Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

that perished in this extraordinary mortality. I only find, that during three months, five, and at length ten, thousand persons died each day at Constantinople; that many cities of the East were left vacant, and that in several districts of Italy the harvest and the vintage withered on the ground. The triple scourge of war, pestilence, and famine, afflicted the subjects of Justinian; and his reign is disgraced by a visible decrease of the human species, which has never been repaired in some of the fairest countries of the globe.

experience of Evagrius.

*After some figures of rhetoric, the sands of the sea, &c. Procopius (Anecdot. c. 18) attempts a more definite account: that pvpiádas pvpiádwv μvpias had been exterminated under the reign of the imperial demon. The expression is obscure in grammar and arithmetic, and a literal interpretation would produce several millions of millions. Alemannus (p. 80) and Cousin (tom. iii, p. 178) translate this passage "two hundred millions; but I am ignorant of their motives. If we drop the μυριάδας, the remaining μυριάδων pvpías, a myriad of myriads, would furnish one hundred millions, a number not wholly inadmissible.

[blocks in formation]
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][ocr errors]
[graphic]
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed]
[graphic]
« ForrigeFortsett »