the world is currently dealing with the massive pandemic which has impacted society from the macro to the individual level it's honestly an incredible historical moment to be living through but what was it like for past generations today we'll be exploring what it was like to live through a pandemic in ancient Rome if you find yourself asking these sorts of questions a lot I definitely recommend you check out our friends over at ancient history magazine they publish awesome issues covering all sorts of aspects of daily life in the past with great articles images and illustrations which bring it all to life as we sit through quarantine you should definitely download their digital issues using the discount link in the description below we get a small cut of sales but more importantly your business helps keep them afloat in these troubling times so check them out to get started let's talk generally about diseases in the ancient world simply put they were just a part of daily life that we all too often overlooked when thinking about the past after all our ancestors dealt with many of the same health issues as us be they common diseases seasonal illnesses or large-scale outbreaks things like pneumonia tuberculosis strep throat and pinkeye pop up quite often in our records in the winters cold weather brought things like the flu while the summers might herald the spread of malaria in fact in Rome malaria was a huge endemic issue which is estimated to have killed more Romans than every war combined so if these diseases were so common what did people think of them answering this question is quite tough in a world before modern medicine where the true vectors of disease were not understood without the germ theory of disease as a guide people instead turned to a host of other ideas which ranged from the religious and magical to the rational and scientific it would take an entire episode to discuss this complex mix of philosophies but for now it'll be enough to state that one of the leading philosophies revolved around the four classical elements of earth water air and fire in this model diseases would be seen as arising from various elements and in particular their imbalance within a person or the environment here's a quote from the 1st century AD that sums things up quite nicely Phyllis Gianna of luxury thinks that we are composed of four forms that is of four elements fire air water earth each of these two has its own power a fire the power is the hot of air it is the cold of water the moist and of Earth the dry according to him diseases come into being in many ways but speaking more generally and in the outline it is possible to speak of a threefold causation one because of the elements two because of the condition of our bodies and three because of external causes diseases are caused by the elements when the hot and moist are in excess or when the hot becomes less and weak they arise through three types of external causes one by wounds and sores two by excess heat cold and the like or change from heat to cold or cold to heat and three by change of nutriment to what is unsuitable or destructive diseases are caused by the condition of the body in the following way when he says the whole body breathes well and the breath passes through without hindrance health and sues for breathing takes place not only through the mouth and nostrils but also throughout the whole body when the body does not breathe well diseases ensue and in different ways so as you can see while it's clearly not aligned with our modern scientific model the passage still shows that people were capable of generating quite sophisticated models based on their own limited understanding of the world around them for instance there was this idea of miasma which was basically noxious corrupting odors emanating from things like rotting organic matter or regions like swamps so clearly they could generally point in the direction of where diseases came from but not describe how they arose or spread okay so if people had their own model of disease how did they treat them again because of the wide variety of medical philosophies there would be treatments ranging from the magical to the scientific the healing power of the gods for instance might be sought by prayer vows and offerings while magical incantations and amulets could be used to drive away illness herbs and drugs were also widely leveraged for their supposed magical properties as much as for their proven effectiveness individuals often treated themselves using a home remedies or might turn to more professional doctors and physicians however there were no set qualifications or standardized forms of training for these experts so the level of care was highly dependent on the doctor in question people like Galen and Kelso's were highly regarded in their day but even they advocated for some wild treatment here is one of the more outlandish cures mentioned by Kelsey's in his Medical Encyclopedia quote I hear it commonly said that if a man eat a nestling swallow for a whole year he is not in danger from angina and that when the disease attacks anyone it is also beneficial to burn a nestling which has been preserved in salt and to crumble the powdered ash into Hydra mal which is administered as a draw since this remedy has considerable popular Authority and cannot possibly be a danger although I have not read of it in medical authorities I thought it should be inserted here in my work now that we have contextualized disease in the ancient world let's now turn to the primary subject of the video pandemics in ancient Rome these occurred throughout history with many potential case studies to explore for this episode we'll be looking at the Antonine plague of the second century AD let's begin from the start where did it come from just as today it's an important question but one which requires a lot of research and investigation to answer this is even more true given the state of science at the time and the fact that we are left with just fragmentary evidence today that being said it seems that the disease originated from the Near East with ancient sources first reporting its appearance during the siege of salut Kea around 165 AD during the Roman Parthian Wars like many plagues this one is often given a supernatural origin as an example one text claims that a soldier opened a golden casket in a temple of apollo which immediately let forth the plague in a choking miasma regardless of how it infected the first person cases quickly spread like wildfire through the packed military camp and likely jumped to nearby merchants and camp followers as the army returned home these then served as vectors for the further spread of the disease across the highly interconnected Mediterranean trade network we don't have good data to track cases with much granularity but the disease likely would have been able to spread quite quickly in all directions just as today its spread would in many ways be undetected with its identification struggling to keep up in some cases their speeds would match when the diseased merchants arrived in cities bearing news of the pandemic pretty soon many major urban centers were infected which then spread to the countryside as people fled this plague would last for over 15 years with many waves we can get a glimpse of what this spread was like by turning to the writings of the famed dr. Gailen who is our primary source for the outbreak he had been practicing medicine in the Roman East and eventually made his way to Rome in 162 ad four years later the plague arrived in Rome Galen promptly packed up and fled blaming political issues with other physicians for his flight as an imperial doctor though he was recalled within a couple of years by the twin Emperor's Lucius verus and Marcus Aurelius who was to meet them in aquileia were Roman troops involved in the Marco manic wars were gathering almost as soon as Galen arrived however the plague descended upon the region the Emperor's for their lives with only hand-picked group of bodyguards it appears that they may not have been fast enough as the Emperor varus died on the road to Rome the panic must have been palpable at this point Galen found another excuse to avoid returning to the city of Rome with the Imperial entourage by claiming that the god Asclepius himself had appeared to him in a dream and told him not to go yet despite keeping his distances from the plague Galen leaves us with the best description of its symptoms he speaks of a rash covering the victims body which became rough scabby and often black symptoms also included coughing fever inflammation vomiting ulceration of the larynx and fetid breath these and other clues have led modern scientists to blame smallpox or measles for the pandemic quantifying the impact of the Antonine plague can be tough when it comes to ancient history there are always caveat sand debates historians tease out morsels of evidence from what remains but it's always difficult to form a clear picture from the fragments of the past that being said there is a general consensus that the Antonine plague was devastating as we stated before a tour across the Roman Empire spreading even further to the lands around it in Egypt for instance entire villages simply disappeared from the tax rolls as they melted away from death or abandonment estimates on the mortality rate generally hover around two to ten percent however these were likely higher in large unsanitary urban areas the historian do Casius for instance claims that in Rome alone it killed a quarter of those affected with 2,000 deaths a day in all it is estimated that upwards of 5 million were killed across the Empire so how did people deal with this well the first thing they did was panic often that meant literally running away however while the rich might have their countryside villas to flee to many especially the urban poor didn't have that luxury so what did those who remained in the city do well we have no real records of any active measures like those common today there were no quarantines no work stop it it is no disease screening and no emergency supplies however people did still understand the dangers of close contact and those with obvious symptoms of the plague were often quickly shunned even their houses were left untouched and abandoned with people afraid to enter a place that had harbored such a horror some exceptions to this were the brave doctors who at least tried to help ancient historians however predictably note that they were often the first to die in these cases in this panic the Romans clung to anything they thought would help just as today this unfortunately made them easy prey for mystics and con artists one particularly interesting anecdote about this involves a man by the name of Alexander who headed the cult of glycon a snake God who whispered prophesies into his ear Xander would then recite these in the form of a ocular poetry one of his famous lines was a prayer against the plague which was shared widely across Rome and the provinces it simply stated unshorn Phoebus keep away the cloud of plague in an odd turn of events though the verse is reported to have had the opposite effect those who put it over their doorways often were the first to be stricken by the plague most probably those who fell for the scan and put the verse over their door had put all faith in it and did not take care to avoid the disease or perhaps as some of you who know your mythology might recall Phoebus Apollo's arrows were actually thought to bring plague whatever the reason we might never know the true answer just as today this all had a major impact on economic activity archeologists examining inscription patterns in the city of Rome around this time have spotted an ominous drop in activity meanwhile the brick making business seems to have completely collapsed with less than 50% of its normal production and there are no inscriptions from the plague period in imperial marble quarries land prices also fell dramatically in places like Roman Egypt never fully returning to normal while wheat prices nearly doubled even the production of the golden aureus coin nearly ceased as gold mines were abandoned in short the Imperial economy seems to have been shredded by 15 years of epidemic in modern times we might expect the government to get involved in economic recovery efforts ancient governments however function in a very different way and didn't really have the same ability to control the economy usually what you got would be spending on public projects like aqueducts or subsidized grain doles but these were never really deployed as stimulative tools occasionally you might have the government step in to mint more coins or attempt price regulations but these were largely met with failure and rampant inflation those in power however were not totally useless and did take some steps to alleviate the problem augustus for example set a precedent 150 years before the Antonine plague by using the imperial treasury as an ultimate insurance to soften the blows of disaster though this mostly came in the grim form of government stepping in to clear the piles of corpses from the streets paying for their burial and providing men to bury them since often times the usual corpse collectors had long since died Marcus Aurelius being the man that he was funded ceremonial funerals across the board though this notably helped to wipe out the imperial treasury I did also want to note that all of this damage and disruption also extended to the Roman army the plague took a huge chunk out of its active duty troops while its recruitment pool simultaneously evaporated and Imperial coffers ran dry as a result of these men power and supply shortages major campaigns were postponed and the defensive frontiers left heavily weakened this in turn allowed Barbarian tribes to increasingly pour over the border to raid Roman lands such problems would only get worse in the decades which followed and would eventually precipitate the crisis of the third century that nearly saw Rome destroyed plagues would continue to ravage the Empire over the centuries slowly chipping away at its stability one of the most damaging of these was the plague of Justinian which struck in the sixth century AD and would be one of the deadliest pandemics in history but that story will have to wait for another time for now stay safe and be sure to check out ancient history magazine for more awesome content on daily life in the past a huge thanks to our researchers writers and artists who made this video possible as well as our patrons who fund the channel I hope you enjoyed and see you in the next one you