Appendix 12
The Antonine Plague was the first of three devastating pandemics which ravaged the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire, the others being the Plague of Cyprian (AD 249–AD 262 ) and the Justinian Plague (AD 541–AD 542).
As we have observed, it was never only the booty which victorious troops returning from war brought back to the homeland and their families and friends. Sexually transmitted infections and other diseases were sometimes incubating in the soldiers themselves and infecting their baggage trains, only too ready to spread into new populations. The Antonine Plague, or the Plague of Galen, which was probably smallpox, took hold during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (r. AD 161–AD 180); it devastated the Roman army and may have killed over five million people in the Roman Empire after the army came home from the war in Parthia (161–166). It has even been suggested that a quarter to a third of the entire population of the empire perished, estimated at 60-70 million.
The plague may have claimed the life of emperor Lucius Verus, who died in 169 and was the co-emperor with Marcus Aurelius. In 168, as Verus and Marcus Aurelius returned to Rome from the field, Verus fell ill with symptoms consistent with food poisoning, dying after a few days. However, scholars now believe that he may have succumbed to smallpox. Some also believe that Marcus Aurelius himself died from this plague some eleven years later.
A blend of legend and historical fact give two different explanations as to how the plague developed to infect the human population. In one, Lucius Verus is said to have opened a closed tomb in Seleucia during the sacking of the city and in so doing released, Pandora-like, the disease. This suggests that the epidemic was a supernatural punishment because the Romans violated an oath to the gods not to pillage the city. In the second story, a Roman soldier opened a golden casket in the temple of Apollo in Babylon allowing the plague to escape. Two different fourth-century sources, Res Gestae by Ammianus Marcellinus (c. AD 330–AD 400) and the biographies of Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius in the Historia Augusta, ascribe the outbreak to a sacrilege by the Romans when violating the sanctuary of a god. Other Romans preferred to blame Christians for angering the pagan gods by refusing to worship them, believing that angry gods sent the plague as a punishment.
Marcus Aurelius accordingly embarked on a programme of persecutions against Christians but these backfired when the tenets of Christianity started to exert themselves: Christians of course felt an obligation to help others in time of need, including those suffering from a lethal illness, and to ‘love thy neighbour’. Therefore, they made themselves available to provide the most basic needs, food and water, for those too ill to fend for themselves. This not only helped the needy but it inculcated good feelings between Christians and their pagan counterparts. Christians stayed to help while pagans fled. At an eschatological and existential level, Christianity offered meaning to life and death in times of crisis and an assurance of life after death. Those who survived gained solace in knowing that loved ones, who died as Christians, could receive their reward in heaven. This promise of salvation in the afterlife triggered a spike in recruitment to the faith which, in the longer term, facilitated the acceptance of Christianity as the sole, official religion of the empire in the reign of Constantine I.
It seems that the Antonine Plague first emerged as a Roman public health problem during the siege of Seleucia in Mesopotamia (a major city on the Tigris River) as prosecuted by the Romans in the winter of 165–166. All sources agree that Verus’ troops brought disease back west with them on their victorious return. Rome and the provinces were all affected, and the army was particularly badly hit; a concern with compromised Roman manpower is noted in many sources, for example Ammianus Marcellinus and Orosius and Eutropius who reports that the plague was so severe that ‘in Rome and throughout Italy and the provinces most people, and almost all soldiers in the army, were afflicted by weakness.’ This was especially problematic since the empire was now under threat along its north-eastern frontiers, and had some difficulty mobilising sufficient forces for the Marcommanic Wars at the end of the AD 160s. Ammianus Marcellinus records that the plague rampaged through the western empire to Gaul and to the legions stationed along the Rhine.
The spread of the contagion through the armed forces would have been accelerated by soldiers and sailors who had been on leave returning to active duty and infecting other legionaries and crews. Twenty-eight legions totalling approximately 150,000 highly and expensively trained men were exposed to the virus: many succumbed. As a result, Marcus Aurelius was desperate to recruit any able-bodied man who could fight: freed slaves, prisoners of war, criminals and gladiators were all signed up. Fewer gladiators meant fewer games in Rome and around the empire, which antagonised the Roman people who demanded more, not less, entertainment during a time of intense national stress. The resulting poorly trained and ill-disciplined army failed badly: in AD 167, Germanic tribes crossed the Rhine for the first time in more than 200 years. Such enemy successes served to expedite the decline of the Roman military, which, along with economic crises, were early steps in the decline and fall of the empire.
Eutropius stated that a large population died throughout the empire. According to Cassius Dio, the disease broke out again nine years later in AD 189 and led to up to 2,000 deaths a day in Rome, one quarter of those who were infected. The total death count has been estimated at 5 million, and the disease killed as much as one third of the population in some areas and again devastated the ranks of the Roman army.
This prodigious death toll severely reduced the number of people paying tax and contributing to the state’s coffers, so government revenues plummeted. It diminished recruits for the army, candidates for public office, businessmen and farmers. Production on the farms fell as fewer farmers meant that so much more land was uncultivated with a further adverse effect on tax revenues. Crop shortages led to inflation and steep price increases along with decreasing food supplies. Fewer craftsmen and artisans also meant a downturn in productivity, which impacted local economies. Workforce shortages led to higher wages for those who survived the epidemic, and fewer businessmen, merchants, traders and financiers caused profound interruptions in domestic and international trade.
So, a long term effect of the Antonine Plague was to set off a gradual progression to the decline of the Roman Empire in the west: Hanna, in The Route to Crisis would have it that ‘Roman culture, urbanism, and the interdependence between cities and provinces’ helped the spread of infectious disease thus creating the basis for the collapse of the empire. Overcrowded cities, poor diet and malnutrition, and a lack of sanitary measures made Roman cities reservoirs for disease transmission. The contagions spread unchecked along the land and sea trade routes which connected the cities to the outlying provinces, surely including Britannia and Roman York.
Harper (The Fate of Rome) suggests that ‘the paradoxes of social development and the inherent unpredictability of nature, worked in concert to bring about Rome’s demise.’
The earliest outbreak of this plague recorded in Jerome’s Chronicle, the universal chronology he compiled in the late fourth century, is listed for AD 168, when, ‘A plague (lues) took hold of many provinces, and affected Rome.’ Four years later things were even worse: ‘There was such a great plague throughout the whole world that the Roman army was reduced almost to extinction.’ Dio alleges that death by disease was augmented by mass-scale poisoning, performed by paid criminals equipped with sharp needles and a deadly compound in what to him was the worst plague he had ever come across and that ‘two thousand often died in a single day’ in Rome.
Herodian confirms that there was a severe plague outbreak in Rome around AD 190. All Italy was affected and infected, ‘great destruction of both men and livestock resulted’. Doctors advised Commodus, the emperor at the time, to flee Rome to a safer place, and recommended those who remained in the city to make good use of incense and other aromatics. This would either keep the corrupt air out of their bodies, or overcome any that did manage to enter. The remedy failed for both humans and the animals they shared their living space with.
A second wave struck during the reigns of Decius (AD 249–251) and Gallus (AD 251–253) This plague broke out in Egypt in 251, and from there infected the whole of the Roman Empire. Its mortality rate severely depleted the ranks of the army, and caused massive labour shortages. According to Zosimus, the plague was still raging in 270, when it claimed the emperor Claudius Gothicus (r. 268–270).
Based on demographic studies, the average mortality rate during the Antonine plague was probably seven to ten per cent and possibly thirteen to fifteen per cent in cities and armies. In 1807, evidence emerged which confirmed the existence of the plague at Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall. (RIB 1579) It comes in the form of a funerary slab with the inscription: ‘To the gods and goddesses according to the interpretation of the oracle of Clarian Apollo the First Cohort of Tungrians (set this up)’. While this is formulaic (we know of at least ten others) and would have been trotted out by all units, it seems likely that it was a reaction to a general order from Marcus Aurelius to invoke Apollo in a bid to safeguard their forts and cities from rampant smallpox. An identical inscription has been found at Ravenglass.
In 2011, Roger Tomlin provided more evidence for the plague’s spread to Britannia when he published research on an amulet found in 1989 at Vintry in the City of London: it gives us thirty lines of Greek, and was written for a man with the Greek name Demetri(o)s. It translates as:
send away the noisy clatter of raging plague, air-borne ... penetrating pain, heavy-spiriting, flesh-wasting, melting, from the hollows of the veins. Great Iao, great Sabaoth, protect the bearer. Phoebus [Apollo] of the unshorn hair, archer, drive away the cloud of plague....! Lord God, watch over Demetrios.