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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
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