Smallpox devastated much of Roman society. The plague waxed and waned for a generation, peaking in the year 189 when a witness recalled that 2,000 people died per day in the crowded city of Rome. The pathogen moved stealthily at first, with people first showing symptoms two weeks or so after contracting it. Rome’s first smallpox epidemic began as a terrifying rumor from the east, spreading through conversations that often simultaneously transmitted both news of the disease and the virus itself. By the standards of antiquity, this was a bona fide miracle.īut smallpox was different. The 4th-century emperor Julian found it a particular point of pride that he had only vomited once in his entire life.

The physician Galen would recall a member of the Roman gentry who accidentally drank a leech when his servant drew water from a public fountain. But some of the ailments Romans suffered boggle the mind-vicious fevers, wasting diseases and worms living in putrefying wounds that refused to heal. Malaria and intestinal diseases were, of course, rampant. Even the richest Romans could not escape the terrors of a world without germ theory, refrigeration, or clean water. Infectious disease was long part of Roman life. “Like some beast,” a contemporary wrote, the sickness “destroyed not just a few people but rampaged across whole cities and destroyed them.” Perhaps 10 percent of 75 million people living in the Roman Empire never recovered. Victims suffered in this way for two or even three weeks before the illness finally abated.

They also developed horrible black pocks over their bodies, both inside and out, that scabbed over and left disfiguring scars.įor the worst afflicted, it was not uncommon that they would cough up or excrete scabs that had formed inside their body. Victims were known to endure fever, chills, upset stomach and diarrhea that turned from red to black over the course of a week. Around 165 A.D., the Anatolian town of Hierapolis erected a statue to the god Apollo Alexikakos, the Averter of Evil, so that the people might be spared from a terrible new infectious disease with utterly gruesome symptoms.

The emperor of diseases