Ovid's description of the punishment inflicted upon the people of Aegina by Juno, in a fit of pique because they named their city after her rival for Jupiter's affections, ranks, along with Thucydides' celebrated account of the Athenian plague of 430–26 BC, as one of the great set-piece descriptions of pestilence. It has been regarded as a ‘prototype’ for an emerging genre that eventually gave rise to Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, and it clearly made a profound impression upon the monastic chronicler, Thomas Walsingham. He refers to the ‘furnace blasts of death’ borne on southerly winds when recording the devastating effects of the 1407 plague upon the people of London, 30,000 of whom reputedly died during what was to become a national epidemic. Independent evidence suggests that this ‘deadly plague’ did, indeed, cause widespread mortality, although, like many other fifteenth-century outbreaks, it has received considerably less attention than those of the late fourteenth century and early modern period.