It may be worthy of remark that of these plagues three are traced to Egypt or Ethiopia, while the fourth, as we shall presently see from Villani, is said to have originated in the north–east of Asia. Kircher, in his ‘Scrutinium de Peste,’ has given a catalogue of the most remarkable pestilences recorded, in which he mentions only one other universal plague, in the year 1400, but relates neither its origin nor its history. Another very destructive one broke out in the year 170 in Babylonia, which spread through the provinces, and carried off a vast number of persons at Rome. Galen was then living in the capital, and speaks of this disease as very similar to that described by Thucydides. The present chapter will be employed in describing some of those pestilences which are most celebrated, either for the abilities exerted in describing them, or the ravages which they have committed; and will include the plagues of Athens, Constantinople, Florence, the plague of Milan in 1630, and of London in 1665. It is not our plan to give either a general history of the plague or a detailed account of the rise and fall, the symptoms and method of treatment of each particular scourge. The passages which we extract from Thucydides, Procopius, and Boccaccio, are complete in themselves; from those later pestilences, of which no master mind has given a comprehensive view, we have endeavoured to select such particulars and to quote such passages as show the moral consequences of the visitation, rather than to disgust by an often repeated story of suffering, or give a hospital chronicle of the varying intensity of the mischief from day to day. We begin then with Thucydides’ account of the plague at Athens in the second year of the war. “In the very beginning of summer, the Peloponnesians and their confederates, as before, two–thirds of the military power of each state, invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of Lacedæmon, and after they had encamped themselves wasted the country about them. And before they had been many days in Attica the plague first began among the Athenians, said also to have seized formerly on divers other parts, as about Lemnos and elsewhere, but so great a plague and mortality of men was never remembered to have happened in any place before. For at first, neither were the physicians able to cure it through ignorance of what it was, but died fastest themselves, as being the men that most approached the sick, nor any other art of man availed whatsoever. All supplications of the gods, and inquiries of oracles, and whatsoever other means they used of that kind, proved all unprofitable, and at the last, subdued by the greatness of the evil, they gave them all over.”