William O. Stephens
speaker
678 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 3d ago
William O. Stephens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So it does seem like, you know, he his health was it was precarious throughout really all of his life.
Um he had digestive issues, he had respiratory issues.
Um Galen was treating him with this weird
compound known as theriac that had morphine in it.
One scholar thinks that Marcus became addicted to this and he had difficulty sleeping and so
You know, viper flesh and all sorts of weird ingredients would be mixed in with this morphine to produce this theriac with with dozens or even hundreds of ingredients, bizarre stuff.
And Galen would dose this to s to Marcus to help him sleep, but
uh you know, then he would doze off during the day sometimes.
So so he had trouble getting the sweet spot with his physician's treatments.
And of course, you know, thousands, perhaps m hundreds of thousands, perhaps uh as many as a million died over the course of the Antonine plague.
And Marcus might have died from that himself.
It seems that that's likely
to be what caused Faustina's death, it seems even more likely that that's what caused uh the des death of Lucius Verus at at a young age.
Yeah.
And maybe it was just a matter of time before it caught up with Marcus.
Right.
And the very notion of quarantining was not uh an accepted widespread practice anyway.
So people were ascribing this to a failure of the Paxta Oram, the peace with the gods.
The gods are angry, they're afflicting us with plague.
We need to introduce foreign practices, religious practices to try to appease the gods again.
Showing 1–20 of 678 · page 1 of 34
Next →