1. In the fifteenth year of king Childebert our deacon returned from Rome with relics of the saints and related that in the ninth month of the previous year the river Tiber so flooded the city of Rome that ancient temples were destroyed and the store-houses of the church were overturned and several thousand measures of wheat in them were lost. A multitude of snakes, among them a great serpent like a big log, passed down into the sea by the channel of this river, but these creatures were smothered among the rough and salty waves of the sea and cast up on the shore. Immediately after came the plague which they call _inguinaria_.[66] It came in the middle of the eleventh month and according to what is read in the prophet Ezekiel: “Begin at my sanctuary,” it first of all smote the pope Pelagius and soon killed him. Upon his death a great mortality among the people followed from this disease. But since the church of God could not be without a head all the people chose Gregory the deacon.[FJ] He belonged to one of the first senatorial families and from his youth was devoted to God and with his own means had established six monasteries in Sicily and a seventh within the Roman walls; and giving to these such an amount of land as would suffice to furnish their daily food, he sold the rest and all the furniture of his house and distributed the money among the poor; and he who had been used to appear in the city arrayed in silken robes and glittering jewels was now clad in cheap garments, and he devoted himself to the service of the Lord’s altar and was assigned as seventh levite to aid the pope. And such was his abstinence in food, his sleeplessness in prayer, his determination in fasting that his stomach was weakened and he could scarcely stand upright. He was so versed in grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric that he was believed second to none in the city. He strove earnestly to avoid this high office for fear that a certain pride at attaining the honor might sweep him back into the worldly vanities he had rejected. And so he sent a letter to the emperor Mauricius whose son he had taken from the holy font, adjuring him and entreating him with many prayers never to grant his consent to the people to raise him to this place of honor. But Germanus, prefect of Rome, forestalled the messenger and had him arrested and the letter destroyed, and himself sent to the emperor the choice which the people had made. And the emperor on account of his friendship[FK] with the deacon thanked God that he had found a place of honor and sent his command to appoint him.… [Because of the plague Gregory makes an address to the people of Rome to meet it by prayer.]