The Unwilling Vestal by Edward Lucas White

THE next year was the year of the great pestilence. Pestilence, indeed, had ravaged Italy for five consecutive summers previous to that year. But the great pestilence, for two centuries afterwards spoken of merely as "the pestilence," fell in the nine hundred and nineteenth year after the founding of Rome, the year 166 of our era, when Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had been co-Emperors for a little more than five years and Brinnaria had been almost five years a Vestal. It devastated the entire Empire from Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia to Segontium, opposite the isle of Anglesea. Every farm, hamlet and village suffered; in not one town did it leave more than half the inhabitants alive; few cities escaped with so much as a third of the population surviving. Famine accompanied the pestilence in all the western portions of the Roman world, and from famine perished many whom the plague had spared.

This disaster was, in fact, the real deathblow to Rome's greatness and from it dates the decline of the Roman power. It broke the tradition of civilization and culture which had grown from the small beginnings of the primitive Greeks and Etruscans more than two thousand years before.