In a review of University of Oklahoma classics professor Kyle Harper’s
The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, the
NewStatesman.com lead book reviewer John Gray looks into Dr. Harper’s thesis that the fall of Rome may have been “the single greatest regression in all of human history,” its long process of decline brought about by pandemic diseases amplified by climate shifts that unraveled the global networks of connectivity the Romans had constructed over centuries. “The ecology of the empire had built an infrastructure awaiting a pandemic,” Dr. Harper argues.
In his review, Gray points out that the Roman empire grew and blossomed with Stoicism, a classical worldview widespread among Roman aristocrats and administrators, that held that wisdom “was achieved by identifying oneself with an unchanging natural order, one where there could be no new evils” for which humanity would be unprepared.
IMAGE CREDIT: VCG WILSON/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGESBut a succession of pandemics shattered this classical Roman world-view, first the Antonine Plague that began in 165 AD and peaked around 180 AD, with as many as 2,000 people dying in Rome every day and with mortality throughout the empire running into millions. This was followed in mid-third century Rome by the deadly but still obscure Plague of Cyprian, a viral hemorrhagic fever (filoviruses) probably like the Ebola virus, and from 541–549 AD by the catastrophic Justinian Plague, a bubonic pandemic like the medieval Black Death from 1347 to 1351.
Gray notes that these misfortunes that befell the Roman empire gave rise to a febrile cult of the god Apollo, then gave Christianity a boost without which it might not have gone on to be adopted as the failing empire’s state religion.
Read “How pandemics extinguished the Roman empire” in the June 17, 2020 issue of the online NewStatesman.com of UK now! RELATED READINGS IN THE FORUM:The 2019 reading
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