n. The
poorer citizens, who were unable to purchase the necessaries of life,
solicited the precarious charity of the rich; and for a while the public
misery was alleviated by the humanity of Laeta, the widow of the emperor
Gratian, who had fixed her residence at Rome, and consecrated to the use
of the indigent the princely revenue which she annually received from
the grateful successors of her husband. [75] But these private and
temporary donatives were insufficient to appease the hunger of a
numerous people; and the progress of famine invaded the marble palaces
of the senators themselves. The persons of both sexes, who had been
educated in the enjoyment of ease and luxury, discovered how little is
requisite to supply the demands of nature; and lavished their unavailing
treasures of gold and silver, to obtain the coarse and scanty sustenance
which they would formerly have rejected with disdain. The food the most
repugnant to sense or imagination, the aliments the most unwholesome
and pernicious to the constitution, were eagerly devoured, and fiercely
disputed, by the rage of hunger. A dark suspicion was entertained, that
some desperate wretches fed on the bodies of their fellow-creatures,
whom they had secretly murdered; and even mothers, (such was the horrid
conflict of the two most powerful instincts implanted by nature in the
human breast,) even mothers are said to have tasted the flesh of their
slaughtered infants! [76] Many thousands of the inhabitants of Rome
expired in their houses, or in the streets, for want of sustenance;
and as the public sepulchres without the walls were in the power of
the enemy the stench, which arose from so many putrid and unburied
carcasses, infected the air; and the miseries of famine were succeeded
and aggravated by the contagion of a pestilential disease. The
assurances of speedy and effectual relief, which were repeatedly
transmitted from the court of Ravenna, supported for some time, the
fainting resolution of the Romans, till at length the despair of
any human aid tempted them to accept the offers of a praeternatural
deliverance. Pompeianus, praefect of the city, had been persuaded, by
the art or fanaticism of some Tuscan diviners, that, by the mysterious
force of spells and sacrifices, they could extract the lightning from
the clouds, and point those celestial fires against the camp of the
Barbarians. [77] The important secret was communicated to Innocent,
the bishop of Rome; and