conversion of Emperor Constantine, Christianity became the church of the empire.
The Antonine Plague
The Roman Empire expanded its frontiers until A.D. 161. But from that time onward its defenses began to crumble. Toward the end of the 1st century A.D. a warlike people riding on horseback from Mongolia, the Huns, began a westward movement. The Huns brought to the Roman Empire new infections, but others such as the Roman fever also rebuffed them. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born in A.D. 121, and throughout his reign as emperor (140-180) he was engaged in defensive wars on the northern and eastern borders of the Roman Empire. In A.D. 164 the Roman legions under the command of Avidus Claudius were sent to Mesopotamia to repel an invasion by the Parthians, and in this they succeeded. But the troops returned with a devastating plague that spread throughout the countryside and reached Rome by 166. This epidemic of Antoninus, the Antonine plague, spread to other parts of Europe, causing so many deaths that cartloads of bodies were removed from Rome and other cities. Within the city of Rome, Emperor Antoninus made administrative reforms; he concerned himself with famine as well as plague in the empire. A devotee of stoicism, he ruthlessly persecuted the Christians, believing them to be a threat to imperial power. In 161, when the Huns had reached the northeast border of Italy, Antoninus was forced to contemplate battle, but fear and disorganization delayed a direct confrontation with the Germanic tribes on the Rhine-Danube frontier until 169. When he and his legions moved into the northern frontier with the objective of securing the empire’s northwesterly boundaries (as far as the Vistula River), a plague broke out among the troops; it raged until 180 and affected not only the Roman legions but also the Huns. As the plague ravaged his army, Antoninus elected to retreat to Rome but was never to reach his destination. In Vienna, on the seventh day of his illness, May 17, 180, he died from this plague. The plague returned again in 189, and though it was less widespread than the first epidemic, at its peak there were more than 2,000 deaths a day in the city of Rome.
The Antonine plague (A.D. 164 to 189) is also associated with the physician Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129-216), whose ideas dominated medicine until the 16th century. Galen’s hero was Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.), who had laid down the principles of medicine in Greece. Galen was first appointed surgeon to the gladiators in Asia Minor and then moved to Rome, where he practiced medicine. Though Galen was a skilled anatomist, an experimentalist, and a searcher for new drugs, when faced with the plague he fled Rome. He was, however, recalled by Emperor Marcus Aurelius to Rome, where he died. But before his death he left a description of the plague’s symptoms: high fever, inflammation of the mouth and throat, thirst, diarrhea, and a telltale sign: pustules on the skin that appeared after 9 days. Even today precisely what this plague was remains a mystery, but most historians suspect that this was the first record of a smallpox epidemic. Some believe either that smallpox moved into the Roman Empire with the legions returning from Mesopotamia or else that the Huns carried it with them from Mongolia and then on to Rome.
The Cyprian Plague
In A.D. 250, Cyprian, the Christian archbishop of Carthage, described a disease that appeared to have originated in Ethiopia, then moved into Egypt, and eventually came to the Roman colonies of North Africa: vomiting, diarrhea, gangrene of the hands and feet, a burning fever, and a sore throat. The Cyprian plague became a pandemic, advancing quickly through direct person-to-person contact as well as by contaminated clothing. It is suspected that the disease was either smallpox or measles. Mortality is said to have been high, with the number of deaths exceeding those who survived. The plague of Cyprian lasted 16 years, causing panic among the people; those who fled to the surrounding countryside served as “seeds” for initiating fresh outbreaks. The land they left lay fallow. Despite this, the Roman Empire survived the devastation wrought by the Cyprian plague and was even able to overcome subsequent invasions by the Huns. But by 275 the Roman legions were forced to retreat from the Danube and the Rhine to the city of Rome. The situation was so precarious that the emperor decided to fortify Rome itself to protect against this plague. This also proved to be ineffectual.
The plague of Cyprian strengthened Christianity. Cyprian wrote:
Many of us are dying in this mortality, that is many of us are being free from the world. This mortality is a bane to Jews and pagans and enemies of Christ; to the servants of God it is a salutary departure. … Without any discrimination the just are dying with the unjust. … The just are called to refreshment, the unjust are carried off to torture; protection is more quickly given to the faithful; the punishment to the faithless. … This plague and pestilence which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the justice of each and every one.
This ability of Christianity to deal with the horrors and hardships of a plague made church doctrine an attractive alternative to the stoic and pagan philosophies, which were impersonal, uncompassionate, and ineffectual in explaining the randomness of death due to disease, and so served to strengthen its hold on the Roman peoples. The attraction of Christianity for the people of Rome not only altered their current religious and cultural practices but also influenced future social and political development.
St. Sebastian, often painted as a naked youth wearing a crown, tied to a tree and with his body pierced by arrows, is the patron saint of archers, athletes, and soldiers as well as the protector from plague (Fig. 3.4). His answers to prayers for protection from the plague, first in Rome and later in Milan (1575) and Lisbon (1599), were the cause for his elevation to sainthood. Documentation and myth along with the fate of St. Sebastian have been woven together in The Golden Legend, a text from the Middle Ages written in 1275 by the archbishop of Genoa, Jacobus de Voragine (1229-1298). It is written that Sebastian was born of a wealthy family in Narbonne in 257 and was educated in Milan. He became an officer in the Imperial Roman Army during the time of Emperor Diocletian (284-305) and was secretly converted to Christianity. Diocletian’s name is often associated with the last and the most terrible persecutions of the early Christian Church. During Diocletian’s persecutions, Sebastian visited his fellow Christians in the prisons, giving them food and comfort. But in 286, when Diocletian learned of his works in converting others to the faith, he ordered Sebastian to be shot to death by his archers. Sebastian was tied to a tree, shot with arrows, and left for dead. The arrows did not kill him, however, and a Christian widow, Irene, tended his wounds. Upon his recovery he continued to preach, and after he confronted the Emperor Diocletian to denounce his cruelty, the enraged emperor ordered that he be beaten to death by the blows of a club. The destructive effects of the plague (particularly bubonic plague) caused people to compare their being struck down by death to an attack by an army of archers, and so they prayed for salvation from a divine being; it is claimed that their prayers were answered by St. Sebastian. So, in time, Sebastian the saint of archers became the people’s protector from the plague.
Figure 3.4 St. Sebastian in a painting by Andrea Mategna (1490) in Ca d’ Oro, Venice , Courtesy of Wikiart.org
Over the next 3 centuries Rome slowly collapsed under pressure from the Germanic tribes (Goths and Vandals) as well as recurrent outbreaks of mysterious plagues such as that of Antonine, Cyprian, and others. Gradually, the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse—Famine, Disease, War, and Death—led to a disintegration of the Roman Empire. And when the Germanic peoples moved into Italy and Gaul, crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, and even reached North Africa, they too became subject to this plague; by 480 the Vandals themselves were so sickly that they were unable to resist invasion by the Moors.
The Justinian Plague
The historian Procopius of Caesarea
