War, invasion, civil unrest… or plague? Could a series of deadly pandemics have helped bring down the mighty Roman Empire?In the third episode of our Fall of Rome mini-series, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Kyle Harper – author of The Fate of Rome – to explore how disease and climate change may have crippled this superpower of the ancient world. From the Antonine Plague of the 160s AD to the terrifying Cyprianic Plague that ravaged Carthage and beyond, this episode investigates how pandemics devastated populations, shattered economies, and reshaped imperial policy.Join us as we uncover the dark side of Roman history – a world of weeping sores, mass graves, and myths of divine vengeance – and ask the big question: Could nature have delivered the final blow to the Roman Empire?MORE:Lessons from the Antonine Plague:https://open.spotify.com/episode/1wsEtmlqkwqLbQlgZ8TW1LPlague of Athens:https://open.spotify.com/episode/1al8GluN7NBvuzXayHe74FPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: Who is discussing the role of plague in the fall of the Roman Empire?
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Chapter 2: What was the impact of the Cyprianic plague on the Roman Empire?
In the time of the Emperor Decius in 251 AD, there broke out a dreadful plague, and excessive destruction of a hateful disease invaded every house, carrying off day by day with abrupt attack numberless people. All were shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion, impiously exposing their own friends. There lay about meanwhile over the whole city no longer bodies, but the carcasses of many.
The words of Pontius of Carthage paint a chilling picture of the Cypriotic plague's devastating impact on the Roman city of Carthage. But Carthage, the ancient colony of the Phoenicians, was not its only victim.
For 15 relentless years, beginning in 249 AD, this Ebola-like contagion gripped the full breadth of the empire, draining it of life with an almost unprecedented ferocity, one of the first ever examples of a transcontinental pandemic.
And yet, despite the scale of this great pestilence, the plague of Cyprian and the many other diseases that perhaps quickened the empire's decline rarely get much time in the spotlight. That is, until now. This is the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and welcome to the third episode in our special Fall of Rome mini-series, where we ask a most intriguing and important question.
Did plague help destroy the Roman Empire? Last week, across our first two episodes, we delved into the turbulent forces and pressures that strained Rome from within, like civil wars, economic tension and the rise of Christianity. We also explored the impact of countless barbarian invasions from outside the empire, culminating in two brutal sackings of its eternal city.
These episodes are available now to hear. On Thursday, in our series finale, we'll be unpacking the lives of the last emperors, revealing the thoughts and actions of those in control when the sun finally set on Rome's western dominions. Today, however, we're moving on from the fateful choices of vainglorious emperors and the swirling hordes of Goths, Vandals and Huns to the wild forces of nature.
The Romans prided themselves on bending the natural world to their will. They braved tempestuous seas and traversed barren deserts to lay claim to vast swathes of the ancient Mediterranean. They imported king-like beasts from distant lands, to be slaughtered for the amusement of the masses by an enslaved class of hardened beast hunters. But Mother Nature always has her way in the end.
Rome's eventual fall was as much a triumph for bacteria and viruses, for droughts and floods, as it was the consequence of generals and barbarians.
Starting with the Antonine Plague in the mid-2nd century, the Roman Empire found itself engaged in a war against environmental and biological crises and it is this story of an imperial system buffeted by the stresses of disease and climate that we're going to dive into today.
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Chapter 3: How did ancient Romans interpret deadly pandemics like the Antonine Plague?
The Romans, with their typically ancient understanding of science and medicine, could scarcely make sense of the raw power and unrelenting speed of the diseases they faced. The costs were so catastrophic and the consequences so devastating that there could only be one conceivable explanation. The wrath of the gods.
And the pestilence which exploded throughout the empire from the year 165 AD during the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was no different. Vividly described by the Greek physician Galen to cause scorching fevers, drawn-out bouts of dysentery and the eruption of weeping sores, the Antonine Plague engulfed all corners of the Roman Mediterranean.
an invisible terror that wrought unspeakable agony, an unseen dread that stole into homes grand and humble alike, leaving desolation in its wake. Perhaps the arbiter of some celestial curse. Centuries after the devastation of the Antonine Plague,
The authors' reading of the torment suffered by their Roman forebears, and steeped in Rome's rich tradition of myth-making and folklore, inevitably attributed its origins to divine retribution. Ammianus Marcellinus, a 4th century soldier and historian we encountered in our last episode, is a clear example of this.
Writing nearly 200 years after the outbreak, he painted a picture of a disease creeping into the empire from the east, born of sacrilege committed by Roman legionaries under the scorching Parthian sun. Legend had it that these Roman soldiers, clad in their iconic segmented armour, encountered a temple of Apollo in the city of Seleucia.
Driven by drink and parched throats, they dared to raise it to the ground, carrying off the sacred statue of Apollo to their halls across the sea. But such desecration would not be tolerated by those enthroned on high.
So Ammianus later recounted, The soldiers searching the temple found a narrow hole, and when this was opened in the hope of finding something of value in it, from some deep gulf issued a pestilence, loaded with the force of incurable disease, which in time polluted the whole world from the borders of Persia to the Rhine and Gaul with contagion and death.
Apollo, a god renowned for his vengeful fancies, did not take kindly to being scorned, and these Roman soldiers, seeking to line their pockets with sacred gold, were the unwitting instruments of his revenge. As punishment for their hubris, they unleashed a pestilence that crept like a shadow across the Roman world. Or so the story spread.
The truth, veiled by the relentless march of time, remains elusive. Did the shadow of plague truly stalk the footsteps of Roman legions returning from distant lands? Or was it a tale conjured up in the corridors of power to smear the general in command of the Parthian campaign? Perhaps we will never know.
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Chapter 4: What new scientific methods help us understand ancient pandemics better?
fast and relatively affordable to sequence huge amounts of DNA, DNA from people's bones that can tell us about their ancestry, but also at times about the identity of the pathogens that infected them and made them sick. So the rise of these new genetic technologies, which really are new, it's 15 years ago now that the first complete ancient human genome was published. So this is new.
For historians, this is really exciting. It's telling us about human population history, it's telling us about animal history, and it's telling us about microbe history.
But does that mean then this study of these genetics can help us learn more about ancient pandemics, including those that affected the Roman Empire?
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of diseases are caused by infectious agents. They're infectious diseases because something invades your body and causes the infection. And those are little organisms. They're usually bacteria or viruses. And those little organisms have genetic codes, so RNA or DNA. And under the right circumstances, it takes a little bit of luck. Bacteria are easier to find than viruses.
There are DNA viruses and RNA viruses. RNA viruses are like measles. It's very hard to recover. But with the right pathogen and the right circumstances of preservation, it's sometimes possible to get the DNA of the microbe that killed a specific individual at a specific point in time. And that has really, really revolutionized what we know about the past of human health, of pandemics.
We've got a few pandemics to get through. But before we do that, is it important to highlight straight away how even these great periods of time in Roman history, when there aren't these pandemics, that disease is rife. This isn't a place where everyday health is really, really high for the Romans.
Exactly. I think it's very easy for us to forget how radically population-level human health has been transformed over the last century and a half. This transition has revolutionized everything about our world. It's prolonged life expectancies by two to three times. In the Roman world,
We don't know, and there's probably not like one stable number, but if I want to pin down a number, life expectancy at birth is probably something like 25 years, plus or minus a few years. A lot of that's infant mortality, a lot of it's childhood mortality, but all the same, the average life expectancy is so much worse in the pre-modern period than the modern period.
There's several variables that account for that. The most fundamental one is that they don't have modern science. So we are lucky to benefit from modern science, which helps us understand the body, helps us understand the infectious cause of infectious diseases, helps us develop things like vaccines, hygiene, water treatment, antibiotics, other pharmaceuticals. None of those are available.
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Chapter 5: Why is disease often overlooked in explanations of the fall of Rome?
We take for granted a world where you can drink a cup of water and not think twice about whether you're putting your life in danger. But that's really recent. We have water treatment. We know to keep human waste matter and contamination apart from the drinking supply. But in pre-modern contexts, they didn't have germ theory.
They thought of disease as a miasma, and they were constantly threatened by infectious pathogens that cause dysentery, infectious diseases that cause respiratory illness, and so on.
Despite all that, Kyle, it's quite interesting that for, let's say, the first two centuries AD, or at least to the mid-second century AD, when you've got the beginning of the Roman Empire and some of its most famous names, Trajan, Hadrian, and so on, despite this background of poor health, not having the modern science that we do today, there aren't any pandemics during that period.
Is that quite surprising?
It's a good question. And I think we don't have a totally clear answer to that. An epidemic is one of these things. It's a scientific term. It actually is just a rough and ready term. There's no like minimum number of people that have to die to make it an epidemic. It just kind of means an outbreak of disease in a population.
And in ancient Rome, you know, one out of every 10 years must have really stood out, right? We're just conditions aligned. There's a bad harvest and there's a bad strain of something. So epidemics are really bad years, but even epidemics are kind of normal. A pandemic is something else. It's where you have a really big interregional outbreak of disease. So people are dying in Alexandria.
People are dying in Rome. People are dying in Athens. all at the same time. And those seem to have a kind of big bad cause behind them. So most of the pandemics that we can understand historically are a sort of fateful alignment of really bad conditions.
So sometimes it's not just that there's a food shortage, it's that there's nothing to eat, that there's a real harvest failure that causes a real famine. And or And usually there's this conjunction of food shortage and virulence. But one of the things that seems to lie behind these rare events that happen every century or two is there is a big bad microbe.
There's plague, there's smallpox, there's typhus. There's certain diseases that are just nastier than others. And then there's this elite class of nightmare germs that seem capable of causing just a different level of destruction. And so we don't totally understand this. This is like an incredibly interesting and rich area of research that combines biology, that combines history and archaeology.
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Chapter 6: How did the Roman Warm Period affect disease outbreaks and stability?
Because I've got in my notes for the 1st century and early 2nd century AD, a time period known as the Roman Warm Period. Did that suggest a more stable climate at that time, which helped it when there were cases of epidemics, but that they didn't go from epidemic to pandemic?
So that stable climate ensured that there wasn't that almost perfect storm of problems that would ultimately contribute to a pandemic.
Exactly. I mean, that's a hypothesis. And I think it's one that's pretty persuasive and has some strong evidence behind it. Start with the Roman warm period, or sometimes it's increasingly called the Roman climate optimum, which is a name for a climate period that maybe goes from like the late Republic to the apex, the Pax Romana, the first and second century.
It's a name for this climate period that was created by the climate people, not by the Roman history people who were sitting there looking at tree rings and ice cores and And observe that in a number of different paleoclimate records, that there's a pretty long phase of three, four centuries where it's relatively stable, where there's relatively few major forcing events.
And we can maybe come back to what causes climate variability. climate forcing mechanisms do. And these include, among other things, volcanic eruptions, which are a very powerful short-term mechanism of climate change. And they're really interesting in lots of different ways. They're interesting historically, they're interesting for understanding the earth system and how the climate system works.
But volcanoes are like this really powerful thing. And I don't mean like the Iceland volcano that dribbles out smoke and disrupts some air travel. As significant as that is, every century or two, even Vesuvius that erupts in the first century and buries Pompeii and Herculaneum is not a big eruption.
It's really big if you're in Pompeii and you're broiled to death, but it doesn't cause the global climate system to wobble. Whereas the big eruptions of 536 and 540 In this Roman climate optimum period, you have three or four centuries where there's only one really, really big eruption. It's aligned with the death of Julius Caesar. One doesn't cause the other unless you're like a
polytheist and think that Vulcan was mad about the assassination or something. It's just pure coincidence. But you have this really long phase where you don't have big volcanic eruptions, where it looks really relatively stable. It is warmer in core parts of the Mediterranean.
And so you do have this kind of background of stability, which arguably creates a kind of condition of favorable climate, of prosperity, of agricultural productivity. This is a farming society. Even in the Roman world, 80% of people at least are working in agriculture. They're very dependent on the immediate climate context.
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Chapter 7: What were the combined effects of climate instability, military pressure, and pandemics in the 2nd century AD?
by pre-modern standards with the pool of infectious diseases that are out there. And then there may be elements of luck. I mean, this is one of the things that's most fascinating about this is that history involves, you know, you've got to be lucky and good if you want to build a stable empire. And there is just this pure element of contingency of luck that comes into history.
Well, it certainly isn't. It's when you think of the big names around the end of the first century and beginning of the second century AD with the Romans like Trajan and Hadrian. And as you say, that context of they were lucky to live in the time that they did and it contributes to us historians remembering this time as more stable than others in Roman history.
And it seems like, Kyle, later in that century, this is when we get the first of the big events that we're going to be talking about. Because what happens around the mid-second century that is this major disease event that really starts to stir up big problems for the Romans?
Well, again, to go back to our very first line of conversation, It's always both the human and the natural. So there are really important human factors.
There's important things going on inside Roman society, inside the way the empire works, inside the relation between the center and the periphery, between elites and workers, geopolitically, between the Romans and the peoples across their frontier, especially across the northern frontier.
So the only question is whether those are sufficient to explain what happens, because it's not like the Romans had never faced civil conflict. In the first century, they absolutely do. I mean, in 68, 69, the empire breaks down. The system for controlling power totally melts down. And yet... The empire doesn't fall apart. It doesn't split into permanent pieces. It pretty quickly heals.
So there's always- That was the year of the four emperors, wasn't it?
The year of the four emperors after the forced suicide of Nero, where there's no script for how you change dynasties and it's settled by force. And these kinds of conflicts are sort of at some level, always there. But you could definitely argue in the second century that there are new kinds of pressures, particularly geopolitically.
But now I think we know enough to say that there are strong clues that we ought to consider the contribution of other factors as well. So two things that I would submit we ought to think about. One is that over the second century, it's now really beyond question that the climate becomes more unstable. It doesn't mean it's necessarily going from good to bad.
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Chapter 8: Where did the Antonine Plague originate, according to Roman writers and modern scholars?
And so the hydroclimate, the sort of rainfall patterns which are really important for farming, they're also really complicated and they're always kind of variable and on the edge in the Mediterranean where it's arid, where water scarcity is a sort of constant concern for farmers. But in the mid to late second century, the indications are that the climate just starts to wobble more.
And I think that there's probably food shortage, even if it's not quite outright famine in the way we might see later. And that's now attested in tree rings, in marine cores, to some extent in ice cores where we do see volcanic eruptions becoming a factor again.
So this particularly is building, you know, over the decades leading into the reign of Marcus Aurelius, but then from like the 160s and 170s, it seems to become more acute. Simultaneously, so leave aside any causal links, but just observing that at the same time in the 160s, there's a pandemic.
Just unambiguously, for the first time in centuries, there are dozens of indications from all corners of the empire that simultaneously there's an outbreak of infectious disease that people perceive as something different. So it's not just sort of the ordinary disease. background stew of diseases. It's not even sort of the ordinary, just a bad year, right? The Romans, again, they have bad years.
There are epidemics every 10 years, every 5, 10, 20 years. There's dying. That's the nature of the world in a society where infectious diseases are dominant. This stands out. This is absolutely different. In the written record, you have people from all different languages, different ideologies, different genres, who talk about what we call the Antonine Plague.
The Antonine dynasty is in power, and we call it the plague. Plague is a really bad term for it, actually. Plague is kind of an annoying word in English because it's ambiguous. Plague can either just mean pandemic or outbreak of disease or pestilence.
The plague also sometimes implies the specific disease of bubonic plague, the plague, the disease that caused the Black Death, the disease that caused the Justinianic plague. It's caused by a specific bacterium called Yersinia pestis. It's a totally fascinating bacterium. But the Antonine Plague is not the plague itself. It's just, we should call it the Antonine Pestilence.
But we don't think it was caused by the plague, the bubonic plague. It's not totally impossible and like, We should always have a little skepticism in our mind about how much we know about these ancient pandemics. But we don't think it was the plague. So we should call it the Antonine Pestilence.
And whatever caused it, it was highly alarming to people all over the empire who describe significant mortality. And this is a society where they're used to a lot of people dying. And this stands out somehow to their experience, to their background. So simultaneously... You've got the human things going on.
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