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[24] When this city was stormed by the generals of Verus Caesar (as I have related before), 1 the statue of Apollo Comaeus was torn from its place and taken to Rome, where the priests of the gods set it up in the temple of the Palatine Apollo. And it is said that, after this same statue had been carried off and the city burned, the soldiers in ransacking the temple found a narrow crevice; this they widened in the hope of finding something valuable; but from a kind of shrine, closed by the occult arts of the Chaldaeans, the germ of that pestilence burst forth, which after generating the virulence of incurable diseases, in the time of the same Verus and of Marcus Antoninus polluted everything with contagion and death, from the frontiers of Persia all the way to the Rhine and to Gaul. 2

[p. 365]

1 In a lost book; cf. Capitolinus, Verus, 8, 3.

2 Cf. Capitol., Marcus Ant. 13, 3-6.

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