440I will also teach you the causes and signs of diseases. 441Foul scab attacks sheep when cold rain and winter, bristling with hoar frost, have sunk deep to the quick, or when unwashed sweat has clung to them after shearing, and thorny brambles have cut their bodies. 445For this reason shepherds bathe the whole flock in sweet rivers, and the ram with his fleece soaked is plunged into the pool and let go to float down the stream; 448or they smear the shorn body with bitter olive-lees, and mix litharge and live sulphur and Idaean pitch and wax rich with grease, and squill and strong hellebore and black bitumen. 452Yet no remedy for their troubles is more effective than if someone can cut open the head of the sore with a blade: the evil feeds and lives by being covered, while the shepherd refuses to apply healing hands to the wounds, and sits asking the gods for better fortune.
457Moreover, when pain has sunk to the bleating creatures' very bones and rages, and parching fever feeds on their limbs, it has helped to turn away the burning heat and to strike, between the bottoms of the feet, a vein throbbing with blood, as the Bisaltae are accustomed to do and the fierce Gelonian, 462when he flees to Rhodope and into the deserts of the Getae, and drinks milk curdled with horse's blood. 464Any sheep you see from afar either withdrawing too often into the soft shade, or cropping the tops of the grass too listlessly, and following last, or lying down in mid-field as it grazes, and returning alone late at night: at once check the fault with the blade, before the dread contagion creeps through the unwary flock.
470Not so thick does the whirlwind rush over the sea bringing a storm, as do the plagues of cattle. 471Nor do diseases seize single bodies, but whole summer pastures at once, the hope of the flock and the flock together, and the whole race from its source. 474Then let a man know it, if he should see the airy Alps and the Noric forts on their hills and the fields of Iapydian Timavus even now, so long after, and the deserted realms of the shepherds and the glades empty far and wide.