Rome’s miserable fate

The Year of the Plague #3

Part 1: The Worst Year Ever
Part 2: Rats

At the time of the Black Death, good Christians knew that God inflicted the Ten Plagues on Egypt, which included not just things like plagues of locusts and frogs but also a particular livestock pestilence called cattle murrain. On another occasion, King David annoyed God by undertaking a census, which was apparently one of those things that irritated the Almighty, and so, ‘Angered, God gave David a choice of punishments: seven years of famine, three months of pursuit by his enemies or three days pestilence.’

Plaga is the Greek for ‘strike’ or ‘hit’ and has been used to mean any generic epidemic, a menace that had periodically afflicted human populations since the dawn of time. We now know that the bubonic plague in particular has been around for much longer than previously thought. According to David Reich, there was an epidemic about 5,400 years ago which was ‘responsible for at least about 7 percent of deaths in skeletons from burials across the Eurasian steppes.’ The population of Europe fell sharply during this outbreak, and it may have weakened the existing cultures enough that they were subsequently conquered by chariot-driving Indo-European Conan the Barbarian types.

What made these societies more vulnerable to such outbreaks was the existence of farming, which allowed for greater human density and more contact with disease-carrying animals. Although rats would become associated with the Black Death, they aren’t even the worst for passing on diseases - dogs top that particular list, sharing 65 different diseases with humans, according to Robert Gottfried, followed by ‘50 with cattle; 46 with sheep and goats; 42 with pigs; 35 with horses; 32 with rats and mice; and 26 with poultry’. Virus and bacteria can also become especially dangerous as they jump species because it is that this point that they mutate; this is called zoonotic transmission, and can happen in a range of settings, such as eating an animal from a wet market, or engineering it in a sinister lab. Y Pestis, for instance, is very closely related to a number of essentially harmless bacterium

As the population rose in antiquity, such outbreaks became a greater risk. The Plague of Athens in the 5^th century BC, which killed thousands during the city’s war with Sparta, was one of the earliest recorded. The historian Thucydides survived the illness, most likely typhoid, and nursed sufferers afterwards; the aristocratic, womanising populist politician Pericles, a hero of Britain’s Covid-era prime minister Boris Johnson, also caught it and was less fortunate.

By the peak of antiquity several centuries later, large-scale cities had become the perfect breeding ground for deadly epidemics, Rome most of all – and epidemics are arguably the chief cause for that civilization’s fall.

The question of what destroyed the Roman Empire has been perhaps the most contentious and debated in history, and everyone has their pet theory based on their own prejudices; it was Christianity, according to atheists, sucking out the vigour of ancient civilization; for conservatives it was decadence and uppity women not having children; and for those worried about immigration, it was the barbarian invasion. Nice as it would be to find some moral lesson in the disaster, Kyle Harper’s brilliant but rather downbeat The Fate of Rome made the convincing argument that the empire was simply destroyed by a series of epidemics that killed most of its population.