was
obtaining an unenviable reputation for malaria: a circumstance that was
due to the over-flowing of the unwholesome streamlet, the Salso, whose
reeking and fever-bearing waters began to impregnate the earth.
Engineering works on a large scale were planned to remedy this drawback,
but these were never executed, and in consequence the unhealthiness of the
place increased. With the decline of the Roman power the population and
prosperity of Paestum likewise tended to lessen, so that its citizens were
placed in a worse position than before with regard to the carrying out of
this vast but necessary scheme of sanitation.

In a spot so accessible to external influence, it is easy to understand
that Christianity early took root in Paestum, which in the fifth century
of our own era had already become a bishopric. The story of the growth of
the Faith in Lucania is closely connected with a legend that centres round
a native of the place, a certain Gavinius, a general in the army of the
Emperor Valentinian, who whilst serving in Britain against the Picts by
some means succeeded in obtaining a valuable relic, supposed to be nothing
less than the body of the Apostle Matthew, which he brought back with him
to his native place. Early in the ninth century there appeared a fresh
cause of alarm, more serious and far-reaching even than the dreaded
malaria, for plundering Saracens, foes alike to the old Roman civilisation
and to the new Christian creed, now began to harass the Tyrrhenian shores.
Settling at Agropoli to the south of the Bay, these Oriental freebooters
found little difficulty in effecting a landing on the Poseidonian beach,
and in raiding the weakened and almost defenceless city. Able-bodied men
and young maidens were forcibly carried off to the pirates' nest at
Agropoli, or perhaps even to the distant coast of Barbary, to be sold into
perpetual slavery. Alarmed beyond measure by this raid, the remaining
inhabitants of the place, at the advice and under the guidance of their
bishop, now decided--wisely, for they had to choose between immediate
flight or gradual extermination by disease, slavery and the sword--to
remove themselves to the barren mountains in their rear, once the haunts
of the Samnites, and to build a new Paestum on a site at once more healthy
and better protected by Nature against the raids of infidel corsairs. In a
body therefore the remaining citizens amid deep wailing left for ever the
ancient city with i