Note 39 — INTRODUCTION.

Wherever causes are obscure, superstition naturally ascribes them to some preternatural influence; and what seemed farther to have encouraged this, anciently, was, that violent epidemics occurred most frequently in camps and at sieges where great political conjunctures were likely to arise, in which superior powers were supposed to interest themselves. Thus we read in Homer of fatal diseases being sent as punishments by the gods. But the pestilential diseases so often mentioned by poets and historians as prevailing in cities and armies, were probably nothing else but fevers, produced partly perhaps by the scarcity and bad quality of provisions, but probably still more by corrupted human effluvia, which was very apt to he produced by the want of personal cleanliness, to which the mode of cloathing among the ancients would more particularly subject them, especially in camps and besieged towns.