(This) disease was so powerful 
that it spread from the ill to the healthy 
like fire among dry 
or oily materials.

It was so bad that it could be [bad word] not only through speaking 
or associating with the sick, 
or anything else they had touched.

The pestilence spread so efficiently that, 
not only did it pass from person to person, 
but if an animal touched the belongings 
of some sick or dead person

Such experiences or others like 
them gave birth to a variety of fears 
and misconceptions among the living, 
and the [bad word] strategy (they pursued) was to avoid

even flee the sick and their belongings.

They thought that by doing so 
they could stay healthy themselves. 

"There were some who thought moderate living and the avoidance of excess had a great deal to do with 
avoiding illness, so they lived apart from others in small groups. They congregated and shut themselves 
up in houses where no one had been sick, partaking moderately of the best food and the finest wine, 
avoiding excess in other ways as well, trying their best not speak of or hear any news about the death 
and illness outside, occupying themselves with music and whatever other pleasures they had available." 

This tribulation [bad word] with fear 
in the hearts of men and women 
that one brother abandoned another, 
uncles left nephews, 
sisters left brothers, 
often wives left their husbands, 
and fathers and mothers left their children, 
as if they were not even theirs. 

Nor were these dead honored with tears, 
lights [bad word]  
Sunk to the level that people 
were disposed of much 
as we would now 
now dispose of a dead goat. 

Thus it became clear that what 
the wise had never learned to suffer 
with patience when, in the natural course of things, 
it [bad word] less dramatically and less often, 
became a matter of indifference even 
to the simple thanks to sheer scale of this misfortune.