Plague and pestilence in literature and art E-Book

Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

• Herausgeber: PubMe
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The scattered records of literature afford a valuable, but neglected, contribution to the study of epidemic pestilence. They show us pestilence as an affair of the mind, as medical literature has shown it as an affair of the body. They teach us too the humiliating lesson that, in spite of the progress of civilization, in spite of the apparent growth of humanity, in spite of the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge, human nature has again and again reverted to the primitive instincts of savagery in face of the crushing calamity of epidemic pestilence. The superficial student of psychology may find it difficult to believe that, so late as 1630 in Milan, so late as 1656 in Naples, so late as 1771 in Moscow, the blood-lust of a maddened populace sought and found a sedative in an orgy of human sacrifice. But so it was. And in this homing instinct of the human mind is to be found the clue to much in the records of literature and art that else is wholly meaningless. It is a grim chapter of history that lies before us, but maybe we shall find here and there some spiritual Bethel reared out of the hard stones on which suffering humanity has lain its weary head.

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Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

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Table of contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

APPENDIX[200]

FOOTNOTES:

PREFACE

This volume represents substantially the FitzPatrick Lectures which I had the privilege of delivering at the Royal College of Physicians in 1912. Originally I intended to do no more than gather together into a succinct record the various memorials and reminders of Pestilence that I had met with in my wanderings at home and abroad and in my casual incursions into general literature. Insensibly the desire to understand supplanted the desire merely to record, and the desire to explain superseded the endeavour to understand. I have turned my attention, as far as practicable, only to the literary and artistic associations of Pestilence, but these have inevitably overlapped the confines of history and of medical science. The latter territory has been invaded only so far as was necessary to ensure a correct orientation to the inquiry. I have thought it wise to let the curtain fall at the end of the eighteenth century, leaving it to my readers to decide what vestiges of the mentality of distant centuries have survived into this twentieth. A little reflection on this will afford a most salutary lesson to all of us.

CHAPTER I

The scattered records of literature afford a valuable, but neglected, contribution to the study of epidemic pestilence. They show us pestilence as an affair of the mind, as medical literature has shown it as an affair of the body. They teach us too the humiliating lesson that, in spite of the progress of civilization, in spite of the apparent growth of humanity, in spite of the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge, human nature has again and again reverted to the primitive instincts of savagery in face of the crushing calamity of epidemic pestilence. The superficial student of psychology may find it difficult to believe that, so late as 1630 in Milan, so late as 1656 in Naples, so late as 1771 in Moscow, the blood-lust of a maddened populace sought and found a sedative in an orgy of human sacrifice. But so it was. And in this homing instinct of the human mind is to be found the clue to much in the records of literature and art that else is wholly meaningless. It is a grim chapter of history that lies before us, but maybe we shall find here and there some spiritual Bethel reared out of the hard stones on which suffering humanity has lain its weary head.The mind of primitive man conceives no power over nature higher than his own: so is his attitude conditioned to disease. He sees in disease only some evil magic, exercised by man on man. The Australian native believes that the assailant transmits disease by pointing some object at his victim, who in turn looks to magic to free him from the disease. In the New Hebrides the idea still persists that the aggressor shootssome charmed material at the victim by means of bow and arrow. Medicine has not yet emerged from magic. The human mind, as it passes to higher stages of enlightenment, does not wholly discard its primitive beliefs: of this we find abundant testimony in early records of pestilence. In Pharaoh’s plagues mark the importance of the manual acts, the stretching out of the rod, the smiting of the dust, the sprinkling of ashes. Again, when the Philistines of Ashdod ask for deliverance from plague, the diviners enjoin them to make images of their emerods, or swellings. This is crude magic—imitative magic—the essence of which is that any effect may be produced by imitating it. It is the spirit in which a savage sprinkles water when he wishes rain to fall.As his own impotence is borne in on man, he comes to look beyond himself alike for the cause and cure of his disease; but human agency still bounds his whole horizon. He looks to those likest himself in nature, the imperishable spirits of his own departed dead. Endued with bodily form, their ghosts need offerings of food and drink, and humble homage of prayer. Neglect of these is recompensed by the sending of sickness and death. This cult prevailed in the religion of young Rome and in the Greek worship of beings of the underworld (χθόνιοι), and may be found to-day in Oceania. Such a deified spirit of the dead might exert his influence in dreams to those who slept over his abode. Such is the germ of the incubation ritual of the demigod Asclepius, who revealed remedies for sickness, and was invoked for deliverance from pestilence. Strabo says that Tricca in Thessaly was the oldest sanctuary of Asclepius, who was the deified ancestor of the Phlegyae and Minyae, the ruling family of Tricca.With the emergence of the idea of a separable soul came the belief in its assumption after death of animal forms, and chief of these the mysterious earth-dwelling serpent, darting pestilence from his barbedtongue. The association of the serpent with disease and pestilence is wellnigh world-wide. The Vedas teem with it: classical and Christian literature and art are full of it. We find it in Ovid,[1]in Gregory of Tours,[2]in Paul the Deacon,[3]and in many other writers. The Book of Numbers too (xxi. 6 seq.) retains this imagery of pestilence: ‘And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.’ Imitative magic—the healing of like by like—is still the weapon with which Moses counters the pestilence.In Fernando Po,[4]when an epidemic breaks out among children, it is customary to set up a serpent’s skin on a pole in the middle of the public square, and the mothers bring their infants to touch it. In Madagascar, Sibree[5]found that Ramahavaly, the god of healing, was also the patron of serpents, and was able to employ them as agents of his anger. In many parts of India also it is customary to make a serpent of clay or metal, and offer sacrifices to it on behalf of the sufferer.[6]Apollonius of Tyana also is said to have freed Antioch from scorpions by making a bronze image of a scorpion and burying it under a small pillar in the middle of the city. So the serpent has power not only to excite pestilence, but also to avert it.From these spirits of the nether world, human or animal in form, it is a short passage to the conception of supernatural beings above the earth, but still in human shape and still with human attributes. Such are Apollo, Asclepius, and Rudra. Traces of the evolution of these deities are usually to be found in the attributes with which they are endowed in later literature and art. The usual symbol of Asclepius is a serpent coiled round a staff. Sacred snakes were kept in his temples,[7]and applicants for healing fed them with cakes.[8]Cures were frequently effected in the sanctuaries of Asclepius by serpents stealing out and licking the wounds of patients. The god-man finally supersedes the serpent, but conservative religious sentiment retains the older object of worship as the symbol and associate of the new. In Greek legend it is the serpent from which Asclepius learns the art of healing: true, Homer makes Chiron his teacher. Numerous other legends of the serpent origin of medicine survive. Polyindus the seer is said to have learnt the herbs that can restore men to life by observing how the serpents raised their dead to life. In Cashmere[9]the descendants of the Naga (serpent) tribes attribute their special skill in healing to knowledge bestowed on their ancestors by serpents: and the Celts acquired their medical lore from drinking serpent broth. As with Asclepius, so also we shall see with Apollo. Apollo in very truth slays the man-killing Python, and himself becomes also the sender of pestilence. He not only smites with disease the doer of evil, but wards it off from the upright. His are the arrows that scatter plague: but he is also the best of physicians. Such is the Apollo of the Iliad.PLATE I (Face Page 4)Apollo with Bow and MouseAsclepius with SerpentSerpent and GalleyChrist on the CrossThe Brazen SerpentHomer’s[10]aged priest Chryses, when he calls upon Apollo to avenge the ravishing of his daughter, invokes him as God of the Silver Bow (Ἀργυρότοξος). Apollo hears his prayer, andDown from Olympus’ heights he passed, his heart Burning with wrath: behind his shoulders hung His bow and ample quiver: at his back Rattled the fateful arrows as he moved: Like the night-cloud he passed: and from afar He bent against the ships and sped the bolt: And fierce and deadly twanged the silver bow: First on the mules and dogs, on man the last, Was poured the arrowy storm; and through the camp Constant and numerous blazed the funeral fires. Nine days the heavenly Archer on the troops Hurled his dread shafts.[11]Homer’s picture of the Archer Apollo has inspired one at least of the masterpieces of Graeco-Roman sculpture. Apollo the Avenger sends the pestilence in punishment of sin. Homer sets it as a signal evidence of divine displeasure in the forefront of his epic, as does Sophocles after him in the greatest of his tragedies. Apollo is pictured as the god who spreads the plague by arrows shot from his bow. He swoops down with impetuous onset, like the sudden fall of night in Mediterranean lands, as the ‘pestilence that walketh in darkness’ and ‘the arrow that flieth by day’. The plague is first epizootic, falling on mules and dogs, then epidemic among the Greek host. A council is called, and Achilles advises that some prophet or priest be summoned to say what propitiatory sacrifices have been neglected:If for neglected hecatombs or prayers He blames us: or if fat of lambs and goats May soothe his anger and the plague assuage.The seer Calchas shows them that it is sent rather as a punishment for flagrant sin, the sin of Agamemnon in carrying off Chryseis. It is for no neglect of honorific sacrifices nor for neglected prayers thatpestilence has come upon them. Chryseis must be sent back, and expiation be made to Apollo with sacrifices, after the whole host has been purified in the doubly cleansing water of the sea. So Chryseis is sent back andNext proclamation through the camp was made To purify the host; and in the sea, Obedient to the word, they purified: Then to Apollo solemn rites performed With faultless hecatombs of bulls and goats, Upon the margin of the watery waste: And wreathed in smoke the savour rose to heaven.Thus they offer the sacrifice of atonement for sin, with the ablutions meet for a solemn lustration of the people. Then when the plague is stayed, and not till then, may they join in the glad eucharistic feast of meat-offerings and libations of red wine, the whole assemblage taking it in company with the god, crowning the cups with flowers and chanting hymns of praise.The Apollo of the Iliad, like the serpent of old, is not only the sender but also the averter of pestilence.Homer’s plague marks a stage at which prayer and sacrifice have displaced magic in the struggle with pestilence. From this time on the study of pestilence is inextricably blended with that of the evolution of religion. Prayer and sacrifice follow inevitably from the conception of the majestic man-god. He must be approached on bended knee with request for help: his is by right the homage of prayer. His worshipper approaches him as he would an earthly potentate: he cleanses himself, he begs for grace in humble posture, he gives him of his best. Hence arise purification, prayer, and sacrifice. At first, as in Homer, it is the body that is purified: the offering of a clean heart and a right spirit is of later growth. So long as the god is humanly conceived, food and drink will be the meet offerings of sacrifice. Later with the conception of a god dwelling aloft, as in the Homeric verse, the sweetsavour of the sacrifice, or of the scented smoke of incense rising to heaven, will find peculiar favour in his sight. Primitive sacrifice is essentially social: it is a banquet in which the worshippers join in communion with the god: it is the true parent of the lectisternium. Early religion has no doubts of the god’s good-will, if duly solicited: hence the joyousness of dance and song attendant on the eucharistic feast, the worshippers being convinced that the sacrifice has restored them to the favour of the god. The stern god, the God of the Old Testament, slow to forgive, has no place in primitive theology. Hymns, such as the Greek warriors sang in jubilant unison to Apollo, are the first dim gropings of language into the domains of literature. Paeans of this kind were chanted in the sanctuaries of Asclepius after successful acts of healing.In early Indian myth Rudra is the god who lets fly the arrows of pestilence. Read this prayer to Rudra from the Atharvaveda[12]: there are many like it in the older Rig-Veda, which reached near its present form as early as 1500 b.c.Prayer to Bhava[13]and Sava[14]for protection from dangers.1. O Bhava and Sava, be merciful, do not attack us: ye lords of beings, lords of cattle, reverence be to you twain! Discharge not your arrow even after it has been laid (on the bow) and has been drawn! Destroy not our bipeds and our quadrupeds.7. May we not conflict with Rudra, the archer with the dark crest, the thousand-eyed powerful one, the slayer of Ardhaka!12. Thou, O crested god, earnest in (thy hand) that smites thousands, a yellow golden bow that slays hundreds: Rudra’s arrow, the missile of the gods, flies abroad: reverence be to it, in whatever direction from here (it flies).19. Do not hurl at us thy club, thy divine bolt: be not incensed at us, O lord of cattle! Shake over some other than us the celestial branch!26. Do not, O Rudra, contaminate us with fever, or with poison, or with heavenly fire: cause this lightning to descend elsewhere than upon us!Other gods than Rudra can stem the pestilence. ‘Vayu [the wind] shall bend the points of the enemies’ bows, Indra shall break their arms, so that they shall be unable to lay on their arrows: Aditya [the sun] shall send their missiles astray, and Krandramas [the moon] shall bar the way of the enemy that has not started.’[15]Like the Madonna of the Christian Church Aditya staves off the arrows of pestilence. The Aryan warrior certainly, the primitive Greek probably, used poisoned arrows.The language of the 91st Psalm reveals the same imagery as do the Homeric epic and the Vedic hymns. ‘ I will say unto the Lord, Thou art my hope, and my stronghold: my God, in him will I trust. For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter: and from the noisome pestilence. He shall defend thee under his wings, and thou shalt be safe under his feathers: his faithfulness and truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night: nor for the arrow that flieth by day: For the pestilence that walketh in darkness: nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noonday. A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee.’The arrows of pestilence have sunk deep into the tissue of many languages. Practically all the Hebrew words for plague (Maggefah, Negef, Naga, Makkah) indicate a blow. Our English ‘plague’ is derived through the Latin plaga from the Greek πληγή, a blow: so too the German plage. The French fléau—a flail or a plague—embodies the same idea of a blow, and is derived from the Latin flagellum and the Greek θλίβω. To-day even physicians must needs call the poisons of pestilence ‘toxines’, as though they were arrow-poisons discharged from a bow (τόξον from τυγχάνω = I hit). The Arabians speak of being ‘stung ’ or ‘pricked’ with plague, recalling respectively the serpents and the arrows of pestilence.Passing allusion has been made above to the plagues of Pharaoh: it remains only to be said that there is now pretty general agreement that these ten plagues represent merely the seasonal variations, to which Egypt is peculiarly liable, magnified in Jewish oral tradition. Perhaps the last plague, the death of the first-born, at the April of the exodus (circa 1220 b.c.) may have been a true pestis puerorum, falling with chief severity on those who lacked the immunity afforded by a previous epidemic. It was the incursion of Libyans and of the nations of the Greek seas into Egypt, at least as much as the Biblical plagues, that enabled the Israelitish serfs to make good their escape.During the period of wandering in the wilderness Korah, Dathan, and Abiram revolted against the ascendancy of Moses and Aaron, and God caused them to be swallowed up with all their households by an earthquake. Some of the children of Israel murmured against their fate. Those that did so were visited with a plague, that carried off 14,700 persons. The plague was stayed by Aaron offering incense as an atonement on the altar—sacrifice still, but the sacrifice only of a sweet savour to a God dwelling in heaven. The juxtaposition, if it be not permissible to say the association, of earthquake and pestilence in this narrative is noteworthy, in view of the widespread belief in their causal relationship, in later times.All through the Old Testament plague is regarded, as here, as a direct consequence of God’s anger. In the New Testament it figures but little, and then rather as corrective than punitive. The God of the Old Testament is a God of vengeance: only in the later Prophets do we find even a foreshadowing of the God of love and forgiveness, the God of the New Testament. In portraying pestilence Art has retained thisconception of God as a stern punisher of wrongdoing, but in the personality of Christ, approached through the mediation of the Madonna and Saints, has recognized the New Testament conception of God.The entrance into Canaan was the beginning to the Israelites of a long period of warfare with surrounding tribes. At last, in the pitched battle of Eben-ezer, the Philistines crushed the army of Israel, captured the ark of the covenant, and carried it off to Ashdod, where they placed it in the temple of their own national god, Dagon. On two successive nights the image of Dagon was mysteriously thrown down from its pedestal. ‘The hand of the Lord was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the coasts thereof.’ The men of Ashdod made haste to send away the ark to Gath, another Philistine city, but here, too, God ‘smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts’. From Gath it was sent to Ekron with like result: ‘for there was a deadly destruction throughout all the city; the hand of God was very heavy there. And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the cry of the city went up to heaven.’ After seven months of pestilence, the Philistines called for the priests and diviners, to inquire in what way they should send back the ark. These told them that, if they wished for deliverance from the plague, the ark must on no account be sent back empty, but with a trespass-offering of five golden emerods and five golden mice, ‘images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land.’ The ark was to be sent in a new cart, drawn by two milch kine, while their calves were kept at home. If the kine took the straight way by the coast to Beth-shemesh, they would know that it was God that had smitten them, ‘but if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that smote us: it was a chance that happened to us. And the men did so: and took two milch kine, and tiedthem to the cart, and shut up their calves at home: And they laid the ark of the Lord upon the cart, and the coffer with the mice of gold and the images of their emerods. And the kine took the straight way to the way of Beth-shemesh,and went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left; and the lords of the Philistines went after them unto the border of Beth-shemesh. And they of Beth-shemesh were reaping their wheat-harvest in the valley: and they lifted up their eyes, and saw the ark, and rejoiced to see it. And the cart came into the field of Joshua, a Beth-shemite, and stood there, where there was a great stone: and they clave the wood of the cart, and offered the kine a burnt-offering unto the Lord. And the Levites took down the ark of the Lord, and the coffer that was with it, wherein the jewels of gold were, and put them on the great stone: and the men of Beth-shemesh offered burnt offerings and sacrificed sacrifices the same day unto the Lord ..., which stone remaineth unto this day in the field of Joshua, the Beth-shemite.’ Fifty thousand and seventy of the people of Beth-shemesh were smitten with the plague, ‘because they had looked into the ark of the Lord.’In its essential features the narrative of thisplague of Ashdodis a mere replica of the Homeric plague. The manifest cause is God’s displeasure, but when it falls on Israelites, God’s chosen people, as well as on Philistines, it is perplexing, for knowledge of contagion or communicability is as yet unborn. But an explanation is ready to hand—the Israelites also have offended God by looking into the ark. The sin-offerings are to be representations in gold of the disease, akin to the votive offerings of diseased parts dedicated in the sanctuaries of Asclepius, and representations of mice, which then and after were generally associated with pestilence—imitative magic again in its simplest form. The sacrificial stone is left as a commemorative altar for all time. Religion has now appeared to reinforce magic. The Philistine diviners do indeed hazard the thought that the plague mayhave been a mere ‘chance that happened to us’, and so faintly foreshadow a belief in the natural causation of epidemic disease.Have we sufficient data to establish the identity of this contagious pestilence? It broke out on the sea-coast among a race of maritime traders, and spread from the coast to other inland towns. It lasted more than seven months. It took on two forms, a severe type with early death, and a less fatal type, in which swellings (so-called emerods) developed in the secret parts, a comprehensive term which habitually included the whole area adjacent to the genitals, and therein the groins. On these data alone it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was true oriental plague, with a proportion of bubonic cases, a disease that throughout its recorded history has hugged this corner of the Levant.Votive offerings for the healing of disease generally portrayed the part diseased, rather than the actual disease, the latter so often defying plastic representation. But, in the case of a simple swelling, it is natural that the disease itself should be modelled.It is tempting to assert with confidence a direct causal connexion between the morbid swellings and the mice, for rats and mice were ill distinguished from each other until recent times. The matter is further complicated by the fact that there is considerable doubt as to the authenticity of parts, at least, of the narrative. The composition of the Books of Samuel ranged over some seven centuries, from 900-200 b.c., and the mouse story is believed to be a late interpolation, of which it is impossible to fix the date. But in the text, as it stands, the mice are designated ‘mice that mar the land’, and ancient literature abounds in records of appalling devastation of crops by the agency of field-mice. Aelian,[16]Aristotle,[17]Strabo,[18]Theophrastus, Pliny, and others testify to this. Loeffler[19]gives an account of a Thessalian corn-harvest destroyed by a horde of field-voles, a field being completely devastated in a single night. Mice were, in fact, one prominent cause of the famine-plagues[20]of history. Viewed in this light, it helps us to understand another Biblical pestilence, that fell on the army of Sennacherib, in 701 b.c., at Pelusium. This campaign of Sennacherib was undertaken to quell a general revolt of the western states against Assyrian supremacy and the payment of tribute to the Assyrian king. The revolt was fomented, seemingly, by Merodach-Baladan, whom Sargon had ousted from the kingship of Babylon, and who now drew Hezekiah into the revolt. He sent an embassy with gifts to Hezekiah, nominally to congratulate him on his recovery from a severe illness, which the Bible narrative terms ‘a boil’. This may perhaps indicate true pustular plague, but forms of boil (e. g. Baghdad boil), quite distinct from plague, are familiar occurrences in several regions of the East. Sennacherib first crushed Merodach-Baladan, and then advanced against Hezekiah, who at once called on Tirhaquah, the Ethiopian viceroy of Egypt, for help. At the pitched battle of Altaku Sennacherib defeated Tirhaquah, and shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem, to which he proceeded to lay siege. Meantime Tirhaquah rallied his army and again advanced to the aid of Hezekiah, so that Sennacherib was compelled to march south against him. At Pelusium, on the border of Egypt, Sennacherib’s army was suddenly destroyed by a pestilence, that compelled him to withdraw the remnant at once to Assyria. ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the Lord went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.’[21]Isaiah confirms in detail the narrative of the Book of Kings, and theChaldaean chronicler, Berosus, in a fragment preserved by Josephus, states also that Sennacherib was driven back by pestilence. The prism inscriptions of Sennacherib are characteristically silent on the subject: they tell only how he shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem, like a bird in a cage.Pelusium has an evil reputation in the annals of pestilence. Procopius cites it as the starting-point of Justinian’s plague. There, too, one of the Crusading expeditions developed plague; and again, in a.d. 1799, the army of Napoleon was infected there and carried the disease into Syria. The explanation is not far to seek. The eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean, and more particularly Syria, Egypt, and Libya, were the points to which the merchants of the East brought their merchandise for exchange with that of the West. From time immemorial Arab caravans and camels had traversed well-worn trade routes from the East abutting on the Mediterranean at Tyre, Sidon, and Pelusium, and later at Alexandria. In these meeting-places of East and West, as also at Constantinople, plague would most readily, and actually did, find a footing. Possibly the eastern Delta may have been an endemic centre, but more likely, as was believed in the late Chinese plague, a distributing centre was an original source.Byron in his lines in the Hebrew Melodies on the ‘Destruction of Sennacherib’ has caught the passionate note of fervid patriotism, on which the chosen race celebrated their deliverance from the heathen enemy by the might of their own God, and has retained the imagery and simple diction of the Bible story:For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed on the face of the foe as he passed: And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still.And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.Herodotus[22]relates that the tradition of this wonderful deliverance lived on in Egypt also. His cicerone in the temple of Ptah at Memphis told him the following tale. ‘The next king was a priest of Vulcan, called Sethos. This monarch despised and neglected the warrior class of the Egyptians, as though he did not need their services. Among other indignities which he offered them, he took from them the lands which they possessed under all the previous kings, consisting of twelve acres of choice land for each warrior. Afterwards, therefore, when Sennacherib, king of the Arabians and Assyrians, marched his vast army into Egypt, the warriors one and all refused to come to his aid. On this the monarch, greatly distressed, entered into the inner sanctuary, and before the image of the god bewailed the fate that impended over him. As he wept he fell asleep, and dreamed that the god came and stood at his side, bidding him be of good cheer, and go boldly forth to meet the Arabian host, which would do him no hurt, as he himself would send those who should help him. Sethos then, relying on the dream, collected such of the Egyptians as were willing to follow him, who were none of them warriors, but traders, artisans, and market people, and with these marched to Pelusium, which commands the entrance into Egypt, and there pitched his camp. As the two armies lay here opposite one another, there came in the night a multitude of field-mice, which devoured all the quivers and bow-strings of the enemy and ate the thongs by which they managed their shields. Next morning they commenced their flight, and great multitudes fell, as they had no arms with which to defend themselves. There stands to this day in the temple of Vulcan a stone statue of Sethos, with a mouse in his hand, and an inscription to this effect: “Look on me and learn to reverence the gods.”’Strabo[23]has a story of mice eating up the bow-strings, and a variant of it appears also in Chinese annals,[24]so that it may be regarded as merely a figurative expression for some providential deliverance from an enemy, and in the case of Sennacherib the medium of deliverance was pestilence.It is impossible to say whose was the statue Herodotus ascribes to Sethos, for no king Sethos is known in Egyptian history. Perhaps it was a statue of Horus, the Egyptian equivalent of Apollo, or not impossibly of Apollo himself, for we have abundant evidence of the association of the mouse with Apollo. In the pestilence of the Iliad,[25]Chryses addresses him as Mouse-God (Σμινθεύς). Strabo says that the statue of Apollo Smintheus in Chrysa, a town of the Troad, had a mouse beneath his foot: so also has a bronze coin now in the British Museum. De Witte[26]has figured coins of Alexandria, the more ancient Hamaxitus, in the Troad, in which Apollo Smintheus is represented with his bow, and a mouse on his hand. Aelian[27]says that an effigy of the mouse stood beside the tripod of Apollo. An ancient bas-relief, of uncertain date, illustrating the Homeric plague and the offerings of the Greeks to Apollo Smintheus, also shows a mouse on a tripod. Another shows Apollo with a mouse beneath his chin: so, too, does a coin of Tenedos. White mice were actually kept beneath the altar in the temple of Apollo Smintheus at Hamaxitus, and were fed at the public expense. Strabo[28]says that the worship of Apollo Smintheus extended to the whole coast of Asia Minor and to the neighbouring islands.Many votive offerings in the form of mice have been found, at Alexandria Troas,[29]in Palestine,[30]and elsewhere, and Strabo suggests that the worship of mice originated in a desire to propitiate mice, so as to induce them not to ravage the cornfields. The propitiation of animals,[31]and particularly of those that infest the crops, is common in the worship of primitive men. The Philistines are said to have made images of the mice that marred their land, and sent them out of their country, so as to induce the real mice to depart also. In a later stage of worship, when a god has supplanted the animal, the god is propitiated instead of the pest itself: hence Mouse Apollo,[32]Locust Apollo,[33]Wolf Apollo,[34]and Zeus Averter of Flies.[35]Even lowlier pests are absorbed into the godhead, so that we have Apollo Erythibius[36](ἐρυσίβη = mildew), and the Romans personified it and worshipped it as Robigus[37](robigo[38]Thus Apollo seems to stand in the same relation to the mouse, as Asclepius to the serpent. He not only sends pestilence, but also wards it off both from man and from crops. And viewing all the facts we may conclude with some certainty that the association of mice with famine-pestilence was well recognized, but of any knowledge at this time of the association of rats with plague there is little evidence.Plutarch[39]asserts that the Persian Magi killed all their mice and rats, because they and the gods they worshipped entertained a natural antipathy to them, a feeling which, he says, they shared with the Arabians and Ethiopians. One is curious to know what may have been the real ground of this antipathy, for which Plutarch advances the current explanation. More than likely it was that experience had taught these nations the relation of these animals to famine and perhaps to pestilence as well.Nicholas Poussin (1593-1665) painted a picture, now in the Louvre, of theplague of Ashdod. An inferior replica hangs in the National Gallery, and yet another in the Academy at Lisbon. Horror is the dominant note of a composition that is full of movement. High up between the columns of a temple stands the ark of God. Beside it the body of Dagon lies prostrate on its pedestal, with head and hands lying below. A priest points out with his hand the mutilated image to a group of awe-stricken men, who from their air of authority seem to be elders of the people. A swarm of rats has invaded the town. The streets are strewn with dead and dying of each sex and of every age, and bearers carry away the corpses. Broken columns, lying here and there among the plague-stricken, heighten the sense of death and destruction. In the centre of the foreground is a group that Poussin has borrowed from Raphael. A woman with bared breasts lies dead between her two infants: one is dead, the other is approaching the dead mother’s breast. The father stoops down with hand stretched out to hold it back: with his other he muffles his mouth and nose to shut out infection. To the right another man holds back an older child who is coming towards the dead woman. One man is huddled up in a dying convulsion, another lies exhausted on a broken pillar. On the steps a sick man implores assistance from one who hurries past him to avoid infection. To the left a man with pity depicted on his face regards another writhing in agony. The whole scene is set in the centre of the town in an open space surrounded by massive buildings in the classical style that Poussin acquired among the ruined monuments of Rome. None of the bodies show any distinctive signs of plague, the disease clearly indicated by the presence of swarms of rats.PLATE II PLAGUE OF ASHDOD. BY N. POUSSINPhotograph by Giraudon, Paris (Face Page 18)