With sun-baked skins? Even as we thus do see Four climes diverse under the four main-winds And under the four main-regions of the sky, So, too, are seen the colour and face of men Vastly to disagree, and fixed diseases To seize the generations, kind by kind: There is the elephant-disease which down In midmost Aegypt, hard by streams of Nile, Engendered is--and never otherwhere. In Attica the feet are oft attacked, And in Achaean lands the eyes. And so The divers spots to divers parts and limbs Are noxious; 'tis a variable air That causes this. Thus when an atmosphere, Alien by chance to us, begins to heave, And noxious airs begin to crawl along, They creep and wind like unto mist and cloud, Slowly, and everything upon their way They disarrange and force to change its state. It happens, too, that when they've come at last Into this atmosphere of ours, they taint And make it like themselves and alien. Therefore, asudden this devastation strange, This pestilence, upon the waters falls, Or settles on the very crops of grain Or other meat of men and feed of flocks. Or it remains a subtle force, suspense In the atmosphere itself; and when therefrom We draw our inhalations of mixed air, Into our body equally its bane Also we must suck in. In manner like, Oft comes the pestilence upon the kine, And sickness, too, upon the sluggish sheep. Nor aught it matters whether journey we To regions adverse to ourselves and change The atmospheric cloak, or whether nature Herself import a tainted atmosphere To us or something strange to our own use Which can attack us soon as ever it come. THE PLAGUE ATHENS