The miraculous signs, which preceded the Gallic war, and their interpretation by the aruspex Manius, are equivalent to an historical testimony, that Rome was visited by famine and pestilence during very brilliant years of war. In accordance with the interpretation of those signs the famine rose to such a highth, that hunger was appeased by grass and the most loathsome food. According to the order in which they are mentioned, the pestilence must have preceded the famine, and then it could only have been spoken of in Livy's eleventh book: else the contrary succession is all the more probable, as the epidemic, which visited Rome this time, seems to have been nothing else but an ordinary typhus. Earlier ones, which I have pointed out as true pestilences, were contemporaneous with equally murderous epidemics on the other coasts of the Mediterranean: this one stands isolated, and no one is mentioned who was carried off by it. The war, from the manner in which it was carried on in those years, might have occasioned both calamities: famine, if there was a bad harvest during the repeated devastations of Campania, and typhus in the armies, which had to endure all imaginable privations in districts that had been laid waste far and wide, although they still continued to obtain booty in places taken by storm.

When this epidemic was raging in the third year of the war in 453 (459), the Sibylline books were consulted, and in accordance with their oracle, which prescribed that Æsculapius should be brought from Epidaurus to Rome, ten embassadors were sent thither with a trireme.