Ethan's Reviews > Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World

No matter how you might personally feel about the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, none of us can doubt its profound and significant influence on the world of today, over four years later. Economies took deep hits; families experienced significant disruption. Educational and mental health outcomes were often challenging and compromised. Confidence in public health departments has likewise been compromised.

But in the grand scheme of things, SARS-CoV-2 and its COVID-19 infection barely register as pandemics. Such is not an attempt to diminish the difficulties and grief which attended to COVID-19; it is a warning about what the potential rise of another pathogen far more pervasive and far more deadly. We know it could happen because it has happened so many times in history.

In Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World, Colin Elliott thus explored the Antonine Plague of the 160s CE and its ramifications for the Roman Empire.

The author took stock of the Roman Empire in the final days of what has been deemed the Pax Romana, the period of relative stability from around 0-150 CE, and made plain how the Roman Empire was never as peaceful or as firmly established as might be imagined. Plenty of diseases and other conditions were endemic, and Romans were shorter and less healthy than those who came before and after them. Urban areas were significant vectors for disease spread. Nutrition for most people wasn’t the greatest. Conditions were ripe for pandemic illness.

The author set forth what we know about the Antonine Plague, and it is not much. One might commend the author for his creativity in trying to make much out of little, but also might fairly wonder if he is making a bit too much out of a little. From what we know it would seem the Antonine Plague would have been in what we deem the “smallpox” category: not smallpox as we would later understand it, but a similar virus. The author presented the Antonine Plague as the first experience of pandemic disease: if the characterization is accurate, it is more about how it was the first time the world had sufficiently developed civilization in various places as to be able to experience such a thing, for no doubt all sorts of diseases had spread around the world, but perhaps never before as efficiently and widely as in the Antonine Plague.

The author did well attest to how it would have been easy for a virus to spread widely in the world on account of trade and military exploits. Legend associated the plague with the defeats inflicted on the Parthians to the east, and the author demonstrated how it would have been quite easy for the soldiers to get exposed to such an infection in Mesopotamia and then quickly bring it back to the barracks of the east and northern parts of the Empire, with further dispersal ongoing.

The author throughout is bedeviled by a lack of first person accounts; such is why we are still not entirely sure what the disease was, and we cannot know how widely it spread, or how many died with any level of confidence. But the author does do well at demonstrating from what evidence we do have about the significant downturn in many aspects of the Roman Empire and its life after the 160s: fewer military diplomas; significant population declines in many cities; permanent reduction in mining and lead emissions; debasement of money; and the like.

The author thus well argued how the Antonine Plague, combined with many other factors, brought an end to the pax romana and ushered in a new, less stable, less populated, less robust era of the Roman Empire. The author did well to remind everyone how it is quite extraordinary for the Empire to have endured the barbarian incursions, imperial instability, famine, the plague, and to continue to persevere. But it helps to show how the scenes we deem unimaginably apocalyptic in the Book of Revelation reasonably fit the experience of those in the Roman Empire beginning in the second half of the second century.

Public health developments over the past two hundred years have been some of the most significant means of saving and preserving life ever experienced in human history. As a society we would be very stupid to conclude from our COVID-19 experience that we should put less energy and funding into public health and the quest for vaccines and medicines for common bacterial and viral infections. We may not know exactly how many died in the Antonine Plague, but it was almost certainly far more than the 1% death rate we experienced with COVID-19. And there will be pandemic-level pathogens which are or will develop in the future, and there will be the prospect of future pandemics. And next time we might experience something more like what the Romans did, and how well would our culture and society endure?