Note 930 — Chapter XII · THE SWORD IN ANCIENT ROME; THE LEGION AND THE GLADIATOR.

During the critical action at Thapsus, Cæsar, according to Plutarch, was hors de combat with a fit of epilepsy, the comitialis morbus (Afric. War, chap. 14). I have noticed in my Commentaries on Camoens (i. 40) the strange fact that some of the greatest men of antiquity were subject to this ‘falling sickness.’ The Egyptians held it to be a manifestation of the power of Typhon; hence the ‘divine disease’ of Apuleius (Defence), and the strange fancies of dæmoniac possession which prevailed in the earliest ages, and which have not yet died out. The learned Canon Farrar (Life, &c. of Saint Paul, Appendix, vol. i.) holds that this perhaps was the ‘thorn in the flesh’ (2 Cor. xii. 7) alluded to by the great Apostle. He quotes from Hausrath the ‘trances’ of Sokrates, the fits of Mohammed, and the faintings and ecstasies of Saints Bernard, Francis, and Catherine of Sienna; and to these he adds George Fox, Jacob Böhme, and Swedenborg.