Note 101 — Chapter V

In the consulship of Marcus Plautius Hypsæus, and Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, Africa scarce breathing from bloody wars, a terrible and extraordinary destruction ensued; for now throughout Africa an infinite multitude of locusts were collected, and having devoured the growing corn, and consumed the vegetables, and leaves of the trees, their tender boughs, and their bark, they were finally driven, by a sudden and tempestuous wind, into the air, and being driven by the wind through the air, at length were drowned in the sea; their carcases, loathsome and putrified, being cast up by the waves of the sea in immense heaps, in all parts of the shore, bred an incredible and infectious smell, after which followed so general a pestilence of all living creatures, that the dead bodies of cattle, wild beasts, and fowls, corrupted by dissolution, filled the atmosphere with a contagious miasma, and augmented the fury of the plague; but how great and extraordinary a death of men there was, I cannot but tremble to report; in Numidia, where Micipsa was the king, died eighty thousand persons: on the sea-coast, near Carthage and Utica, about two hundred thousand are reported to have perished; from the city of Utica itself were, by this means, swept from the face of the earth thirty thousand soldiers, who were appointed to be the garrison of Africa, and the destruction was so violent, according to report, that from one gate of Utica were carried to be buried, in one and the same day, the bodies of above fifteen hundred of the aforesaid soldiers; so that by the grace of God (through whose mercy, and in confidence of whom I speak of these events), I boldly affirm that sometimes, even in our days, the locusts do much mischief, yet never before happened, in the time of the Christians, a calamity so insupportable, as this scourge of locusts, which, when alive, were insufferable, and after their death, produced much more pernicious consequences, which, if they had lived, would have destroyed every vegetable thing; but being dead, destroyed, through the plague which they produced, all earthly creatures. Vide Paulus Orosius contra Paganos, Lib. V. Cap. ii.