NOTES 305

the writers almost without exception praise Thucydides' accuracy
and precision, and yet differ most strangely in the conclusions they
draw from. his words; physicians, English, French or German, after
examining the symptoms, have decided that it was each of the
following maladies: typhus scarlet putrid yellow camp hospital
jail fever, scarlatina maligna, the black death, erysipelas, small—
pox, the oriental plague, some wholly extinct form of disease.
2 . Lucretius' copy must manifestly be even more vague
and inconclusive.^ Lucretius in fact often misunderstood and
mistranslated Thucydides' account of the symptoms, and even
added others. It is probable that Fracastorius, a student of
Lucretius, depended on his version rather than on the original
Greek. He may however have read Thucydides in a fairly good
Latin version such as Valla's or Bruni's. As to its cause, Lucretius
6. 1141, says that the Athenian plague came, borne on the air,
from Egypt; whereas Thucydides says that it was said to have begun
in Ethiopia, descended to Egypt and Persia, and broke out at Athens
beginning with the Piraeus; so that it was perhaps brought by ship.

Iïa This malady, exanthematic typhus, is described below, Book II.
G,

s9 This outbreak of foot—and—mouth disease' spread from the
district of Friuli in the province of Venetia, S. W. to the Euganean
hills and the shores of Lake Garda, where was the villa of Fracas—
torius.

40 A tainted condition of the air, the morbidus aer, 'distempered
air!, of Lucretius VI. 1097, had been held responsible for epidemies
from at least the time of Hippocrates. See Syphilis, Book I,
where Fracastorius uses the phrase aer pafer rerum, and below,
pp. 25, 65. Similar statements occur in all early syphiliographers,
e. g. Hutten (1519), Ch. II, venenatum demissum ab aere vaporem.
For marshes and water as sources of infection, see pp. 59, 65, 105.

4: For his attitude to astrology see Introduction, p. xxxiii, and be—
low, p. 65.

4 For the distinction between material! and spiritual qualities,
e. g. between [uz, light, and its spiritual quality lumen, luminousness,
see p. 23.

43 See p. 25.

44 Celsus, De Medicina VI. 4, discusses the varieties of area, which
include aJopecia and ophiasis.  The latter (from Greek öis, gnalge)
is an obsolete term for a form of alopecia areata; the adjective
'ophiasic' is still used for a skin affection that is serpiginous, works
round like a snake..

45 For his discussion of herpes, see Book II. Ch. 15.

46 As will be seen in the chapter on elephantiasis, he uses that
Greek form and the Latin elephanfia indifferently, and I preserve
this variation in the translation.

47 In Ch. VIII, he discussed the analogies of contagions, i. e.
their 'selective properties'.