Massimo Pigliucci

One of them is the Antonine Plague, which was the worst plague to hit antiquity.

It killed close to 5 million people, and it was probably caused by measles brought back by the legions that were fighting on the east side of the empire.

Mm-hmm.

He also had to deal with natural disasters, a major flood of the Tiber that devastated Rome, a major earthquake that raised Smyrna in modern Western Turkey.

So he had a lot of issues to deal with.

Every time he says to himself, okay, what here is up to me and what is not up to me?

For instance...

In the case of the plague, the resources of the empire were already depleted by the war against the Parthians.

So even though the Roman Empire was rich, there is a limit, obviously.

And so what Marcus thought, one of the things that was up to him was to actually sell a lot of the imperial treasury and jewels.

So he essentially did auctions where he sold out

A bunch of stuff that he thought, I don't need this.

This is not making my life better, but it has the potential to help with the relief effort.

And so that's what he did, right?

But he was not expecting the plague to just go away.

He said, we don't understand what a plague is in the first place.

We don't know what causes this thing.

We just have to run it out.

We just have to do our best in order to deal with it, and then it will go away at some point by itself.

So this was a situation where Marcus wrote in his journal something along the lines of, what can you do here?