Plague in Rome

How Pandemics Figured Into the Roman Apocalypse

Key Takeaways:

1. In both history, and in the popular imagination, pandemics are linked with economic collapse.

2. A pandemic was a major factor in ending the Pax Romana that characterized the height of Roman civilization.

3. A century later, another pandemic pushed Rome to the brink of total economic collapse.

The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse

Near the end of the first century AD, the gospel writer John sat down on the Isle of Patmos to write the notorious book of Revelation. Thousands of years later, Chapter 6, Verse 8 remains one of literature’s most chilling passages:

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

That English rendering comes from the 1611 King James translation of the Bible. But John himself wrote the Greek word thanatos, commonly translated as death. The Marvel villain Thanos derives his name from this word. But footnote #37 in the New English Translation of the Bible clarifies: “θάνατος (thanatos) can in particular contexts refer to a manner of death, specifically a contagious disease.” In this sense, the Fourth Horsemen of the Apocalypse is often understood to represent pestilence, plague, or pandemic.

Economic dysfunction often brings about pandemics. People tend to get sick when they lose access to food, water, or shelter. Disease and death also bring about economic dysfunction, as shrinking populations curtail economic productivity and cut off even more access to these essentials of good health.

That feedback loop explains why pestilence and collapse are often linked in popular imagination, such as in Revelation.

John’s words seemed eerily prophetic to the European populace in the 1300s, for example, as they suffered the horror of the Black Death. By creating a drastic labor shortage, that pandemic heavily contributed to the collapse of the feudal economic system of the Middle Ages. It also discredited the Roman Catholic Church which, without a germ theory of disease, was utterly powerless to stop the dying.

Though nothing like the bubonic plague in terms of mortality, the recent COVID pandemic was similar to the Black Death in the way it damaged the public perception of our modern authorities. Furthermore, economic problems from the COVID era persist to this day, such as rising rents and home prices, and skyrocketing inflation.

Like late-stage capitalism and the late Middle Ages, the Fall of Rome was also haunted by the specter of the Fourth Horseman. The Roman Empire suffered two catastrophic plagues, approximately 100 years apart, which caused much of the massive loss of life and economic turmoil that characterized its fall.

The Antonine Plague

The Roman Republican period, when the Senate ruled Rome, lasted for 500 years. The Roman Empire, under the emperors, lasted almost as long before its eventual collapse in the West. These two periods line up almost exactly on either side of the year 0.

This is because Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar both rose to prominence in opposition to the cruel economic hierarchy of Roman society around the same time.

Less than 50 years before the birth of Christ, Julius Caesar marched on Rome as a “populare”, or a political representative of the working class. He set off a chain of events that culminated in the coronation of his grand-nephew and adopted son Augustus as the first Emperor in the year 27 BC.

The entire Roman Republican period was rocked by constant worker strikes and slave revolts. The first secession of the plebs, or mass worker strike, occurred just 15 years after the establishment of the Republic. But the Roman Senate continued to legislate exclusively on behalf of the oligarchy, because the Senators all belonged to that elite economic class. They actively blocked any redress of political grievances, preferring to allow wealth inequality to spiral out of control.

Within a few decades on either side of the year 0, Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ were both killed for their advocacy of the downtrodden working class. Theirs are two of the most famous deaths in history. After centuries of economic strife, political assassinations, and civil war, only the autocratic power of Augustus could bind the warring factions within Roman society together. The Empire was born with his coronation.

The story of the Roman Empire is the unwinding of the vast wealth concentration built up during the Republican period. Either the land reforms proposed by Caesar or the debt forgiveness proposed by Christ could have facilitated a more equitable economy for all Roman citizens. But because neither proposal was acceptable to the oligarchy, Rome lapsed instead into economic chaos, and into the pandemics that so often accompany it.

The Antonine Plague was probably either smallpox or measles, and it hit the Roman Empire in 165 AD, less than a century after John wrote Revelation. Around a tenth of the total Roman population lost their lives in the pandemic. In densely populated settings like the army or major cities—where the masses of desperate poor lived in squalor—mortality was closer to a third. The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse had arrived in Rome.

With so many casualties, food production collapsed and the Empire’s tax base shrank even further than it already had due to economic mismanagement. The imperial treasury was forced to debase its currency just to keep functioning. Meanwhile, the plague decimated the ranks of the Roman legions, who suddenly lacked the manpower to defend the frontiers of the Empire.

The famous Pax Romana—the “Roman Peace” that epitomized the height of that civilization—finally came to an end after the borders of the Empire began to shrink back from their furthest advance.

The Crisis of the Third Century

In 1869, the French painter Jules-Élie Delaunay depicted the plague as a good angel directing an evil angel to strike down Roman households with pestilence. He titled his painting “Plague in Rome”, and his work serves as the Title Card of this essay.

Delaunay was inspired by the massive role that pandemics played in the Fall of Rome. In addition to the decline that began with the Antonine Plague, the Plague of Cyprian pushed Rome to the brink of total collapse between AD 249 and AD 262. It was named after the Christian Bishop of Carthage at the time. Cyprian himself described its horrific symptoms in his contemporary treatise De Mortalitate (“On the Plague”):

With the bowels in continuous discharge, the strength of the body is gone; the fire that begins deep within burns all the way up to the wounds in the throat; the intestines are shaken with continuous vomiting; the eyes are set on fire by the force of the blood; for some the feet or other extremities are cut off by the infection of diseased putrefaction; as weakness comes from the failures and losses of the body the ability to walk is enfeebled, the hearing is lost or the eyes are blinded.

An estimated 15-30% of the Roman population lost their lives in the Plague of Cyprian. The city of Alexandria, on the Nile Delta, lost a staggering 60% of its inhabitants. The pandemic was attended by the familiar economic fallout of rising prices and labor costs, collapsing tax bases, and currency debasement. Inflation—similar to that of the COVID era—soon accelerated into a hyperinflation that paralyzed the Roman economy.

Making matters even worse, the plague struck during the broader Crisis of the Third Century. Generals in the Roman Army began installing themselves as Emperors whenever they could seize power, leading to frequent, violent succession contests that badly disrupted continuity of governance.

Foreign powers, such as the Sassanian Persians, took advantage of all the chaos. They began helping themselves to formerly Roman territories all over the frontier. The Antonine Plague had marked the beginning of Rome’s decline. But with the Plague of Cyprian and the Crisis of the Third Century, every Roman citizen knew that their society’s days were numbered. To them, the end of the world seemed to have arrived. The words written down by John on the Isle of Patmos two centuries before seemed prophetic, just as they would again during the Black Death.

The apocalyptic prophecies of Christianity, like those found in Revelation, matched the multiple plagues and the rising economic dysfunction that defined the Fall of Rome. Christianity appeared so prescient that terrified Roman citizens began converting in droves to the new faith. There’s a direct connection between the imagery of the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse evoked by John, and the proliferation of Christianity within the dying Roman Empire.

Conclusion

After the trauma of the Plague of Cyprian, the Roman Emperor Diocletian put an end to the succession crises by creating a tetrarchy, where the Empire was governed by two senior and two junior emperors at the same time. After that Roman civilization pulled itself back from the brink and limped along for another century before finally vanishing from Europe altogether. Nonetheless, John’s personification of both plague and apocalypse—in the single dread figure of the Fourth Horseman—captured the imagination of the dying Empire and established Christianity as its creed during its final centuries.

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Further Materials

The Book of Revelation forecast these four plagues as punishment for the greed and inequity into which the Roman Empire was falling. By Late Roman times there seemed no alternative to the Dark Age that was descending. Recovery of a more equitable past seemed politically hopeless, and so was idealized as occurring only by divine intervention at the end of history. Yet for thousands of years, economic polarization was reversed by cancelling debts and restoring land tenure to smallholders who cultivated the land, fought in the army, paid taxes and/or performed corvée labor duties.
Michael Hudson, The Collapse of Antiquity, 2023