Latest / Marcus Aurelius: Rome's Philosopher King — Fexingo History / Marcus Aurelius and the Stoic's Plague Doctors
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Marcus's wars and his philosophy, but there's something that hung over almost everything he did, and we've only touched on it in passing: the Antonine Plague. Luna: Right, we've mentioned it a few times, but never really dug into what it actually was. Lucas: Exactly. It's often called the Antonine Plague, after Marcus's family name, but it started under Lucius Verus, his co-emperor. It raged from about 165 to 180 CE, right through the Marcomannic Wars. Lucas: Modern scholars think it was likely smallpox, brought back by Roman soldiers returning from the Parthian War. The siege of Seleucia on the Tigris in 165 might have been the spark. Luna: So the army literally brought it home. Lucas: That's the leading theory. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, writing later, says the troops brought back plague from the East. And once it hit the crowded cities of the empire, it spread like wildfire. Lucas: Our best source for the medical details is Galen, the great physician. He was in Rome during the plague, and he left detailed clinical descriptions. Luna: What did he say it looked like? Lucas: He describes fever, diarrhea, a rash that starts on the extremities and spreads inward — that's classic for smallpox. He also talks about black pustules and a foul smell. Mortality was high, maybe 10 to 15 percent in the population overall, but much higher in crowded urban areas and the army. Lucas: Cassius Dio, who lived a generation later, says that at its peak, the plague killed up to two thousand people a day in Rome alone. Luna: That's staggering. How did the emperor respond? Lucas: Marcus Aurelius took it very seriously. He didn't flee the city; he stayed and administered relief. He organized burials for the dead, which was a huge logistical challenge. He also enacted laws to regulate funerals and protect the state from the economic disruption. Lucas: And here's where his Stoicism really comes into play. In the Meditations, which he wrote during the plague years, he constantly reflects on mortality. He says things like 'You have embarked, you have sailed, you have made the land. Go out of the ship.' That's the Greek word "kataplous" — the end of the voyage. Luna: He's using philosophy to face a real pandemic. Lucas: Exactly. He writes about accepting death as natural, about not fearing the plague itself but only the failure to act virtuously. It's one thing to theorize about death in a lecture hall, quite another when it's all around you. Lucas: The plague also had practical consequences. It decimated the legions. That's one reason Marcus had to recruit slaves, gladiators, and even German tribesmen into the army during the Marcomannic Wars. Luna: So it weakened the military at the worst possible time. Lucas: Absolutely. And it gutted the economy. There were labor shortages, trade disruptions, and a decline in tax revenue. The empire never quite recovered its earlier demographic peak. Lucas: There's even a theory that the plague contributed to the crisis of the third century, by weakening the state and the army just enough to make civil wars and invasions more likely. Luna: Interesting. And Galen himself—did he treat the emperor? Lucas: He did. Galen was summoned to treat Marcus in 169, and he prescribed a famous remedy called theriac, a sort of universal antidote. But Marcus eventually died of the plague — or at least from complications — in 180 at Sirmium, on campaign. Lucas: So in a way, the plague bookends his reign. It started under Lucius Verus and ended with Marcus's own death. Luna: It's remarkable how much of his reign was shaped by something he couldn't control. Lucas: And he knew it. In the Meditations, he writes: 'A plague, or a loss of loved ones, or something else — what does it matter? For a man who has grasped the nature of the whole, all such things are indifferent.' That's the Stoic ideal, anyway. Luna: Did the Romans have any idea what caused it, or how to treat it? Lucas: No germ theory, of course. They thought it was caused by bad air, miasma, or divine anger. Marcus did order sacrifices and religious rites to appease the gods. But he also took practical measures: he appointed a special official to oversee burials and gave public funds to cities for relief. Lucas: One interesting detail: there's a letter from Marcus to the Senate, preserved in the Historia Augusta, where he says he's willing to spend his own treasury on the war effort because the plague had emptied the state coffers. Luna: He was auctioning off his own possessions, wasn't he? Lucas: Yes, exactly. He sold imperial treasures, statues, even his wife's jewelry, to fund the wars. That's not just Stoic indifference to material goods — that's leadership in a crisis. Lucas: And it's that same sense of duty that kept him at his post. He didn't retire to a villa to write philosophy; he stayed on the frontier, leading armies, managing a plague, and writing his Meditations in camp. Luna: It's almost hard to imagine a modern leader doing that. Lucas: It is. And speaking of supporting leaders who take their duty seriously — if you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know this show is ad-free and relies entirely on listeners who find value in these conversations. If that's you, you can support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a simple way to keep things going, no pressure. Luna: Yeah, and every bit helps us keep digging into stories like this one. Now, back to the plague — one thing that's always struck me is how little we know about the human experience of it, beyond the elite sources. Lucas: That's a great point. We have Galen's clinical notes and Marcus's philosophical reflections, but we don't have diaries of ordinary people. Archaeological evidence is helping, though. Mass graves have been found in Rome and elsewhere that date to this period. Lucas: For example, at a site near the Via Triumphalis in Rome, excavators found a mass grave with hundreds of bodies, all from around the plague years. No grave goods, just bodies stacked in a pit. Luna: That's haunting. It really brings home the scale. Lucas: It does. And it shows that the plague wasn't just a statistic for Marcus to ponder — it was a daily crisis of death and survival that shaped everything he did. And yet, he kept writing, kept fighting, kept governing. Lucas: In a way, the Antonine Plague is the ultimate test of his Stoicism. Not the theory, but the practice. And by all accounts, he passed it.