552With heavier loss the plague reaches the wretched farmers and lords it within the walls of the great city. 554First the vitals are scorched, and the sign of the hidden flame is redness and the drawing of laboured breath. 556The tongue is rough and swells, the mouth, parched by warm winds, gapes open, and heavy air is caught at with gaping jaws. 558They cannot bear a bed, nor any coverings, but lay their breasts on the hard earth; 559nor is the body made cool by the ground, but the ground grows hot from the body. 561Nor is there anyone to check it, and the cruel disaster breaks out upon the healers themselves, and their arts harm those who practise them: the nearer each is, and the more faithfully he serves the sick, the sooner he comes to his share of death.
564And when hope of recovery had gone and they see the end of the disease only in death, they indulge their impulses, and there is no care for what is useful: for nothing is useful. 567Everywhere, putting off shame, they cling to springs and rivers and capacious wells, and their thirst is not quenched by drinking before their life is. 570Then many, too heavy, cannot rise and die in the very waters: yet someone drinks those too. 572And so great is the wretched sufferers' loathing of their hateful beds: they leap out, or if their strength prevents them from standing, they roll their bodies down onto the ground: and each flees his own home, to each his own house seems deadly, and because the cause lies hidden, the small space is blamed. You might have seen them wandering half-dead in the streets, while they could stand, others weeping and lying on the ground and rolling their weary eyes with a final movement: and they stretch their limbs towards the stars of the overhanging sky, breathing their last here and there, wherever death had caught them.
582What spirit did I have then? 582Was it not what it ought to have been, that I hated life and longed to share the fate of my people? 584Wherever the gaze of my eyes had turned, there the common folk lay strewn, as rotten apples fall when branches are shaken, and acorns from a shaken holm oak. 587You see the temple opposite, lofty with its long flight of steps: Jupiter holds it. 588Who did not offer vain incense on those altars? 589How often, while a husband for his wife, a father for his son, was speaking words of prayer, did he end his life at the unmoved altars, and part of the incense was found unburnt in his hand!
593How often, brought to the temples, while the priest was pronouncing the vows and pouring pure wine between their horns, did the bulls fall from a wound not waited for! 596When I myself was making sacrifice to Jupiter for myself and my country and my three sons, the victim gave dreadful bellows and, suddenly collapsing without any blow, stained the knives held beneath it with scanty blood. 600The diseased entrails too had lost the marks of truth and the warnings of the gods: the grim disease penetrates to the inner organs. 602Before the sacred doorposts I saw corpses thrown out, before the very altars, to make death more odious. 604Some shut off their life with a noose, and by death drive away the fear of death, and of their own accord summon the fate that was coming.
606Bodies sent to death are not carried out with funerals according to custom: for the gates could not hold the funerals. 608Either they weigh on the earth unburied, or are given to high pyres without offerings. 609And now there is no reverence, and they fight over pyres and burn in fires meant for others. 611There are none left to weep; 611and the souls of mothers and young wives, of young men and old, wander unwept: there is no room for tombs, nor wood enough for fires. 614Astounded by so great a whirlwind of miseries, 'O Jupiter!' 615I said, 'if the tales are not false that say you went to the embraces of Aegina, daughter of Asopus, and if you are not ashamed, great father, to be my parent, either give me back my people or lay me too in the tomb.' 619He gave a sign with lightning and favourable thunder.
620'I accept, and may these be happy signs, I pray, of your intent,' I said. 621'The omen you give me I take as a pledge.' 622By chance there was nearby an oak with wide-spreading branches, sacred to Jupiter, from Dodonaean seed: here we saw grain-gathering ants in a long column carrying great loads in their small mouths and keeping to their own path along the wrinkled bark. 627While I marvel at their number, I said, 'Give me as many citizens, best of fathers, and fill my empty walls.' 629The tall oak trembled and, its branches moving without a breeze, gave out a sound. 630My limbs had shuddered with trembling fear, and my hair stood on end.
631Yet I gave kisses to the earth and the oak; 632nor did I admit that I was hoping: yet I was hoping, and cherishing my prayers in my heart.