Pox Romana explores the social, economic, and scientific context of the Antonine plague in Ancient Rome.
In 2020, Colin Elliott found himself face-to-face with two pandemics. Like the rest of the world, the associate professor in the history department within the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington endured rising COVID-19 cases, stay-at-home orders, and social distancing. But perhaps uniquely, he also pored over data, documents, and descriptions of a much older pandemic: the Antonine plague.
Although Elliott has long studied ancient pandemics, this specific flurry of research arose in response to an invitation by Princeton University Press. In March of 2020, the publisher posed a question to Elliott: what did the world’s first pandemic look like? The professor’s thoughtful, nuanced response hit shelves in February 2024 as Pox Romana: The Plague that Shook the Roman World.
Pox Romana explores the religious, military, and economic conditions of the Roman Empire in the middle of the second century AD. It documents the arrival of a mysterious illness to Rome and explores the widespread anxiety that emerged in its wake.
To trace a disease’s trajectory is a daunting task for any scientist. To trace an ancient disease’s trajectory is immeasurably harder. Add to this challenge the fact that Elliott is a historian, not a scientist, and the task seems nearly impossible. Yet, Elliott didn’t back down. Instead, he started with what he knew best: historical evidence.
“We’re very fortunate with the Antonine plague because we have a doctor, Galen, who lived through the pandemic and who also wrote profligate notes on his experiences, treatments, movements, and cures,” explained Elliott.
Galen described the fever, pustular rash, and ulcers in the throat that arose in those infected. Yet, “Galen was a really arrogant, and self-aggrandizing person,” said Elliott, “so despite having this fantastic corpus of descriptions and symptoms and cures, a lot of it is really just about him.”
So, the historian turned to other evidence. He traced pre- and post-plague levels of everything from military salaries to wheat prices, analyzing how deaths from the plague may have driven economic changes. He analyzed which temples were built during the plague and to which gods they were dedicated.
These historical sources built a compelling image of what life may have been like during the Antonine plague, but Elliott had one big type of evidence left to tackle. When writing about an ancient pandemic, all roads lead to science.
Seeking scientific support
“In the current moment in ancient history, there are a lot of multidisciplinary teams that have been working on climate evidence, paleobiological evidence, and paleogenetic evidence,” explained Elliott. These teams publish their findings not only in scientific journals, but also in ancient history journals, making them more accessible to researchers in non-scientific fields.
The professor absorbed all that he could independently from this data, but didn’t hesitate to ask for help. He teamed up with Daniel Gaines, a then-graduate student from the Indiana Statistical Consulting Center to analyze lead pollution levels during the Roman Empire. When looking at a plot of the dataset, Elliott noticed a dip around the time of the Antonine plague. Unsure how to quantify this, he turned to the ISCC, who conducted a change-point analysis to determine where in the dataset there were significant moments of change.
They confirmed Elliott’s suspicion: lead pollution levels did fall significantly around the time of the pandemic. This, reasoned the historian, was likely due to lower levels of mining and coin minting, both of which are very labor dependent and may have been affected by plague deaths.
Surprisingly, the change-point analysis revealed another significant moment of change in 150 AD, a decade before the beginning of the plague. “One of the arguments in the book is that this plague […] does not attack an empire that is strong and robust,” said Elliott. This earlier decrease in lead pollution could signal prior labor shortages or other weaknesses in the empire that were exacerbated by pandemic. “That’s something I would not have found if I had not had access to [the ISCC],” he said.
Scientists and statisticians helped Elliott with other elements of his writing and fact-checking, too. “There were several moments where I talked to scientists and they really helped me modify what I had said, or just be more precise,” he said. One such consultant was Rich Holdeman, a faculty member in the College’s Department of Biology.
“[Elliott] has done an impressive amount of research for his book,” said Holdeman. Even to the longtime cell biologist, the mysteries of the plague were puzzling. “None of the descriptions really match any of the diseases of which we are aware today,” he said, “I found that aspect of the story particularly intriguing.”
While Pox Romana doesn’t pin down the exact cause of the world’s first pandemic, it presents a compelling history of it, tracing the disease through its biological beginnings to its social fallout.
You can find Pox Romana anywhere books are sold.