Arabia was ravaged by pestilence in the year of our Lord 158. The disease appeared in Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Lucius Verus, preceded by a more destructive plague in Asia, which the great Ammianus Marcellinus, the philosophic hero, asserted arose from the foul air of a small box which a Roman soldier had opened at the capture of Seleucia. This opinion was in accordance with the superstition of the times. At that period the elements were greatly deranged: commotions of the physical world, inundations of rivers, agitations of the earth, devastations from locusts, caterpillars, and every variety of the insect tribe, famine, putrid vapours, with great inclemencies and irregularities of the seasons, foretold the approach of the awful pestilence which in the same year desolated Rome: its symptoms were, a burning fever and gangrene of the extremities, particularly of the feet. These times were also distinguished by wars and rumours of wars: 450,000 Romans were butchered in Syria and in Cyprus by the Jews. Fourteen cities were destroyed by earthquakes, amongst which was Antioch, with 100,000 inhabitants: 580,000 were supposed altogether to have perished by the sword, famine, and pestilence. Aurelius Victor, speaking of the emperor M. Antoninus, gives a lucid description of those calamitous times. He says, “Unless he had been born for these times, all the affairs of the Roman empire would have been ruined assuredly as if by one fall; for there was rest no where from arms, and wars burned through all the East, Illyricum, Italy, and Gaul. The motions of the earth, with annihilation of cities, inundation of the rivers, thick pestilences, species of locusts infested the fields; indeed, nothing can be said or conceived, by which mortals used to be wasted with the severest agonies, which have not raged during his administration.”