The Volscians advanced so far that men and beasts had to be brought within the walls of Rome, and a plague arose from this crowded state of the city. Lowness of spirits always makes people susceptible to epidemics. Thus in the Peloponnesian war, it was the despair of the Attic peasants, at seeing from the battlements their farms set fire to, and their olive groves cut down, which developed the seeds of the epidemic; the yellow fever at Cadiz in 1800 grew much more violent from the despondency of the host of people which had flocked in without any means of livelihood. The unfavourable season,--it was in August,--the unwonted manner of life, the effluvia from the cattle, the want of water and of cleanliness, might have contributed much to the breaking out of the plague; yet it is likely that the great epidemic, which thirty years later broke out in Greece, and afterwards in Carthage, had begun already then. The mortality was very great; it was a true pestilence, not a mere fever, which might have been brought on by passing the night in the open air. There died the two consuls, two of the four augurs, the _Curio Maximus_, the fourth part of the senate, and a countless number of citizens of all ranks; so that the dead carts did not suffice even to throw the corpses into the river. They were cast into the sewers by which the evil became still greater. In the meanwhile, the Volscians and Æquians were overrunning Latium. The Latins resisted, but suffered a terrible defeat in the valley of Grotta Ferrara. In the following year, we read nothing of victories: the disease may have attacked the enemy also, and Rome thereby been saved. After some years, the plague shows itself again. The details of the accounts of this war are in part deserving of no notice whatever: many of them were invented only very late, in order to enliven with some cheerful images that dismal time. The scene of the wars is always on the Algidus, which is not a mountain, but a cold rugged height extending several leagues between Tusculum and Velitræ, where the different streams divide, which partly flow towards the Liris and the Pontine marshes, and partly towards the Anio. Horace says, _nigræ feraci frondis in Algido_. The country round is barren, and was in olden times, as is it to this day, overgrown with evergreen holm oaks. It was several years ago the constant haunt of robbers, so that I did not see it; but I have gathered very accurate information concerning it. Here the Æquians and Volscians always appear, and unite their armies. Here also is the scene of the poetical tale of the victory of Cincinnatus over the Volscians. This, at least in the form in which it has been handed down to us, belongs to a very fine cycle of legends; but it is connected with the earlier events which happened at home.