The Antonine plague is not an easy plague to write a book about. There are better plagues, plagues for which we actually have good evidence. Colin Elliott does well to capture this in the introduction of his Pox Romana, the first monograph on the ‘persnickety’ (148) second-century pandemic, with a series of unanswerable questions about the plague’s basic chronology, geography, morbidity and mortality. He follows these up with a sentence worth quoting in full: ‘Despite arriving in a period and place with a relatively high survival rate of source material, the Antonine plague left behind surprisingly little direct evidence of its deadly presence’. E. warns that few ‘key questions’ about the plague have been ‘answered with much confidence’ (xviii), but does not then, as one might expect, promise confident answers. Instead, he doubles down: the evidence is ‘meagre’, ‘confusing’, and ‘even contradictory’; what contemporary material we have ‘confirms very little’ and what even ‘should count’ as plague evidence ‘is hardly obvious’ (xviii–xix). E. is speaking truths.
If you are looking for unwavering statements about where and when the second-century pandemic emerged, how many millions it killed or any of the effects it had, look elsewhere. That is a compliment. Assertive tellings of long-past pandemics should draw suspicion. If you are looking for grounding in the Antonine plague, however, Pox Romana is the book. That is not simply because this is that plague’s only book, but because E. unpacks decades of convoluted argumentation, thoughtfully synthesises the written and archaeological evidence and engages with the natural sciences, while stressing caution and uncertainty. The book almost never offers confidence where none can be found. Still, Pox Romana makes it clear that Galen’s ‘major’ and ‘long-lasting’ plague is a plague worth knowing about and E. does not always play it safe.
The introduction starts the plague as it has started since Ammianus Marcellinus wrote about it: unbridled Roman troops ransacking a temple of Apollo in Seleucia and inhaling a mortiferous haze in the process. It then acquaints readers with modern interpretations of the pandemic — was it an empire-incapacitating blow or an almost ‘non-event’? — and the Roman plague context, with a dissection of the pax Romana construct. Eight chapters and an epilogue follow. Ch. 1 provides more context. Think not of Gibbon’s ‘Happiest Age’, but immense poverty, millions starving, horrendous sanitation and urban crowding that ‘aided and abetted’ (14) illness. Ch. 2 focuses on climate change, extreme weather, failing agriculture and grain shipments, with a lot of attention paid to Egypt. That emphasis carries over to ch. 3, where merchants and soldiers traffic pathogens and an attempt is made to identify roughly where the plague may have come from and how it spread. E. emphasises monsoon-aided luxury trade, casts the Red Sea as a funnel of people and goods, introduces Kushan-empire sculptures of a Buddhist demon later associated with poxes, and discusses Han China epidemics, as many Antonine plague scholars have, but wonderfully warns against drafting epidemic trajectories ‘with preexisting assumptions’ (60).
Ink has been spilt on the Antonine plague’s diagnosis for centuries, and ch. 4 spills more. To speculate on origins, transmissibility, or possible morbidity and mortality, a diagnosis would really help. Therefore, ‘it is a real shame’ (79) that this remains out of reach. Smallpox receives the bulk of the attention, as it has in scholarship since the nineteenth century, but E. sides with interdisciplinary palaeogenetics that argues smallpox, as we know it, did not then exist. Despite a recent speculative attempt to reassign smallpox to the Antonine plague which calls E. out, there remains no robust evidence for that disease in antiquity.
Radical mystic cultists, or Christians, who in Pox Romana eventually emerge as one of the few quasi-winners, are introduced in ch. 5, where we also learn about widespread plague flight, ‘counterproductive’ and sometimes ‘disgusting’ remedies (123–4), and charlatan-healers like Alexander of Abonoteichus, who claimed his pet snake was Asclepius incarnate. In ch. 6, things take a turn for the worse: plague depletes Rome’s military, there are spending stoppages and a fiscal freefall, and an emperor auctions off his ‘knickknacks’ (150). Ch. 7 questions whether the pandemic persisted until 190, as commonly believed, and ch. 8 underscores the ‘insurmountable challenges’ (215) that plague any attempt to estimate the outbreak’s death count. The Epilogue describes established religion flailing, unable to meet calls for better health, and the Antonine plague as a ‘crucial waypoint’ in the rise of Christianity (238), similar to Daniel Reff’s Plagues, Priests and Demons.
There are 247 pages of text, 27 of endnotes, 29 of bibliography and 19 crisp figures plotting changes in things like legionary base salaries, Egyptian tetradrachm quality and American Southwest ‘tree ring growth’. A timeline and four maps orient the reader, and we get images of five coins and a bust of Commodus, whom Gibbon thought worse than the Antonine plague. The notes are painfully thin (publishers), but occasionally the reader gets something. In n. 78 (255), Kyle Harper’s 10% plague mortality is characterised fairly as ‘moderate’; in n. 49 (248) we learn Sabine Huebner has identified ‘numerous errors’ in Danielle Bonneau’s oft-employed Nile flood chronology; and in n. 28 (244) E. observes that he, à la Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai, did not set out to write Pox Romana assuming the Antonine plague was sufficiently significant to be an agent of historical change.
Despite the subject’s seriousness and Rome being a ‘shithole’ with daily ‘triple-digit body counts’ (9, 11), Pox Romana is lightly written. Twice this reviewer laughed out loud. And while one might like more on this plague’s scholarly debates and for the book to decentre the Roman experience (an annoying criticism, because how?), E. offers a lot. Consider his branding concurrent livestock deaths a trope (199–200), his scrutiny of Ammianus’ ‘tailor-made’ plague passage (xvi), the scepticism heaped on the infamous (in some circles) ‘gods and goddesses’ petitions (100), and his handling of Cassius Dio’s made-up mortality figure (94, 199), ancients’ anti-Eastern prejudice (57) and a pivotal but possibly forged inscription (190). His attention to the likelihood that the pathogen entered the empire at multiple points, questioning of conventional dating, justification for ‘pandemic’, and spelling out differences between Pox Romana’s Antonine Plague and that of Harper’s Fate of Rome are laudable too.
Still, the book may frustrate. There is so much caution that the Antonine plague does not really do much in the book. E. is sure the plague was deadly, but how deadly and with what consequences? For all the attention paid to Egypt, grain shipments, chronic hunger and population immunity, for all the inspiration drawn from other happenings (like Napoleon’s march on Russia, sixth-century Constantinopolitan plague, eighteenth-century New Mexican smallpox, and crisis contemporaneous with Okmok), and despite a ‘paleoclimate rabbit hole’ (34) that pushes teleconnections to the limit, it remains completely unclear what, if any, role Egypt, malnutrition, previous exposure or climate played in the outbreak. But there is no other way. E. is right: it is too soon to commit to much about the Antonine plague.
