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[4] In fact all who watched beside the sick were struck by the plague, and thus the lot of the ill was miserable, since no one was willing to minister to the unfortunate. For not only did any not akin abandon one another, but even brothers were forced to desert brothers, friends to sacrifice friends out of fear for their own lives.1

1 Hans Zinsser (Rats, Lice and History, pp. 124-127) thinks that this plague was "the severe, confluent type of smallpox in which death on the fifth or sixth day is not exceptional," despite the fact that there is almost general agreement among scholars that smallpox was not known in the Greek and Roman classical period.

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