Plague of Justinian of the sixth century. This dreadful plague has been described by Evagrius and by Procopius.  [1] Here is a précis of their descriptions. I will begin with Evagrius.

According to this ecclesiastical historian, the plague in question arrived about 543 CE and for fifty-two years wreaked terrible havoc over almost the whole extent of the earth. It began two years after the city of Antioch had been taken by the Persians, and appeared in some of its aspects like the plague of Athens which has been described by Thucydides, and in others very different.

It descended first on Ethiopia, and from there spread over almost all parts of the world. Some cities were so cruelly ravaged by it that they lost all their inhabitants. There were persons whom it attacked on the head, the face, and the eyes which appeared extremely inflamed; then, descending into the chest, it carried them away mercilessly. Others had distempered stomach, yet others abscesses in the groin; others had fevers from which they died the second or third day; others became delirious before perishing; others in perishing had their body covered in pustules and lesions. Some who had caught this scourge once or twice and survived would succumb the third time.

There were different ways, and very difficult to understand, of contracting this disease. A number died from having merely entered infected houses; others by having lightly touched the sick, and others, without any communication, caught the illness in the countryside and public squares. Some protected themselves from it by fleeing the affected cities, and did not fail to spread the plague . Some others remained in the midst of the victims, without fear and without dying, and even without experiencing anything. Evagrius relates that he was studying grammar when this plague began, that he caught it, but that he subsequently lost his wife and some of his children, relatives, and slaves.

Procopius has given us a description of this disease with as much art as precision, and as well as if he had been a physician by profession. According to him, this scourge consumed almost the whole of humankind. There was not a single part of the earth it did not afflict, and it was not in a particular season of the year but in all of them equally. It spared neither rank nor age nor sex, even though there was such a great diversity of temperaments and dispositions. The varying situations of place, diet, complexion, and behavior: nothing could save those afflicted.

It began among the Egyptians of Pelusium, spread to Alexandria, into the rest of Egypt, and into those parts of Palestine that neighbor Egypt; then, progressing ever steadily, it roamed the world as if its purpose had been to strive successively to ravage everyone. Terra firma, islands, caves, mountain tops, every place where there were men, was infected. From the seashores it spread inland; and when it leapt over a country, they had not long to feel relieved, for it turned around and came back. As early as the second year, towards the middle of spring, it came to light in Constantinople, where Procopius then lived.

Some persons who caught the disease thought they saw apparitions of spirits in all sorts of human forms; others imagined that the men they ran across struck them on some part of their bodies; others thought they heard a voice in their visions that cried out to them that they were inscribed in the book of the dead; others took refuge in churches, where they perished. Some, without any precursor symptom of the disease were suddenly seized with a sort of fever which by the pulse did not portent any danger, yet they were carried off by a bubo that formed, sometimes earlier and sometimes later, either in the groin or in the armpit, or under the ear, or in other parts of the body.

A great diversity of symptoms was observed in this disease. Some fell into a deep lethargy, others were agitated by a violent frenzy, some asked to eat and others, repelled by all food, died of starvation. In certain times, neither physician, nor guardian, nor gravedigger caught the disease in proximity to the sick and the dead; they continued to enjoy perfect health, even though they cared for and buried infected persons. Others on the contrary caught the disease without knowing how, and promptly died of it. Many though not feeling thirsty dove into fresh water or into the sea. Some, without experiencing lethargy or an attack of frenzy, had gangrenous buboes and expired in pain; others ended their days vomiting blood.

Some physicians, conjecturing that the disease’s poison consists in the pestilential ulcers, opened these ulcers in dead bodies and found an enormous lesion there. Those whose body was spotted with small, black eruptions the size of a lentil did not live a day. Some, entirely abandoned by the physicians, would recover against all expectation; others, from the recovery they thought certain, would suddenly perish. A bath helped some, and harmed others; the latter died of the remedies, and the former escaped without having used any. In a word, it was not possible to find any method to preserve men’s lives, either by preventing the disease or by defeating it, there being no apparent cause to which one could attribute the disease or its healing.

Pregnant women who were stricken would die, some with miscarriages; and others, happily delivered, would perish at the same time as their children: few contrary examples were seen. The sick whose open ulcers ran abundantly usually survived, the violence of the lesion being tempered by the outflow; but those whose ulcers remained in the same state as at first almost always perished. Some had shriveled thighs even though the ulcers had not run; others survived the illness with a mutilated tongue and could not, for the rest of their lives, articulate more than vague sounds.

This plague lasted for four months in Constantinople, at first rather benignly, but then with such fury that the number of dead increased to ten thousand in one day. At the outset they were carefully buried, but all at once everything fell into the worst chaos: servants had no more masters, and the rich had no domestics to serve them. In this afflicted city there were empty houses everywhere, and stores and shops that no longer opened; all commerce, even for subsistence, was wiped out.

The emperor instructed Theodorus, one of his auditors, to withdraw from the treasury the money needed to distribute to those who were in need, but that was but a feeble resource. Procopius adds that numerous rascals, stricken with terror, abandoned their evil life, while others returned to their evil ways as soon as the danger was past.

It results from all this detail that although this plague lasted for fifty-two years, often changing symptoms country by country, nevertheless the description of Evagrius differs in few essentials from that of Procopius.... but as the history of Procopius was known to everyone, Evagrius was wrong to assert that this disease had not been described before him. We cannot doubt that his description and that of Procopius refer to the same plague , which, in the report of Agathias, began the fifth year (we should read: Justinian’s fifteenth year). Procopius described it as it appeared in Constantinople in the second year, and what Evagrius says is consistent with what it was like several years later: it is this difference of time and place that are apparently the principal causes of the difference sometimes found in the two historians’ descriptions.

Evagrius, for example, relates a very surprising circumstance which we do not read in Procopius, which is that not one person who was a native of the infected cities, however far they were from where the disease was, nevertheless escaped its fury. These words not one person , strictly speaking, destroy all credibility; but if we interpret his narrative by a large number of people, he will not be suspected of falsity for those who are not unaware of similar examples reported by the historians of more modern times with respect to the English sweating sickness, a sort of plague that broke out in the principality of Wales in 1483, ravaged England, spread to Germany, reappeared in London in 1551 for the fifth time, attacked many English natives in foreign countries and spared almost all the foreigners established in London. See English sweating sickness.

1. Evagrius Scholasticus, sixth-century Syrian author of a six-volume Ecclesiastical History . Procopius of Caesarea was a prominent sixth-century Byzantine historian, particularly of the emperor Justinian I.