For twenty years before the institution of the decemvirate Rome was visited by all imaginable scourges, mortalities, earthquakes, calamitous defeats, as though heaven had resolved to exterminate the distracted nation from the face of the earth; and manifold signs, betokening an inward coil and stir of nature, announced that the times were out of joint. A similar combination of all natural horrours with the last extreme of human misery came again upon the city after the lapse of a thousand years, and left it desolate as a grave, three hundred years after Rome had experienced the first pestilence the ravages of which can be compared with those of this earlier period.

The first of these epidemic disorders makes its appearance in the year 282: its peculiar character is not described, only that it attackt every one without distinction of age or sex; that it rolled over the city like a torrent or a lava-stream, and would have swept all before it, had it made a longer stay. This sickness is expressly said to have visited the rest of Italy. The same thing is not stated of the second, which raged nine years after, in 291, though it is impossible to doubt that it was no less widely spread: an account has been preserved of its victims, sufficient to give a notion of its ravages, and deserving unqualified credit. It carried off both the consuls, three out of the five tribunes, two of the four augurs, the chief curio, and the fourth part of the senators.