The Plague of Cyprian, named after the man who by AD 248 found himself Bishop of Carthage, struck in a period of history when basic facts are sometimes known barely or not at all. Yet the one fact that virtually all of our sources do agree upon is that a great pestilence defined the age between AD 249 and AD 262. [...]
What is starkly lacking, however, is a Galen. The previous century’s dumb luck of having a great and prolific doctor to guide us has run out. But, now, for the first time, we have Christian testimony. The church experienced a growth spurt during the generation of the plague, and the mortality left a deep impression in Christian memory. The pagan and Christian sources not only confirm one another. Their different tone and timbre give us a richer sense of the plague than we would otherwise possess. [...]
The Plague of Cyprian was not just another turn through the periodic cycle of epidemic mortality. It was something qualitatively new—and the evocation of its “bloody” destruction may not be empty rhetoric, if hemorrhagic symptoms are implied.
The disease was of exotic origin and moved from southeast to northwest. It spread, over the course of two or three years, from Alexandria to other major coastal centers. The pandemic struck far and wide, in settlements large and small, deep into the interior of empire. It seemed “unusually relentless.” It reversed the ordinary seasonality of death in the Roman Empire, starting in the autumn and abating in the following summer. The pestilence was indiscriminate; it struck regardless of age, sex, or station. The disease invaded “every house.” [...]
The reckoning implies that the city’s population had declined by about 62 percent (from something like 500,000 to 190,000). Not all of these need be dead of plague. Some may have fled in the chaos. And we can always suspect overheated rhetoric. But the number of citizens on the public grain dole is a tantalizingly credible detail, and all other witnesses agreed on the scale of the mortality. An Athenian historian claimed that 5,000 died each day. Witness after witness—dramatically if imprecisely—testified that depopulation was invariably the sequel of the pestilence. “The human race is wasted by the desolation of pestilence.” [...]
Retrospective diagnosis from anguished reports of nonmedical personnel across nearly 2,000 years is never going to offer great confidence. But the hemorrhagic symptoms, the shocked sensibilities, and the insistence on the novelty of the disease all fit a filovirus. An agent like Ebola virus could diffuse as quickly as the Plague of Cyprian, but because of its reliance on body fluids for transmission, it could exhibit the slow-burning, “unusually relentless” dynamics that so struck contemporary observers. The obsession with deadly corpses in the third-century pandemic strikes a profound chord, given the recent experience of the Ebola virus. The uncertainty lies in our profound ignorance about the deep history of pathogens like Ebola that never became endemic in human populations.
No comments:
Post a Comment