promised the Lacedaemonians, in reply to their application immediately
before the war, that he would assist them whether invoked or uninvoked;
and the disorder now raging was ascribed to the intervention of their
irresistible ally; while the elderly men further called to mind an
oracular verse sung in the time of their youth: "The Dorian war will
come, and pestilence along with it." Under the distress which suggested,
and was reciprocally aggravated by these gloomy ideas, prophets were
consulted, and supplications with solemn procession were held at the
temples, to appease the divine wrath.

When it was found that neither the priest nor the physician could retard
the spread or mitigate the intensity of the disorder, the Athenians
abandoned themselves to despair, and the space within the walls became a
scene of desolating misery. Every man attacked with the malady at once
lost his courage--a state of depression itself among the worst features
of the case, which made him lie down and die, without any attempt to
seek for preservatives. And although at first friends and relatives lent
their aid to tend the sick with the usual family sympathies, yet so
terrible was the number of these attendants who perished, "like sheep,"
from such contact, that at length no man would thus expose himself;
while the most generous spirits, who persisted longest in the discharge
of their duty, were carried off in the greatest numbers. The patient was
thus left to die alone and unheeded. Sometimes all the inmates of a
house were swept away one after the other, no man being willing to go
near it: desertion on the one hand, attendance on the other, both tended
to aggravate the calamity. There remained only those who, having had the
disorder and recovered, were willing to tend the sufferers.

These men formed the single exception to the all-pervading misery of the
time--for the disorder seldom attacked anyone twice, and when it did the