How bad was the world’s first pandemic?
Photo illustration Princeton University Press. Images: Marble bust of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Musée Saint-Raymond, Toulouse, France via Wikimedia Commons; Marek Studzinski via Unsplash.
By Colin Elliott March 25, 2024
Elites of the Pax Romana—the Roman Empire’s political and economic apex—had little reason to fear for the future of their world order. Rome of the mid-second century AD was a cosmopolis of over 1,000,000 souls, and capital of consumption. Spices and silks from the distant east sold in Rome’s fora alongside ambers from the North Sea coast and African ivories. And Rome’s economic power mirrored its military might. Several hundred thousand Roman soldiers sprawled across borderlands between the Atlantic to the Red Sea, and from the thick forests of Germany to the sparse Sahara sands. While only a sliver of the population directly benefitted from this interconnected world, the Pax Romana was, nevertheless, an efflorescent epoch in the histories of European, North African and Western Asian peoples.
The end of this era, therefore, came as a shock to those who witnessed the Pax Romana’s sudden ruination. Modern historians are equally perplexed. Rome’s golden age still hummed along when Marcus Aurelius became emperor in AD 161. Yet within a generation, Rome’s fortunes lurched towards a new trajectory: a century-long age of violence, civil wars, financial crisis and religious persecutions. What exogenous shock knocked the Empire from its prosperous and peaceful pinnacle?
