The Daily Stoic - Colin Elliott On The Art Of Navigating Lessons From History To The Modern World

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

On this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with economic and social historian Colin Elliott. They delve into the complexities surrounding the societal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing parallels with the ancient Antonine Plague. Elliott criticizes the lockdown measures and emphasizes the need for a nuanced and science-oriented approach. He highlights the decentralized nature of society and the diverse capacities within it, including healthcare, communities, and various institutions. The discussion touches upon the importance of accountability and learning from past mistakes, along with his book, Pox Romana, offers a comprehensive, wide-ranging account of the world’s first pandemic: the Antonine plague.Colin P. Elliott is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has published interdisciplinary research on the economic, social and environmental history of the Roman Empire, and his next project explores intersections between its economy and the environment. He has a PhD in Ancient History from University of Bristol and a BA in History from University of Oregon. He also received the David and Cheryl Morley Early Career Award for Outstanding Teaching (2021) and a Trustees Teaching Award (2016).Check out Colin's books: Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World and Economic Theory and the Roman Monetary EconomyCheck out Colin's podcast, The Pax Romana Podcast. The Pax Romana Podcast is available everywhere podcasts can be found.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stilett Podcast.

It's interesting, when you think about Marcus Rios, you think of a guy whose reign or administration started with so much promise, right? He's the philosopher king. He's got 20 years to prepare for the job. And there's all this hope, right? Since I actually, I have a line here. I have a line in, I have a line in lives of the Stoics.

Let's sort of set this up. Since Plato, it had been the dream of wise men that one day there would be such a thing as a philosopher king, right? That's what Marcus Aurelius was, right? The star is born. And yet, Marcus isn't that well known historically. He's not well known as the greatest leader who ever lived.

It just didn't go the way that he wanted it to go. It didn't go poorly in the sense that he wasn't corrupted by power, broken by power, made awful by power, the way that say Nero was or even Marcus the Sancomitus was. But he doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserved. And that's actually what today's episode is gonna be about.

There's this fascinating new book out called Pax Romana, the plague that shook the Roman world by Colin Elliot, who's a professor of history at Indiana University. And this dude knows the Roman Empire inside it out. And he's written a really interesting book about a really interesting wrinkle in Marcus Aurelius' life, one that we can all relate to coming now here on the fourth anniversary of COVID, because Marcus's reign is struck by what is now known as the Antonine plague, this devastating multi-year pandemic plague,

not the bubonic plague, but a virus or a disease that's spreading rapidly through the population that disrupts everything in the way that COVID disrupted everything for us. I won't step on the intro of this episode too much because we, Colin and I really got into it. But I loved this book. I thought it was fascinating.

The folks at Princeton University Press put it together. And these folks have been doing amazing work, popularizing the works of the ancients and the stokes. I've been recommending so many books from the ancient wisdom series that Princeton University Press has put together. And then Barry Strauss, who's a great writer on ancient history, has started this imprint with them

called The Turning Points in Ancient History series, which he's the editor. He has a great little intro of the book. But this book, Pax Romana, I really loved. It's a wide-ranging account of the world's first pandemic, Antonine Plague. And Colin is not just a great writer and thinker about it, but I think we had a really good conversation.

And he also has a history podcast, the Pox Romana podcast, which you can grab anywhere podcasts are found, or you can just go to the poxromanapodcast.com, great title. As I said, we ran a little excerpt of this book, I think last week or week before last, you can grab that, it was a Sunday episode. But actually even the phrase Pax Romana,

which is a play on Pax Romana, that phrase Pax Romana was invented by Seneca. So anyways, great episode. I think you're really gonna like it. Enjoy and thanks to Colin for coming on. Do check out Pax Romana. Talk soon. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]

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["The Last Time"] All right, I think we're good. I'm so sorry about last time. Yeah, that's okay. These things happen all the time. Maybe, so I had Chrome issues, I had laptop issues, I had Wi-Fi issues, and I had camera issues. So pretty much everything that could go wrong did.

Much like what happened in the middle and late second century AD. Well, you know, that's what I was gonna say, because I sometimes I think about Marcus Aurelius's reign as something that had so much potential and so much lined up for it. He takes over having had basically 20 years of peace and prosperity, and then literally everything that could go wrong does go wrong. It's a true calamity, a perfect storm.

It's disease. It's economic problems. It's a protracted war. And in some ways, though, it was kind of the right guy at the right time. I mean, you can imagine if somebody like Nero was in charge or Caligula was in charge, what another disaster it was, because they inherited the empire at great times and managed to totally screw it up. And yet Marcus was able to hold on in the midst of really a true pummeling from just about every angle

that you could possibly imagine. Well, give us the catalog of disasters that befall Marcus in the course of his reign. Sure, I mean, everything from local issues to big issues. So right when he takes office about a year later, he deals with a flood of the Tiber. So that affects Rome only, but of course, there are around a million people in Rome at this time.

Many of the poorest Romans are living in the lower parts of the city. So that flood comes in, it would have destroyed homes, it would have killed a livestock because you'd even have people with livestock and crops and stuff around near the city, little gardens, things like that. The sewers would have overflowed. You'd have got all the nice corpses and bits of junk and garbage and stuff that would have come up and flooded into the city, that would have brought on disease.

So he had a local problem in Rome right off the get-go, right when he takes office, and then it just starts to kind of get worse and worse. The Parthians decide to invade Armenia, which causes the governor that's over nearby to have to go and fight them. He's unsuccessful. That, the Parthian War then kicks off for several years, and initially it is a bit of a quagmire until finally a Viteus Cassius is able to kind of mop the floor with the Parthians. But then right after that, you get a huge disease. You get a disease, a wave of this pandemic in Rome. Then there is the war with the Germanic tribes, which kicks off and that is supposed to be a pretty quick and

easy war, at least based on what Galen had to say. The physician Galen writes and says, Marcus sort of thought, told me that he thought this was going to be a year-long thing. He was going to be back in Rome. He wasn't. told me that he thought this was going to be a year-long thing. He was going to be back in Rome. He wasn't. Marcus was dealing with the Germanic tribes on the northern borders for more than a decade. So he had that problem. I mean, there are financial problems. Mines begin to run dry and so silver production to make coinage. That starts to falter. Huge problem. that starts to falter, huge problem. You get rebellions in many parts of the empire,

in Asia Minor and also in the Balkans, waves of desertion in the army. So this is probably part of what helps bog down the war. Also Plague is probably playing a role too. There's the rebellion of Avidius Cassius, who I'm sure you and obviously your readers know are your listeners know about Marcus's trusted leader of

Virtually a good chunk of the whole of the Eastern Empire decides to declare himself Emperor His wife dies. He loses most of his children. I mean, I probably could keep going It's just over his troops are constantly clamoring for more money. It's a disaster. Yeah. Cassius Dio says something like, Marcus does not meet with the good fortune that he deserved. His whole reign was involved in a series of troubles, which is a bit of an even an understatement. I mean, it just sounds like it was one disaster, tragedy, screw-up, betrayal after another. I mean, even you mentioned his beloved wife dying, there's a pretty strong historical insinuation that she was also repeatedly unfaithful also.

insinuation that she was also repeatedly unfaithful also. That's right. Marcus doesn't seem to have believed that or have acted on it, but yeah, he's got family problems, he's got work problems, he's got health problems. And that's when it's not going well. I can't imagine, it was an easy job for Antoninus Pius, Marcus's predecessor, who experienced most things going,

right, you get the sense that that job ground him down and wore him out, even amidst that peace and prosperity. Yeah, it's like when you look at US presidents, right? You look at the picture before they go into office, and then you look at like Obama, right? He's so young, he's just so fresh looking. And it's only eight years later and you can just see the care and the lines

and the wear on his face. I wonder if we could have seen what Marcus looked like going in 161 AD and then looked at him even just 10, 15 years later, what he must have looked like. Just those kinds of cares must have really beat him down. And you're right, personally, he's dealing with sickness. I mean, he's frail almost, from his letters with Fronto, it looks like he gets sick around 145-ish

and he just deals with sickness for the rest of his life. And who knows if he caught this big plague that was going around, but either way, he was sick anyway, just struggled with health, with external and internal problems for the whole of his reign. I want to go into a bunch of directions on this, but I've always, in light of the catalog of horrors that was Marcus really, his life life really from birth. I mean, it starts when he loses his father. There's never a good chunk of Marcus's life where you're like, everything's going well for this dude, right? It's sort of one thing after another,

from a very early age, including becoming emperor, which it doesn't seem like he particularly wanted or sought out. So I've always found it interesting, whether you're talking about a literary critic or an academic or just a normal person that hears about meditations and picks it up that You often hear this sort of critique of well, it's a little depressing

You know Marcus is Marcus or the stillics are depressing and I've always found that to be strange because when you lay out the things that happen to Marcus in his life, I think first you go, well, of course his writing is a little dark and down. And then I also go, the fact that this guy even got out of bed in the fucking morning

is a statement of profound optimism and hope and perseverance. Like that he was even finding time to write about philosophical ideas and think about things is the opposite of depressing, if you think about it. Yeah, I'm one of these people that sort of convinced that the meditations, right, is notes to self.

It's like a reason for him and strategies for him personally to face a world that is in ruins and that is on fire. And so it's true that there are, you could read that, there's a lot about death, for example, right? And who wants to think about death? Well, actually, we're afraid of things that we don't think about. We're afraid of things that seem vague and strange and our mind goes wild. And one of the things that we see in meditations is a man who was willing to confront scary, dark things. And he has some really great insights. Like I share with my students, when I talk about Marcus Aurelius, I share the

meditations where he talks about death. I think that's some of the most profound things that he has to say. No one can lose either the past or the future. How could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess? It's only the present moment of which one stands to be deprived when he dies. This is a level of sobriety and honesty about death

from a man who constantly faced the possibility that he was gonna die. Other illness or some German was gonna invade his camp or somebody was gonna stab him in the back, some senator or somebody else that was unhappy with him. And he just is willing to think kind of rationally and reasonably about this thing that probably most of us are most terrified about. And the meditations is great for, I think, understanding how we should be courageous in

the face of very scary things like death. So yes, it's honest, but it's also kind of necessary, I think, if we want to grow as people to confront those kind of issues No, the necessity of these themes that he's talking about in meditation I think this is a great point because if we if meditations had survived and it was full of esoteric debates about stoic physics and theoretical ideas and abstract ideas meanwhile this guy's day job is running an empire in decline.

Millions of people are dying of a plague. He's burying his children. There's all these wars going on. We would be saying, bro, put your, keep your eye on the ball. Like you're distracting yourself. We would see what was going on professionally as a kind of mismanagement because we go,

oh, he's thinking about the wrong things. And yeah, if you think of meditations as a leader under immense stress and difficulty and FDR during the Depression or JFK during the missile crisis or Lincoln during the Civil War you go Oh, they're talking about the things that they need to hear most So they can be the leader that other people are looking to and can depend on because there's really no other outlet It's not like he can call Marcus can call up another emperor and commiserate about what they're both going through and he can't he can't talk to to the person

He's relied on most his whole life, which is Antoninus The only other person who might relate Because he's lost him and so he's really Fundamentally alone and the weight of the world is on his shoulders and it's those pages of meditations They're sort of the only outlet and the only solace that he has. Seneca has this great line in letters to Lucille. He says, what is philosophy offers?

What is philosophy offered? He says, philosophy offers counsel. And that's, I think, what Marcus was doing to himself and for himself via Stoic philosophy in the pages of meditations. Yeah. We definitely need people to get into the pages of meditations. Yeah, we definitely need people to get into the theory of things. I mean, I would like to think of myself

in some ways as one of those people, but it's often our leaders that really shouldn't be doing that. Like we want our leaders to be thinking about application, right? They're the ones that are going to have to give commands that are going to have to make decisions, that are going to have to make decisions, and we can't have them debating about so many hypotheticals that they get frozen, right? And Marcus, to me, when I read their meditations, seems like a kind of applied stoic, right?

That is what he's trying to do. He's trying to apply what he has studied, And he had a great amount of time, right? 20 some years being prepared to be the emperor. He had his time when he could think about theory. And with meditations, I think we see a man that's trying to apply them. And so it's easy to critique him from a theoretical perspective.

And yes, are there some, maybe some platitudes in there? Okay, fine. And we could critique aspects of the meditations for being You know, just maybe not as well thought out or whatever But if you think about what he is going through and what he's trying to do he's trying to endure a barrage of External missiles and internal issues and he's going back to the things that he knows and trying to think of ways to apply them

to the present issue. And I think he does a reasonably good job. I don't think I would do as good of a job as Marcus Aurelius did, nor could I think most people say that. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with poetry or playing the liar, but it wasn't what Nero should have been doing while he was emperor. Right? And so, Marcus is able to explore the parts of philosophy that pertain to the immense

obligations and responsibilities of his job, and really not that much else. So, as we catalog all the things that Marcus is having to deal with, one of the things that I thought was most striking in the book, which is amazing, you talk about just how big the Roman Empire was. And it's easy because Rome is still a city and Italy is now a country for people to kind of in their mind, cordon off what the Roman Empire was. And it doesn't do justice or give the perspective of just the immensity of people and places and problems that would have been on someone like Marcus Aurelius' plate.

Yeah, you're exactly right. It's funny because it's both huge and then in some ways at the time it's small. Let me explain that. So, yes, you have an empire that spans from the island of Great Britain all the way over to the deserts of the Middle East from the Sahara in the south, all the way up to the Rhine and Danube River in the north. We're talking about three million square miles or so, which is of land and sea. So similar to the contiguous United States, it's a huge territory.

It is a huge job for a modern president or Congress to manage such a territory, even with modern technology and ways of communication. Imagine the burden of a Roman emperor trying to deal with that level of territory. The population is probably 50 to 60 million people, which at that time in global history is between one-fifth and one-quarter of the global population. That amount, that proportion of the human population live under territory that Marcus is directly responsible for. So in that sense, it's vast, it's huge, it's complex. But because of the unique moment in history, there are ways in which that world became a bit smaller. Roman road networks make this place a little bit better connected, right?

Armies can move over land from one part of the empire to another. If there's a war in Parthia, for example, as there was under Marcus Aurelius, he can order soldiers to go from parts of Europe and march by land all the way over to the eastern border with Parthia. The maritime routes are also very robust, and for a good chunk of the year, the Mediterranean is reasonably calm, and you can sail in a matter of weeks from one end of the Mediterranean to another, even with ancient seafaring technologies. It's a huge empire, but also there are ways in which it was small under Marcus Aurelius.

And even the broader world was somewhat, there was this efflorescence of connectivity under Marcus as well. So you get the Parthian Empire, east of the Roman Empire, then you have the Kushan Empire, and then you have the Kushan Empire, and then you have the Han Chinese Empire. There are beginning to be links within, you know, across kind of the Eurasian landmass at this time, both over land, silk roads, and then through the Indian Ocean. So this is a huge world. On the other hand, for a moment in time, for a few decades, it's surprisingly connected.

Yeah. I think it was striking to me to read in the book and you're saying that we're not sure how official it was, but there is supposedly a delegation of representatives of Marcus Aurelius in China during his reign. So, I mean, just Italy to China is an enormous distance and enormous spread as far as cultures and it's the Eastern world and the Western world are coming together, even if it's only through a few dignitaries or trades people or tradespeople, or tradesmen.

But it is remarkable just how enormous the span of his reach was. And then when you read in meditations, he's talking about being a citizen of the world or it's something bigger than the Roman Empire, you get a sense of that he means that, and he's starting to understand a globalism that we're experiencing today. Yeah, definitely. And there are many ways, obviously, in which the pre-industrial world is so different than the industrial world. So I don't want to make too much of it, but yeah, you're exactly right. And the interesting thing about that delegation, by the way, which makes it from somewhere probably Egypt-ish, and they find their way over to the court of the Chinese emperor. And you're right also, who knows if these were official delegates, but I think they've probably found themselves in a sticky situation and said,

oh yeah, well, we come from the empire, we come from Rome. But what was interesting about that is if you read the Chronicle from the hand court, the emperor had heard of Marcus Aurelius. He had known about Rome, he had known a little bit about that. So through other mechanisms, there was connectivity across the Eurasian landmass. Wow, that's remarkable. Yeah, there's basically two or three people on the planet at that time that had any sense of what it would have been like to be Marcus Aurelius or the emperor of China. And then I think the other thing that we can sometimes miss, because the statues we have of Rome or how we might think of an Italian today, we basically think of a white male

that looks like Julius Caesar. Obviously, there was racism and a sense of what a Roman was and what a barbarian was, but the immensity of the Roman Empire, by that very fact of that, means it was an incredibly diverse place of like an unfathomable amount of languages and cultures and institutions and types of people.

But again, as we sort of think of the classics, a lot of that gets sort of homogenized away. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so we even have statues of sub-Saharan Africans. So we know that there were people coming even from beyond the boundaries of Rome that are coming into the Roman world. So it would have been a, yeah, extremely ethnically diverse place. And that on the one hand is an incredible achievement in Roman history, but it also would have created

a lot of tension in Roman society too. And added probably to the burden that Marcus is experiencing. I'm not trying to say that Marcus is a pluralist or anything like that, certainly not. But you have all of these different peoples who have strong ethnic identities, religious identities, social identities, cultural identities, and he's having to figure out how to unify these people,

how to rule a people that are very, very different from one another, and this again would be a major challenge for him. Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily right or fair to run an empire, but we can concede. It's very difficult to run a colonial empire because most people in your colonies don't really want to be colonized. And so there's that inherent tension, and that's what leads to all the wars that he has to spend so much of his reign fighting because although the Roman state

was very strong, it was also weak, although the Roman state was very respected, it was also very rejected. And so there's this inherent tension he's having to keep this unwieldy, unnatural thing going at the point of a spear and a sword, and inherently to go to what you talk about the book. It's also this diversity and this massive expanse that makes it inevitable that there's gonna be the exchange of pathogens and disease for which the ancient world would have had

very little immunity and very little in the way of prevention or treatment. That's right. It's an irony, just a huge twist of history, that these things that made Rome so prosperous, the road network, the maritime trade, the expansive vision and the diversity, the urban populations, I mean, the level of urbanization in the Roman Empire would not be seen again until kind of the 17th, 18th centuries in Europe. So it is a tremendously strong empire for those reasons.

But then, of course, once a pathogen, a novel pathogen finds its way into Roman territory, it's gonna use those roads, right? As people are moving along the roads in big groups especially soldiers That's going to be really conducive to pathogen spread right high density populations in cities That is going to be conducive to the spread of a novel pathogen So these sources of strength that had given the Pax Romana a period of great peace and prosperity

over the course of almost two centuries, suddenly became a tremendous vulnerability when we get the world's first pandemic. So that phrase, that Pax Romana, which is the period of peace and prosperity, which Marcus is sort of inheriting at its peak or its end or its high point. Did I get this right? Did Seneca come up with that phrase? Yeah, I think so. I think that's the first time that we run into that.

That's so fascinating. Again, Seneca being underrated as a stylist and user of language, I think. Yeah, yeah, clever word smithing there. Yeah, just to come, I mean, if Seneca, the philosopher's only contribution to history was coining this two-word phrase that is still in use to today, and still used in terms of, we call it the Pax Americana for the period of American empire.

There's the British version of it. I mean, if that's his only impact, he'd still warrant a mention or two in the history books. Sure. So how proud of yourself were you when you decided to call your book, Pax Romana, about the Antonine play? Cause it's pretty fucking good

It I would love to take credit for that title I would love to and I would put up on my wall right next to my you know University credentials came up with Pax Romana. I did not come up with it I was the editor Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press that sent that to me. And it was like, I mean, this is gold, this title for this book. Yeah, genius title from Rob. Yeah, let it be said that editors are not entirely worthless. So that's fantastic. So let's talk about the Pax Romana. So Marcus Aurelius, running this enormous empire, he inherits 20 years of peace and prosperity.

He thinks of the things that the emperor could get stuck with dealing, wars, natural disasters, coups, a recalcitrant Senate, you know revolutions. He's probably not thinking One of the worst plagues in human history Yeah, and nobody could have imagined what was going to happen because up till this point You certainly have plagues you have really devastating plagues and I mean plague in the colloquial scent I don't mean just for my colleagues that are very specificity about, yes, the word plague. I mean that in the colloquial sense. But so you have outbreaks, you have epidemics, right? Locally. This is a normal thing that happens all the time in the ancient world. But what Marcus could not have expected

and indeed anybody in the Roman Empire was a disease that could strike anyone anywhere. And that's basically what happens. So we don't know how it finds its way into the Roman Empire. We don't know where it comes from, but it appears that the earliest sources that we have for this suggest that at some point in this Parthian war is when we get soldiers that may have caught this disease.

So Avidius Cassius and then Lucius Verus, Marcus's co-emperor, is an Antioch. He sends Avidius Cassius over in, on this kind of march down the Euphrates. And at some point in the cities that he encounters, there is an epidemic flare up, the soldiers get it, and then Lucius Verus marches with those soldiers back into Roman territory.

That is one possibility for how this disease finds its way into the Roman Empire, but there are also kind of more decentralized way that this could have spread too. You have a lot of merchant activity, especially in Egypt, which is kind of a gateway between the Mediterranean Ocean and then the Indian Ocean. Like there's a lot of movement up and down the Nile and across Egypt's eastern desert. And so you could see disease pathogens moving through there with groups of traders, caravans, that sort of thing. But however it happens, it finds its way into the eastern part of the Roman Empire, probably around 164, 165, and then into Rome by 166.

And despite the fact that this was quite an unprecedented outbreak, Marcus is pretty heroic in the way that he handles it. If you want to focus more on your well-being this year, you should read more and you should give Audible a try. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks focused on wellness from physical, mental, spiritual, social, motivational, occupational, and financial. You can listen to Audible on your daily walks. You can listen to my audiobooks on your daily walks.

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Yeah, he doesn't flee immediately, right? I've always thought there's that interest in passage in the beginning of meditations where he thanks Antoninus for teaching him how to sort of listen to and defer to experts. It seems to have done a pretty good job with public health. However, rudimentary, the understanding of that would have been at the time. Yeah, Marcus was pretty consistent and calm in the face of the first wave. So the epidemic hits Rome in 166.

We don't know exactly when, but the physician Galen, who was Marcus's physician, manages to skip town just before the plague comes in. And that was probably a huge problem for Marcus because he didn't have this advisor that he would come to rely on later. And when we look at Marcus's letters, by the way, you're exactly right. He was, he listened to his doctors. He really did believe, he did not believe like many Romans did that, okay, these Greek physicians, they're a bunch of quacks. I'm not going to listen to them. Marcus really did listen

to his physicians and he kind of needed to because he was so sick, but Galen was out of town. So Marcus is on his own in the city of Rome. Now he has Lucius Ferris with him, but I don't know how much help Lucius Varys was going to be anyway, based on what we read about his character. So yeah, the plague hits probably late 166. Marcus, nor would anybody, have had any idea how to truly mitigate the disease. Like there is no option in the ancient world to heal this thing, this mysterious disease, which by the way, we still don't know today what this disease was.

So weird as in the dark in some ways as Marcus Aurelius was. It's just a plague. It's a pestilence. It starts killing people. And what Marcus does instead, he can't fix it, right? In some ways, this is a model you need a stoic in this moment. You cannot, this is something you have to accept. And what we can control is how we react. And that's what Marcus does. So he employs people to deal with the corpses. He passes some laws to prevent people from just dumping bodies anywhere. I think he does this for

practical reasons, in one part, that is, you know, you don't want the contagion and contamination of corpses all over Rome, but I also think Rome was trying, or I mean, that Marcus was trying to remind the Romans of their dignity. He was trying to show them, we are civilized people, we are Romans, right? We care for the dead. We respect each other, and we do not simply toss our dead into other people's tombs. We don't throw them down wells. This is not how we live. Is that the panic and the overreaction is making a bad situation worse. So he's kind of keeping order and trying to keep the wheels on a pretty shaky thing.

Yeah, because again, this thing, nobody had seen anything like this. And so you can understand why people were afraid. And there are certainly, Marcus does have his moment later where it does look like he is quite afraid of the disease. But it's amazing that his first instinct when the plague hits Rome is to stay put, fight the thing totally different than Commodus later on, which maybe we could talk about

him later, such a contrast to Marcos Aurelius. But the third thing that he does is he provides funeral arrangements for both the elites that had died. He erects statues in their honor as a way to mourn them and recognize them. He also provides kind of large-scale funerals or perhaps funeral events to just kind of collectively remember the victims in broader society. Again, it's a kind of reminder, we are all Romans, right? We are all human beings. And I don't think other emperors would have done that.

Some did, the emperor Titus, for example, there was a pestilence under his reign. He forks out a bunch of money to help mitigate the problems. And he also pressed into religious devotion because again, ancient peoples would have assumed that a plague or a pandemic or an epidemic was caused in some way by religious forces. So Marcus, we see in Marcus a similar high level

of leadership, really strong leadership when this pandemic first hits Rome in 166. Yeah, there's that quote in meditations that's always struck me where he says, you know, there's sort of two types of plagues. There's the one that can destroy your life. So I think he's talking in the literal plague. And then he's saying,

there's the one that can destroy your character, which is the panic and the fear or the abandonment of the common good, you know, the kinds of things that we saw in the plague of our own time, where you get this sort of antisocial behavior, this denial of science, denial of medical treatment, the sort of turning on each other and the authorities,

that it's fascinating to me to see and to understand that that's basically a timeless human issue and that when something like a plague tests the society, some people go one way, some people go the other way and you need a leader in charge who can try to steer as many people as possible the right way. Yeah, part of the meditations is a great one. It's funnily the only mention that I know of where he actually directly mentions anything

about pestilence or disease, which is itself fascinating for a man who dealt with both an external pandemic and internal sickness. But yeah, corruption of the mind is a far greater pestilence compared to the plagues that affect our character. And he mentions that a plague that affects the body is a plague in the same way that like kills us as animals, like the parts of us that are just biologically alive. But the plague of the mind, the corruption of the character, corrupts us as human beings. And so I think when Marcus was leading in that first wave,

that was what he was trying to show people. People will die. We have, many people have died in the city of Rome, but we can't lose who we are as people. Yeah, and when I first read Meditations, I mean, I had some vague sense that there was a plague in Rome at that time, and I knew plagues existed in the ancient world. But I guess I just thought he was being sort of metaphorical, right? You don't think of Meditations as a plague book, but it is.

It would have been deeply informed by what he was experiencing and what he was going through and in a passage like that. He's being literal and figurative. And it's just fascinating to reimagine Marcus, not as just some guy writing philosophical ideas, but a guy trying to cling to philosophy in the midst of an invisible, devastating, demoralizing,

incomprehensible enemy that is whatever the Antonine Plague was. Yeah, and I think we can empathize a lot with what Marcus experienced and what many Romans would have experienced, because in my view now there are different views on how severe the Antonine plague was in terms of death rate. I'm kind of in more of the minimalist camp. I actually don't think the big issue with this pandemic was that it was crazy deadly. I think maybe you get 5% of the Roman population killed. That's not a small number, that's a few million people, but it's not 30% of the population.

But what was scary about this disease was its pandemic nature. This was the first time that people could not simply leave an infected city and get away from the virus. Elites do this all the time in before this pandemic, Roman elites. There's often in Rome in the summer,

just a natural wellspring of fecal, oral, bacterial, just kind of the nasty diseases that come out because it's summer, it's hot, it's gross. And so you get malaria, you get all sorts of problems in Rome. And so elites could just leave the city and they usually did in the summer and it's like Okay, no, you know no big deal will go out to a villa and it'll be fine We'll come back but that couldn't happen this time and it didn't really matter where you were at in the Roman Empire Now there were some parts that it does look like were not hit very hard

And there were other parts that looked like they were hit worse. If you were in a city in Asia Minor or Italy, you probably experienced the plague. If you were in North Africa or if you were in a rural village, you probably didn't. But basically anywhere that elites would have gone, they would have run into this thing. And that's what made it scary. And I think for us, it was kind of the same. And I hope that we're all acknowledging now that the initial estimates we were given about COVID mortality of like 5%, right? These were way, way out of bounds. And in fact, this disease was not that level of deadly,

but it was still terrifying because this was the first time many of us had realized like we can't get away from this thing. Like this thing is going to come for us. It doesn't matter where we live. Doesn't matter that we're Americans, right? For, I'm speaking for myself. This is not something we can just easily fight.

It's something we're going to have to face. And that took a lot of courage. And also live with, right? So, there were these estimates of how many people were gonna die of COVID right away, right? And of course that didn't happen, right? There were very scary moments early on where thousands of people were dying a day,

but that eventually leveled off. And we kind of go, oh, COVID's not as bad as they said it was gonna be but like the Antonine plague it doesn't go away Right, it's six around and so thousands of people are still dying of COVID not every day But every month sure and so ultimately those numbers do become quite enormous as they do with the Antonine plague, right? So so what's I think what Marcus is dealing with is similar to something that we're dealing with and goes to this very stoic idea of a certain amount of acceptance

is the world was one way where this thing didn't exist. And then this thing comes into existence and now it's just part of your life forever. A new leading cause of death or or you know Emerges it's briefly in the top 10 or briefly at number one And now it just hangs around in the top 10 and it's probably not going anywhere For years as the Antonine plague does right Marcus doesn't have COVID-19 where it's a year of lockdowns or whatever.

He has it that lasts for what, like a decade and a half, something like that. Yeah, so there are disputes about how long it lasts. And again, I probably put myself on the minimalist side, but even then, I'm still thinking it's at least a decade, which again, that's huge, it's a huge amount of time. There's the confusion over this is because there's an epidemic in

Rome under Commodus. And that happens in 190. So if that's connected to the pathogen that was responsible for the antinine plague, that'd be 25 years of this disease mulling around in the Roman Empire. We can't confirm that. but at the very least, Galen talks about the pathogen having to do with the antinine plague up until about the 170s, mid-170s, so we know at least a decade. So their experience, I think, was even worse than ours, because, okay, we could look back on, like there were a lot of comparisons

to the Spanish flu, right? We have other pandemics in history. We also have treatments. I mean, we have vaccinations, we have treatment regimens that we can, we have doctors, we have a whole apparatus to kind of help us handle a pandemic, even though for most of us this was kind of a new thing. Marcus has nothing like that.

The Romans have, this is totally brand new, and it just scared the crap out of them. Yeah, they had to live with the reality of what people in our time sort of threw around of, you know, letter rip, herd immunity, let this thing do what it does. That's the strategy that the Romans had to live with. And it was obviously horrendously cataclysmic in what that does to not just a population in terms of health, but as you talk a lot about in the book, it just ripples through.

I mean, the mines are abandoned, the shipping routes, the people aren't plowing and tilling fields. I mean, basically Rome's treasury is depleted. The problem of a plague is not just that it makes people sick, but it cripples a society. That's right. And again, I think we can draw parallels ourselves. I mean, there is COVID-19, the disease.

And then there was kind of COVID-19, the experience, right? The political debates, the debates about safety, the debates about freedom, which in many ways are still ongoing. Like that's going to be an enduring legacy, probably for all of us that live through it. We are to be referencing this experience as we think about these fundamental issues.

That is similar. I think there are some similarities with what happens with the Antonine plague. This is a novel disease. It rips through the Roman Empire. It brings into question. Now, again, for the Romans, this is as much a religious phenomenon as it is a medical one. There, if there's a local disease, the Romans can say, well, there must be some local deity that's upset.

There must be a local magician that is cursing us. There must be something wrong locally. But when a disease can strike anyone, anywhere, and there are kind of these ongoing disruptions, because again, the Antonine plague did not have to be a huge killer to be disruptive, because the pre-industrial world was kind of teetering on the brink anyway.

And despite the prosperity and strength of the Roman Empire, it's not as though they have a bunch of capitals sitting around. It's not as though they have machinery. It's not as though they have... A social safety net? That's right, of the post-industrial world. And so when this thing starts killing mine workers and field workers and the people that chopped

down the trees to build the ships. And you know, this causes huge problems with soldiers. I mean, I think one of the reasons the Marcomannic War, this war that Marcus fights in the Germanic territories along the Danube River, I have to think that one of the reasons that that gets prolonged is because soldiers are just dying not of warfare, but they're actually getting infected of the disease and dying. So there's just a kind of cascading set of crises that this plague just helps fuel a little bit more.

Yeah, it's like a year and a half into COVID if you wanted to buy a couch or you wanted to buy a new car. You couldn't because one was missing computer chips from China, the other was stuck in a container ship in Long Beach somewhere. There is this logistics and supply chain crisis in the middle of COVID

that wouldn't have happened were it not for all the other problems with the pandemic months and at that point, years earlier. And we have a much, as you said, a much more robust and redundant system. There are multiple empires today in a way that, you know, Rome's kind of the only game in town there, and they would have been much more affected by the disruptions than we were. That's right.

I mean, we benefit from living in a much more comparably decentralized society, right? That brings tremendous benefits, right? We have people that can be experts in their area, their specialists, they have their supply chains, their networks, and if something happens with that, we have a thousand others that this different company can do this thing. We could, a brewery in my town was able to start producing hand sanitizer, right? They just did that on their own, right? They realized that probably a lot of people aren't going to be buying beer in the next

month. There's going to be a huge demand for hand sanitizer. We're going to shift what we do. And you could just have this happen in a kind of decentralized society like the one that we live in. Rome is the opposite of that, right? They do not have a robust sense of how economics works. They have no idea.

And Marcus Aurelius is a great stoic and a wise man, but he does not have Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, right, in his back pocket. And so for him and for the emperors that come after him, a plague, they have no option when the plague stops work in your main bread basket. Egypt, which is the main supplier of grain for Rome, experiences this plague. Field workers die.

We have evidence of just land problems where people can't buy land or where they're not interested in buying land because they can't get the workers to grow the to tend the fields and so that's that's it right Rome suddenly its main bread basket is gone there is not this robust market just Immediately ready to fill the gap and it's not until immediately ready to fill the gap. And it's not until Commodus in the late 180s that he finally says, okay, well, maybe I guess we should start importing more grain from Africa in order to resolve some of the food supply problems.

And that's the other issue is it wasn't just problems during the plague because Rome's economy is so fragile and centralized and bureaucratized and state run, it can't cope for a long time. Like we see some permanent changes in productivity in the Roman Empire following this plague. The mines never recover. Roman coinage as a result is gradually and then suddenly debased. The silver content of the coins just goes away over the course of a hundred years and that And coinage as a result is gradually and then suddenly debased. The silver content of the coins just goes away over the course of 100 years, and that

causes all sorts of financial problems. Now that's not squarely on the plague. It's not that the plague is the sole cause, but it helps just kind of rush forward into the present a bunch of issues that would have taken a long time and maybe could have been dealt with if they had happened one by one But because all of these things happen at once. It's just a catastrophe Yeah, Marcus really is can't raise or lower interest rate. You can't issue stimulus checks You can't deficit spend there's a whole bunch of financial innovations that have happened over the last

And there's a whole bunch of financial innovations that have happened over the last 2000 years that societies have developed to deal with crises that he's just not able to do. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, he just does not have these options. And so instead, again, that's why you could criticize Marcus and say, okay, well, so what? He just passed some laws on burials, so what?

He just held some funerals But if you think about the options that he has That's about the best that he can do right and again compare this to comatis right who his he doesn't do any of that When the epidemic strikes Rome, he just leaves he just runs out and then he comes back and he's like hey look I survived the plague. I must be a god. That means totally different than Marcus Aurelius so Look, I survived the plague. I must be a God. That means totally different than Marcus Aurelius. So one of the core stoic virtues is this virtue of justice, right? And I don't think it's a stretch,

however decent Marcus Aurelius was as a person to say that Rome's society was inherently unjust. It's a stratified hierarchical oligarchic system. It's founded on colonialism. It's built around slavery. It's cruel and violent. It's not a great place, right? It's not a great place to be an elite,

but it's definitely not a good place to be poor or a slave or a woman or any number of these things. And one of these things. And one of the things I was so struck by in your book, and I think we experienced it during COVID, is the way that a disaster like a pandemic or a flood or a hurricane or any kind of the thing that can be visited upon a society,

the bigger ones only compounding this, is the way that those injustices ripple through or the Consequences of a natural disaster which are not just or unjust Ripple through a society which is just or unjust and so the way that as you said an elite can retreat to their country estate Where social distancing is much easier. A laborer in a mine cannot, right? A soldier in the army cannot. You know, people who had access to their own food supplies are not going to starve in the way that someone who is dependent

on the grain doll can, right? Colonies who are administered by Roman soldiers can't escape the pathogens because those people are there and occupying them without their trade. So I was just struck by the way that pandemics reveal and perpetuate the injustices of a society. The way that the lower income folks are so profoundly impacted by a thing that's nobody's fault, but ultimately, a society has to answer for its most vulnerable. Yeah, that's right.

And the Romans would not have had certainly the same values that we have, and it just wouldn't have even occurred to them but certainly yes the people in the most vulnerable position. So the malnourished for example right they're going to be way more susceptible to the disease behind the antinine plague. They are the ones that are suffering from the food supply problems. They flood into the cities to try to obtain food. They've likely had to sell their land, maybe land that they and their family had owned for generations.

But because of food supply issues, they go into the cities. And then of course, in the cities, there's where the disease is. And so they're becoming the dry tinder that keeps these diseases aflame. But there are other ways I think we see injustice in this pandemic and the Roman pandemic and it has to do with religion. So the Romans are obsessed, like I said, with finding the impiety that was responsible

for this disease. There are numerous theories in the ancient sources as to where it comes from. A big source of, one of the places where blame is laid is Avidius Cassius. So Avidius Cassius supposedly busted into a shrine of Apollo or his soldiers do when they're over in Parthia and this leads to the disease. And the reason why he's blamed is because he eventually would turn on Marcus Aurelius. But what if there is a group of people already in the Roman Empire that could also be blamed?

What if there are deviants who are practicing religion that the Romans view as superstitious or that the Romans view as not properly acknowledging the divinity of the soul of the emperor or are not seen as publicly participating in Roman religious activities and we see that that group is the Christians. There are about 40,000 or so Christians in the Roman Empire at the time of the Antonine plague. They are highly concentrated in cities so they are in the midst of where this plague is at its worst. And so unsurprisingly, we get some reactions during, but especially just after the Antonine plague towards Christians. We get a mass murder of Christians in what is now modern Lyon, France. About 50 men, women and children are killed

in the mid-170s. Their bodies are burned. It's a truly grotesque mass killing event that was sponsored by the Roman authorities there. And there is no explicit link with plague. There's not a source that tells us they were killed because of the plague. But as a historian, it's impossible not to notice that in the aftermath of this plague, we have an increase in the deaths and persecutions of Christians.

We have church fathers like Tertullian saying, look, you guys blame us for everything. You blame us for plagues. You blame us for floods. You blame us for plagues. You blame us for floods. You blame us for earthquakes. I think a lot of that ratcheted up persecution of Christians occurs in kind of the mid to late second century, right? And it's concurrent with this disease. Hello, I'm Alice Levine, and I am one of the hosts of British Scandal. So I want you to imagine that you're being offered £500,000 to introduce someone to your ex. I mean the answer is still no. So you shake hands and agree to do it. But it's all about to get

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It's got political ideology. It's got nuclear Armageddon. It's got love story. It's got betrayal. It's got economic collapse. One ingredient that you left out, legacy. Was he someone who helped make the world a better place, saved us all from all of those terrible things?

Or was he a man who created the problems and the challenges of many parts of the world today? Those questions about how to think about Godbatchov. Was he unwitting character in history? Or was he one who helped forge and frame the world? And it's not necessarily just a question of our making. There is a real life binary in how his legacy is perceived. In the West he's considered a hero, and in Russia it's a bit of a different picture.

So join us on legacy for Mikhail Gorbachev. Yeah, that's really interesting the way that societies have always looked for scapegoats and it wants to look at basically anything in the mirror. I was just struck by, you know, there's a passage in meditation, the remarks really says, you know, you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also. And so the way that Rome society is set up, you know, the way it doesn't care about certain people and certain conditions because it doesn't affect the elites, that goes for a long time. And then you have something, it's like, if you have a society that masses its poor people

in rickety tenements, and then you have an earthquake, those people are going to be affected by that. So you're not to blame necessarily for the social conditions, but you're to blame, or you're not to blame for the earthquake, but you're to blame for the social conditions in which people needlessly die because of that earthquake. And I think there's an argument to be made there in Rome. And then also, though, as we saw in the pandemic, also, there's this wonderful book called Cast about the American racial caste system, which Isabella Wilkerson makes this argument that the way that we don't deal with our issues in inner cities makes those inner cities particularly prone to say the

crack epidemic, right? And then our inability to deal with the crack epidemic as a public health crisis sets us up for the opioid crisis, right? So by not caring about one vulnerable group, eventually it affects a larger, more vulnerable group. And I think, you know, there's this interesting argument by Rome's inherently exploitive economic, political, and military system is what sets up the conditions, as you said, for poor people to rush into cities

bringing with them disease or spreading disease that ultimately cripples Rome, changes its trajectory, and perhaps kills Marcus Aurelius himself. So the injustice of there being a totalitarian emperor, which Marcus isn't personally but is sort of systemically, you know, it ultimately is that idea of the justice coming back around to you. And when the Stoics say when you wrong someone else you end up wronging yourself, I think

there's an argument that that's what happens during the Antonine play. Yeah. And maybe at the risk of editorializing or going out of my lane, it's the Romans couldn't do anything about that. So what we don't want to do is say, oh, look at how terrible this society was. What we need to do is look at ourselves, right? Yes. That's the point. Because we do have the capability to deal with some of these problems, right?

We actually do have the political possibilities, the economic possibilities, the medical possibilities, environmental possibilities to actually deal with some of these issues that cause tremendous injustices in the short term, but that also create in the medium and long term the capacity for cascading injustices. The Romans were many ways just entrapped in their pre-industrial context. They were entrapped in their cultural views. They were entrapped in their economic views.

We don't have that excuse. Yes. Yeah. And you know, Seneca has that exercise, premeditatio malorum, right? A premeditation of evils. You're supposed to, he says, exile, war, torture, shipwreck, all the terms of the human lot should be before our eyes. He doesn't specifically mention pandemics or pestilences, although he himself probably got tuberculosis, some version of that. But that's probably because there wasn't anything you could do to prepare for a public health crisis

other than just endure it. But you flash forward 2000 years and America's, disbanding its pandemic preparedness response team in good times, in 2018, I think, and then we're caught off guard in 2020. We had the ability to prepare and plan and put the national stockpiles and stuff. We had the ability to prepare and anticipate and prevent public health crises that the ancients did not. And we have to direct political willpower and capital and energy there, or we are responsible for the injustice and the death that follows.

Sure. Yeah. And even, I mean, this would be my own personal view, and you may or may not agree. But I think also in some ways, we acted out of fear, right? There are ways in which we acted towards our pandemic experience where we just thought, okay, whatever comes out of the mouth of somebody in charge, we should do that. And lockdowns, I have to think, I'm sure that most people now will recognize probably wasn't the best idea, right? That really did not help us in many ways.

Many of the modeling that was done that led to those lockdowns was out of proportion. I think we still have yet to do a reckoning. They're doing this in some countries. There are inquiries where there is some accountability being put on some of the ways in which our own mitigations could have been more precise or more science-oriented and not simply, hey, we just need to do whatever we're being told. And there's, again, we have a decentralized society. We have so much capacity for healthcare.

We have so much capacity to help people. We have communities. We have cities. We have so much capacity to help people. We have communities, we have cities, we have governmental institutions, we have non-governmental institutions, we have medical experts that have all had all sorts of different views about how to resolve this thing. And I think we could have leaned into that a lot more. And I think as we came out of the pandemic, we realized that, hey, there were some things we should have done that we didn't, and there were some things that we shouldn't have done that we did. And my hope is that we can learn from that because these things are going to come again and again and again. One of the reasons

why Rome experienced its first pandemic was because of the connectivity, was because it, for a brief period of time, came a little bit closer to what we now experience on an everyday basis, a connected world, a globalized world. We're going to have pandemics on a regular basis. It's really crucial that we learn the lessons from what went wrong in this last one so that we can be better prepared. Yeah, I think there were overreactions and there were underreactions.

And what you could, if you zoomed out a little bit more, is you could go, we weren't as precise or as surgical as we could have been. We used a lot of brutal or blunt crude tools because we lacked the ability or the resilience to use other things. So if you have, for instance, the reason you go into lockdowns

is because you do the math pretty quickly and you go, if everyone gets this all at once, we do not have the healthcare capacity to deal with that, right? So if you don't have a sufficient healthcare system slash social net, if you have an inherently unhealthy, uncared for population, and you lack the ability to rapidly build and expand that capacity, you're sort of like, what do you do, right?

And you end up doing things that in retrospect were probably not as effective or as desirable as they seemed at the time. The, you know, the, you know, they had those people during the pandemic go, well, you know, hey, if everyone was in better shape, we wouldn't be so susceptible to this. And you're like, sure, let's all go back in time 10 years

and we'll all, we'll all get, we'll solve the obesity crisis first. And then this won't happen. That's not how life works. Right. No, but so that's a really good point, I think. And that is what we could, so now we can look towards the future, right? So I think that's exactly right. So we can acknowledge there was no way in March of 2020 for us all to take spin classes and, you know, suddenly improve our health. But what should have been acknowledged at the time was, hey, yes, we can't go back and do this, but we got to be more healthy.

This actually is exposing a health issue. And in countries where there was greater amounts of vitamin D and countries where the population was far more robust in terms of their own bodily health, they did much better. That's a wake up call to us as Americans, right? If we wanna keep our death levels down in the next pandemic that comes, we need to be healthier.

We need to take that more seriously. And we can't do anything about it on March 2020, but we can do something about it in 2025 or 2027, right? But we have to be willing to critique ourselves, right? We have to be willing to look at what we got wrong and not simply say, okay, well, that's ridiculous that this vitamin D stuff, this is garbage. Well, no, it wasn't. It wasn't garbage. It was true. You know. Well, and it's something that Marcus Aurelius

would have related to, which is oftentimes the people who were raising those issues, they may have been correct in one sense, but they were also doing it in bad faith, right? They were doing it because they fundamentally didn't care about, believe in, or want to do any mitigation measures in regards to the pandemic. So they were raising legitimate points, but doing it somewhat illegitimately. This happens

later with the lab leak hypothesis. The people are right, but they're also motivated by more complex reasoning, right? And society, rational people, the Marxist realist of the world, were not good at responding to the internet term for this is concern trolling, right? You're raising a concern that you don't really care about, but it's actually just to cause problems or to be disruptive, right? And so I think this is another opportunity for stoicism,

which is how do you deal with the correct, how do you deal with people you disagree with generally being correct in specific instances, right? Right. Or how do you deal with the fact that one side is open to criticism and the other isn't, and that you're being held to a double standard, right? These are all incredibly frustrating complex thorny issues that Yeah, we did not do great with as a society

Right and Marcus when he was expressing gratitude to Antoninus Pius Mentioned that one of the things that he appreciated about him was that he gave a ready ear to anyone with any proposal for the common good, right? And that's hard for us. That's hard for us in a polarized society. That's hard for us in a society that has all sorts of divisions, not just political divisions, right?

Class divisions, race divisions, regional divisions, even the way that somebody speaks, accents in our country can cause us to have a set of prejudices about that person. But it's often the case that people, we might intrinsically kind of be repelled by, have some wisdom for us. And Marcus's argument in the meditations is that, look, we're all on this journey together, we're all looking for this kind of spirit of the divine, this intrinsic spirit of the good that exists. Some of us maybe are doing a worse job than others, but we have to find in each other the goodness, that's kind of common pursuit of goodness

and justice and sobriety, right, that he's looking for. And when we immediately shut ourselves off to what somebody has to say because of these external factors, we're doing ourselves a disservice and we're doing our community and our species really a disservice. Two last things I wanted to talk to you about

that I think you just brought up there, it's really interesting. So when you read about the Antonine Plague, when you read Mark Zerilius and the Stoics generally, also when you read someone like John M. Berry's book about the great influenza, one of the things that strikes you is this very, I think, stoic idea.

You look at a pandemic and you go, okay, it originates from the Far East like ours did. It's spread by interconnectivity in the Spanish flu. It's spread by troops on troopships being sent to fight in World War I. Just as in Marcus's time, it's spread by troops, traveling between the different provinces.

You've got quacks, you've got fear, you've got the logistics and supply chains and financial impacts, you've got wars, you've got super spreader events, you talk about that big victory parade that spreads it, just as there were victory parades in the Great Influenza, just as there were motorcycle rallies during COVID. And you just go, people are people.

We've been doing the same thing, making the same mistakes, acting in the same fundamentally irrational, self-destructive ways possible. Injustices in ancient society in the early 20th century, in the 21st century, are compounding the effects of a public health crisis. They're making everyone vulnerable. You just go, man, when Marcus Aurelius is meditating on our history is the same thing happening over and over and over again.

He really did get it right, tragically, but also kind of remarkably poetically. Yeah, I mean, so I started writing this book in March of 2020, and I finished it mid-2023. And it was incredible to write a book about an ancient pandemic while we're experiencing one. And I think that kind of helped me because, yes, you're exactly right. The conditions and the context and the world was very different. The world in which I was living in, writing this book, and the world that I was writing about,

totally different worlds, different disease. Everything's different, but human beings are the same. The circumstances were different, but people were still afraid. People were still just puzzled and trying to figure out what to do. It was causing heroic reactions in people, self-sacrifice, and it was at the same time causing people to maybe do things that I hope that they will regret, that they regret. And certainly during the antinine plague, we see some really cowardly behavior too at the same time.

And so it was a kind of a surreal experience, really. Yeah, I was just reading this book about the race to create the polio vaccine. And as they're right on the edge of doing it, this is only like 60, 70 years ago, Walter Winschel, who was the biggest media personality of the day, starts spreading all this misinformation about how the polio vaccine is not safe, right? And you go, huh, did something happen around like 21, 22 with well-known media personalities spreading, you know, anti-vaccine information that, you know, and you're just

like, oh, this is just what people do. They're afraid of change. They're afraid of treatments. You know, pandemics cause stresses on people. We irrationally you get enough people together there's gonna be somebody that has this opinion or that opinion and It's just how it goes and and what you ideally want and probably what helps Marcus really is in his pandemic Is that when you have a sense of history and you have a sense of how people behave in? High stress high pressure situations that it brings out the best in some people and the worst in other people. You can turn down the volume on it a little bit

and not overreact in one direction or another. Yeah, the fear during the Antonine Plague presented a great opportunity for profit and personal enrichment. You have a guy named Alexander who was from Asia Minor and he was already kind of popular before the Antonine plague. He was sort of a regional healer and almost like a messianic figure. But when the Antonine plague strikes, he sees this as a great opportunity to just kind of build a kind of national celebrity or an empire-wide, excuse me, me celebrity and that's what he does He starts sending around these people with oracles and if they just put these

Words on their doorpost or they wear these words in on a pendant and we actually have found one of these pendants all the way in London so this guy's message of hey, you just say these magic words and the plague won't affect you message of, hey, you just say these magic words and the plague won't affect you. It made it everywhere across the Roman Empire. So there were certainly people that took advantage of the moment of fear, which is yet another reason why it behooves us to be reflective and careful and sober when we encounter the unknown, right? Whether it's something that's dangerous in a broad sense, whether it's something personal, it makes sense to just take Marcus's advice,

look at it dispassionately, accept it, and realize what it was, and do the correct thing to resolve it, right? Insofar as you can control that. Yeah, the last thing I wanted to bring up, you mentioned that one of the sources of data you draw in is that there are these bristlecone pines, one of the oldest living things on earth, and that would have been around during the Antonine Plague. They would have been around, I don't know, when the Odyssey was being written in some cases. There are these really old trees, and we can take

data about what big macro things that were happening in the world based on you know samples from these trees And I was just thinking about that I owned some land in the mountains of Inyo County in in in Southern California, which is You know near Death Valley just this old ghost town and and we were talking about that They just got struck with a hurricane a couple months ago, which everyone was saying, you know This has never happened before right and it's true. You don't get a lot of hurricanes in Death Valley, right? But we were talking about these trees and we were like these trees know that it's happened. Yeah, right? Over thousands of years, of course the things that never happened have happened several times, right?

And it is fascinating, you know, we have this sense of the ancient world. We have even, you know, a hundred years ago There's no one around from then anymore. At the same time, I think this is kind of stuck and beautiful, the idea of sympathy, too, that we're all how interconnected we are. There are things that live through all of those things. And there is a kind of a continuity and a timelessness. It's only the human affairs that feel so urgent

and important and unprecedented, but to, you know, I don't know, some temple of Apollo that endured not just the Antonine plague, but hundreds of plagues before and after, you know, there is a different sense of what we're talking about. And those bristlecone trees are, you know, to me, just another fascinating example of that. Do you have a turtle that lived through the time of, or a tortoise that was alive when Napoleon was alive and it's only dying in the 21st century? It's just, it is fascinating how long ago some of these things were, and then by other measurements, really still recent.

Yeah, not a stoic work, but it reminds me of Ecclesiastes, right? Life is but a vapor, right? Grasping after the wind, I think it's the same kind of wisdom that we see, right? We are on this earth for a small fraction of time, and we imagine that what we experience is kind of the end all be all of the universe and that the universe dies with us. But of course, that's not true. And yeah, you're right. The testimony that we see in nature is fascinating.

And by the way, it was really why I was able to write this book, because we've had the literary sources for this plague for a long time, and they've just continually puzzled us. And we have no, like, it's very difficult to parse them, and they're very mysterious. But because of the recent interest in climate change, and of course, in order to understand climate change, you cannot look at the last, you cannot look at the weather this week, right?

You have to look at the long durée. And so there are these, yeah, from tree rings to cave spelio thames to cores that are dug out of the ice. I really had an opportunity to use a lot of these to get a sense of what was going on in the, you know, with the earth at the time of the Antonine Plague. And that helped kind of complete the story and to help be able to see, okay, there are these things that are going on decades before the Antonine Plague, food supply issues, droughts, climate issues in key areas that would have made the empire way more susceptible to this thing.

And then there are things that are going on after that can also cause new flare ups of diseases. And the earth has these records in its bones, right? In its trees, in its mountains, in its caves. And it's great that we're finally able to tap into them and kind of learn a little bit more just more how insignificant we are and the extent to which our own experiences really do not give a full picture of life. Well, I thought the book was absolutely fascinating. It's the most important thing that happened to one of the most important stoics there ever was.

And thank you for coming on, thank you for writing it. I know we're running an excerpt on the podcast too, which everyone should listen to, and they should go check this out, Pax Romana. And thank you very much. Thanks a bunch, Ryan. It was a treasure and a treat to talk to you. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and

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