In the time of David, 1017 B.C., there broke out a pestilence which in three days destroyed 70,000 persons. About the period of this infliction, the first dreadful epoch of Spanish epidemiology is recorded. The period, however, has been variously given; by some, it is fixed at 1100 B.C., while other writers mention it as having occurred during the great plague or dearth in Egypt. There were, without interruption, _twenty-five years_ of drought in Spain; springs were dried up, rivers became fordable, their waters becoming almost stagnant; there was neither pasture for beasts nor fruit for man; so great was the barrenness of the land, that there was scarcely any green thing to be found, except some olive-trees on the banks of the Ebro and the Guadalquiver. Such, says the historian, was the melancholy state of our ancient Spain; “full of dreadful mortalities, plagues, and miseries of every description, which, with emigration to other lands, nearly depopulated our country.” Plutarch mentions the occurrence of a great pestilence that happened in Rome in the year 790 B.C., soon after the murder of Tatius: it was so rapidly fatal that it is represented as killing almost instantaneously; cattle as well as men were swept away, and all nature appeared one desolate and abandoned waste: during this awful period it is said to have rained blood, or crimson insects which turned the waters to the colour of blood, as happened in Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh: the crops failed, and the country of Campania may be said to have been ravaged by the sword, famine, and pestilence. Plutarch also gives an account of an epidemic pestilence which afflicted the inhabitants of Italy, especially the capital of the empire, during the reign of Numa Pompilius, of Hezekiah over Judah, and of Sennacherib over Assyria in the year 710 B.C.: by this pestilence 185,000 of the Assyrian armies perished at the siege of Jerusalem, which compelled the assailants to raise the siege and to return to Nineveh, even after they had taken all the principal cities of Judah, including Libnah, a city situated about twelve miles south-west of Jerusalem. It was at this period that Numa Pompilius instituted the Salii, a college of priests of Mars, who carried the sacred shields in procession, to stop the pestilence.