Plague

The decline of the Roman Empire was not only due to barbarian invasions and civil war. In the second century AD, it was hit by the first pandemic known in human history: the Antonine Plague. Was it germs rather than Germans that brought down the empire?

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Hello and welcome back to the fall of the Roman Empire. My name is Nick Holmes, and this is episode 11 called Plague. In the last few episodes, we've been looking at how the Roman Empire was shaken to its core in the crisis of the 3rd century, and we've heard about how its main enemies, the Persians, Germans, and Goths, all became much more formidable in the 3rd century and were able to defeat Roman armies in a way that would have been unthinkable in the second century. We've also discussed a lot about Rome's fragile political system, which was a major cause of its decline because it made Rome very vulnerable to civil war. This was really because his constitution was neither a republic, as Rome had very successfully been for five hundred years, nor a monarchy which was always perceived as unroman and uncivilized. So instead the Roman political system tended to favour leaders who seized power supposedly for the public good, which was of course the tradition that Augustus inaugurated with his rule, but which in the third century resulted in an endless succession of Roman leaders fighting each other and abandoning the frontiers, thereby allowing the Persians, Goths, and Germans to pour in. But there were other things going wrong as well. And modern research is giving increasing weight to two very interesting areas which have tended to be overlooked somewhat in the past, and these are plague and climate change. And in this episode, we'll look at plague. We'll look at climate change in a future episode, because the evidence is increasingly clear that one of the main causes of Roman decline was the sudden appearance of some devastating plagues that had never really been experienced before. And in the late 2nd and 3rd centuries, there were two of these, the Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian, and as you'll hear, their effect on the Roman Empire was almost as bad as the huge barbarian invasions that we've been hearing about. So, without further ado, let's hear about them. Hope you enjoy it. The Romans were very superstitious, so they invented a story to explain the first known pandemic in human history, the Antonine Plague, that devastated the Roman Empire in the late 2nd century AD, and is increasingly regarded as the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire. The story went like this. In 161 AD, the Romans decided to teach the Parthians a lesson. This was because the Parthian king Volligases had unwisely challenged Roman authority in the contested borderland of Armenia by installing a Parthian Arsachid, prince as ruler of Armenia. This prompted Roman retaliation. Rome was still at the height of its power and the Roman army was not to be messed with. The newly appointed Emperor Marcus Aurelius appointed a tough soldier Avidius Cassius, who had a penchant for brutality as the commander of a force to drive the Parthians out of Armenia. Although the Roman army was nominally under the command of Aurelius' ineffective brother Lucius Verus, Cassius built up a powerful Roman force at Antioch, reinforced with three of Rome's most experienced legions from the west. The campaign was a textbook example of the efficiency and effectiveness of the Roman war machine. Roman columns marched into Armenia, brushing aside Parthian resistance and taking the Armenian capital Artasata. Meanwhile, Cassius led the main assault into the Parthian heartland, taking the Parthian capital Catesiphon, and burning down the royal palace. But he then instructed or allowed his legionaries to commit a crime that came to haunt the Roman world. For close to Catesiphon was Seleucia, a great Hellenistic city, founded by Alexander the Great's general Seleucus as the first capital of the Seleucid Empire. It boasted an array of temples and theatres to rival any of those in the Roman world, and it was populated by Greeks and Syrians who would normally be Rome's allies. At first the inhabitants of Seleucia opened the city gates to the advancing Romans, but then some dispute broke out between them and their new masters, and the city was sacked so brutally that it disappeared from history. It was refounded sixty years later by the Sasanian Persians. Even the Roman world, addicted to the violence of gladiatorial combat, was shocked by this wanton destruction, fear of some supernatural retribution developed, and evidence of this was quickly found. A story developed that a Roman legionary, while plundering the temple of a god known as the long haired Apollo, found a chest that was locked with a warning sign that it must never be opened. But greed overcame the legionary and he smashed open the chest. Inside was a pestilential vapour that poured out, killing all in its wake. According to the Roman historian Amianus Marcellinus, this was the origin of the first pandemic known to humanity called the Antonine Plague, which devastated the Roman Empire from one hundred and sixty five to one hundred and eighty AD as Marcellinus wrote it polluted everything with contagion and death, from the frontiers of Persia all the way to the Rhine and to Gaul. What was this strange new disease and where did it come from? The Greek physician and writer called Claudius Galenus or simply Galen in its anglicised form, provided detailed descriptions of this new disease, and although historians and epidemiologists are still not completely sure what it was, the most widely accepted view is that it was a form of smallpox. Thanks to Galen, we know a reasonable amount about what epidemiologists now regard as the first pandemic ever to affect humanity. As to its origins we can be fairly certain that it had nothing to do with the Roman sack of Seleucia as the Romans superstitiously believed. Instead, it may have originated in Africa and spread via Arabia west to the Roman Empire and east as well to China, where a similar disease was recorded in the decade shortly before its outbreak in the West. Trade between Rome and India had grown exponentially in the first century AD, meeting the Romans' newfound love of oriental spices for cooking, as well as a booming demand for silks imported from China, apparently to accommodate a fashion explosion among Roman women. The disease was rapidly spreading in the Empire by 165 AD and reached most areas by 175 AD. The full impact of the disease is not known. Modern estimates of the number it killed vary massively from 2% to over 30% of the imperial population, a range from one and a half million to twenty five million deaths. But Roman records from Galen and other writers are clear that it struck Egypt very badly, and Rome itself suffered a second major eruption of the disease in 191 AD when records say that over two thousand people a day were dying from it. The Roman army was also one of the worst affected, with one source saying that by 172 AD the army had been reduced to near extinction. Certainly the army seems to have come under serious manpower constraints when Marcus Aurelius had to resort to conscripting gladiators and slaves into the legions to bolster numbers, to fight the invading German tribes, the Marcomini and Quadi in the 270s. Such measures had never had to be taken before. This suggests that depopulation was widespread as a result of the Antonine Plague. Such a situation was very different from Rome's early history when it had enjoyed an abundance of manpower that had proved to be a critical advantage in defeating Pyrrhus and Carthage, as well as providing a running tap of new recruits to the legions in the heady days of Augustus, Trajan and Hadrian. The most noticeable recorded effect on the economy was a fall in the price of land, again suggesting depopulation and a reduced number of peasants available to work the land, but it's likely that the economic impact was much more severe than has been recorded. The Antonine Plague was almost certainly the first check to the Roman economic miracle in about 300 years. Its coincidence with the first serious Germanic invasions of the Empire also for about 300 years marked an ominous new direction for the Empire. Although the plague was effectively over by 191 AD when its last large major outbreak was reported in Rome, the Empire was still vulnerable to pandemics, and the next serious disease to attack it struck in the 240s, the plague of Cyprian. Compared to the well documented Antonine Plague, relatively little is known about the plague of Cyprian. It gained its name from a Christian bishop of Carthage called Cyprian, who's left us with one of the main accounts of the plague. It appears to have struck Alexandria in Egypt in 249 and moved to Rome by 251. Although there is a lack of detailed source material about it, what records there are indicate that every major city in the Roman Empire suffered from it. The main chronicles record a plague lasting about fifteen years, so from around two hundred forty nine to at least two hundred sixty four. The Emperor Claudius Gothicus died from a plague in two hundred seventy, although there is no evidence to confirm or deny that he died of this particular plague. However, it might have lasted until then or had further outbreaks at that time, it's just impossible to know. The records say that mortality was high. The Bishop of Alexandria recorded that around half of the city's population died, which, if true, is a staggeringly large number. In Athens a chronicler claimed that five thousand people died from it each day. Cyprian's accounts are particularly frightening, describing that the infection of the deadly putrefaction cuts off the feet or other extremities, and that as weakness prevails through the failure and losses of the body, the gait is crippled or the hearing is blocked or the vision is blinded. So what was the Cyprian plague? Modern historians think it was probably either pandemic influenza or viral fever, or just possibly another outbreak of smallpox. Like the antinome plague in a society with next to no medical health care, it would have been very difficult to contain the outbreak of a serious infection. Before the age of penicillin and more sophisticated medical treatments, the only cure for plagues like this was time, waiting for it to burn itself out. It's impossible to estimate the cost to the Roman Empire of both of these plagues, but it was clearly very high. Indeed, the antonym plague effectively marked the beginning of Rome's economic decline. Evidence suggests that both the Empire's population and economic production reached a maximum level just before the plague struck in around 160. The plague of Cyprian was probably less severe than the Antonine Plague, but it hit Rome at the worst possible moment in the 250s and sixties when the Empire was struggling with a military and political breakdown. Its contribution to the crisis of the third century shouldn't be underestimated. To quote one historian, maybe it was germs, not Germans, that broke the power of ancient Rome and that ends this episode. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, I'd be really grateful if you wanted to subscribe, tell a friend, or best of all, to leave a review or a rating as you can now do on Spotify, for example. That would be fantastic, thank you. And in the next episode, we'll continue with the story of the Roman crisis of the third century. Thanks for listening and see you next time.