[The wars with the barbarians affected the population in almost every province, thus death by the sword.] … The entire … reigns of Valerian and his son (AD 254 to 268) … was one uninterrupted series of disorders and disasters. (The First Four Seals, pg. 28).
“Our habits of thinking so fondly connect the order of the universe with the fate of man, that this gloomy period of history has been decorated with inundations, earthquakes, uncommon meteors, preternatural darkness, and a crowd of prodigies fictitious or exaggerated. … But a long and general famine was a calamity of a more serious kind. It was the inevitable consequence of rapine and oppression, which extirpated the produce of the present, and the hope of future harvests. Famine is almost always followed by epidemical diseases, the effect of scanty and unwholesome food. Other causes must, however, have contributed to the furious plague, which, from the year two hundred and fifty to the year two hundred and sixty-five, raged without interruption in every province, every city, and almost every family, of the Roman empire. During some time five thousand persons died daily in Rome; and many towns, that had escaped the hands of the Barbarians, were entirely depopulated.”
Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1, Ch. 10, “Emperors Decius, Gallus, Aemilianus, Valerian And Gallienus.—Part IV.
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