If one country suffered others did not; if half the Mediterranean world, even, was devastated, the other half escaped. From the immune regions competence and capacity had flowed into the ruined areas and civilization had gone on. But the great pestilence left no district unharmed. In six months it killed off all the brains and skill, all the culture and ingenuity in the Empire. There were so few capable men left in any line of activity that the next generation grew up practically untaught. The tradition of two thousand years was broken. In all the Mediterranean world, until centuries later, descendants of the savage invaders developed their new civilization on the ruins of the old; no man ever again made a great speech, wrote a great book or play or poem, painted a good picture, carved a good statue, or contrived a good campaign or battle. The brains of the Roman world died that year, the originality of the whole nation was killed at once, the tradition broke off. Of course, the survivors did not realize the finality of the disaster, but they did realize its magnitude. In Italy, fed almost wholly by imported food, the famine was most severe. In Italy the pestilence was most virulent. Men disputed as to whether the great army of Lucius Verus, returned home from its splendid victories in Parthia, had brought with it a form of pestilence worse than that of the five previous years, or whether the returned soldiers had merely been a specially easy prey to the pestilence already abroad in Rome. Whichever was true, the veterans died like flies. So did the residents of Rome. Whole blocks of tenements were emptied of their last occupier and stood wholly vacant; many palaces of the wealthy were left without so much as a guardian, the last inmate dead; the splendid furnishings, even the silver plate, untouched in every room; for the plague had so ravaged Rome that there were not even robbers and thieves left to steal To the survivors, since genuine piety as they knew it was all but universal among the Romans, it was some small comfort, a faint ray of hope, a sign that the gods were not inexorably wrathful, that, after Rabulla’s death, there was no case of pestilence in the Atrium, not even among the servitors, that no Vestal so much as sickened. Through it all the six remained hale and sound. But when the plague abated, only Manlia had any living relations left her. The other five had lost every kinsman and kinswoman, to the ninth and tenth degree. Brinnaria’s parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins were all among the victims. This left her grave and sobered with grief, with no trace of her girlish wildness apparent. It also left her enormously rich, one of the wealthiest women in Rome. Not a tenth so wealthy, but still very rich, it left Almo, Vocco and Flexinna, all of whom survived.