
in the dangerous cow, or the unresisting sheep. The animation of the place
is gone; a gloom hangs over the Forum; and if its frequenters are still
merry there is something of sullenness and recklessness in their mirth.
The gods have given the city up; something or other has angered them.
Locusts, indeed, are no uncommon visitation, but at an earlier season.
Perhaps some temple has been polluted, or some unholy rite practised, or
some secret conspiracy has spread.

Another and a still worse calamity. The invaders, as we have already
intimated, could be more terrible still in their overthrow than in their
ravages. The inhabitants of the country had attempted, where they could,
to destroy them by fire and water. It would seem as if the malignant
animals had resolved that the sufferers should have the benefit of this
policy to the full; for they had not got more than twenty miles beyond
Sicca when they suddenly sickened and died. Thus after they had done all
the mischief they could by their living, when they had made their foul
maws the grave of every living thing, then they died themselves, and made
the desolated land their own grave. They took from it its hundred forms
and varieties of beautiful life, and left it their own fetid and poisonous
carcases in payment. It was a sudden catastrophe; they seemed making for
the Mediterranean, as if, like other great conquerors, they had other
worlds to subdue beyond it; but whether they were overgorged, or struck by
some atmospheric change, or that their time was come and they paid the
debt of nature, so it was that suddenly they fell, and their glory came to
nought, and all was vanity to them as to others, and "their stench rose
up, and their corruption rose up, because they had done proudly."

The hideous swarms lay dead in the moist steaming underwoods, in the green
swamps, in the sheltered valleys, in the ditches and furrows of the
fields, amid the monuments of their own