On the surface of the noble area, once thronged with bustling crowds passing to and fro in every direction as their various destinations or caprices might lead them, not twenty moving figures were now discernible.

These few, who still retained their strength or the resolution to pace the greatest thoroughfare of Rome, stalked backwards and forwards incessantly, their hollow eyes fixed on vacancy, their wan hands pressed over their mouths; each separate, distrustful, and silent; fierce as imprisoned madmen; restless as spectres disturbed in a place of tombs.
Such were the citizens who still moved over the Campus Martius; and, besetting their path wherever they turned, lay the gloomy numbers of the dying and the dead--the victims already stricken by the pestilence which had now arisen in the infected city, and joined the famine in its work of desolation and death.

Around the public fountains, where the water still bubbled up as freshly as in the summer-time of prosperity and peace, the poorer population of beleaguered Rome had chiefly congregated to expire.

Some still retained strength enough to drink greedily at the margin of the stone basins, across which others lay dead--their heads and shoulders immersed in the water--drowned from lack of strength to draw back after their first draught.

Children mounted over the dead bodies of their parents to raise themselves to the fountain's brim; parents stared vacantly at the corpses of their children alternately floating and sinking in the water, into which they had fallen unsuccoured and unmourned.
In other parts of the place, at the open gates of the theatres and hippodromes, in the unguarded porticoes of the palaces and the baths lay the discoloured bodies of those who had died ere they could reach the fountains--of women and children especially--surrounded in frightful contrast by the abandoned furniture of luxury and the discarded inventions of vice--by gilded couches--by inlaid tables--by jewelled cornices--by obscene picture and statues--by brilliantly framed, gaudily tinted manuscripts of licentious songs, still hanging at their accustomed places on the lofty marble walls.