the republic or under the emperors. These last indeed erected baths and thermæ for the use of the poor, and also made public distributions of food; and in these respects their example was followed by the wealthy patricians, who affected to give every day to their poor clients what went by the name of the sportula. We see by the descriptions of Juvenal, that the poor and infirm dependants of these nobles had no other resource to look to; for, according to him, the most acute distempers could not prevent them dragging their steps to the portico, and soliciting their share in the sportula.
"Quid macies ægri veteris quem tempore longo
Torret quarta dies olimque domestica febris, &c."
It is easy to see that no public asylum was open for their reception. Both Greeks and Romans, then the two most polished nations of antiquity, consecrated no retreats for the unfortunate. This was most probably the consequence of their constitutions and forms of government. Divided at all times into freemen and slaves, the legislatures of these two nations never bestowed much attention on the second of these great bodies of men—but always regarded them as of a different race, and, as it were, the dregs of humanity. A slave dangerously ill was left entirely to the care of his fellows in servitude; in many instances his master would not even be at the expense of burying his corpse, and allowed it to be thrown out to the vultures. The Esquiline Mount, whitened, according to Horace, by the great number of bones left there in heaps by these birds of prey, is a sufficient proof how little care was taken of the funerals of the poor. These unhappy men, of whom there was always a great number even in the best days of Athens and Rome, had then no other resource in their calamities but private charity, the strength of their constitutions, or the crisis of nature.
The temple of Esculapius, in the island of the Tiber, was indeed a sort of hospital, although far from corresponding exactly to what we call by that name; at least, the law of the Emperor Claudius, which declares that slaves abandoned by their masters in the island of Esculapius, should be held tree in case of their recovery, seems to intimate that there was in that place a seigneurial hospital destined for their reception. But it is not till the establishment of Christianity that we can find any traces of those institutions, which are now so common in Christendom, for the accommodation of the infirm and the unfortunate. In spite of all the persecutions to which the first Christians were exposed, we find, that about the year 258, Laurentius, chief of the deacons, assembled a great number of poor and sick, who were supported by the alms of the church. But it was in the year 380 that the first regular hospital was built. St Jerome informs us, that Fabiola, a Roman matron of distinguished piety, founded, for the first time, a nosocomium, that is, as he himself explains it, "a house in the country for the reception of those unhappy sick and infirm persons who were before scattered among the places of public resort,—and for the purpose of furnishing them in a regular manner with nourishment, and those medicines of which they might stand in need." This establishment was situated at some distance from the city, and in a healthy part of the country.
When Constantine transferred the seat of the empire to Byzantium, he caused an hospitium to be erected for the use of those strangers and pilgrims who had by his time begun to visit the East from motives of religion. This edifice was constructed after the model of the house which Hircanus had built at Jerusalem, about 150 years before the commencement of our era. That prince sought, by the establishment to which I allude, to purify himself, in the eyes of the Jews, from the stain which he had contracted by the sacrilegious rifling of the tomb of David. The riches which he had procured in that impious manner, would, he flattered himself, be less unfavourably regarded, if he should share them with the poor pilgrims, whom zeal or curiosity drew in multitudes to the capital of Judæa. This, according to Isidore, is the origin of the name Ξεν δοχιον, i.e. hospital for strangers, which was given to this building. In the year of our Lord 550, the Emperor Justinian constructed, at Jerusalem, the celebrated hospital of St John, which was the cradle of the military order of the knights of Rhodes and Malta. His successors imitated his example with so much
