The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire

Kyle Harper

Abstract: Global environmental history is currently being enriched by troves of new data, and new models of environmental variability and human impact. Earth scientists are rapidly expanding historians’ knowledge of the paleoclimate through the recovery and analysis of climate proxies such as ice cores, tree rings, stalagmites, and marine and lake sediments. Further, archaeologists and anthropologists are using novel techniques and methods to study the history of health and disease, as revealed through examination of bones and paleomolecular evidence. These possibilities open the way for historians to participate in a con- versation about the long history of environmental change and human response. This essay considers how one of the most classic of all historical questions–the fall of the Roman Empire–can receive an answer enriched by new knowledge about the role of environmental change.

On the twenty-first day of April inad 248, Rome celebrated her one thousandth birthday. For three days and three nights, the haze of burnt offerings filled the streets. An exotic menagerie befitting the seat of a tricontinental empire was presented to the people, and massacred: thirty-two elephants, ten elk, ten tigers, sixty lions, thirty leopards, six hippopot- ami, ten giraffes, the odd rhinoceros, and innumer- able other wild beasts, not to mention one thou- KYLE HARPER is a Historian and sand pairs of gladiators. The ludi saeculares (“century Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma, games”) summoned forth a host of archaic memories, where he is also Senior Vice Presi- “skilfully adapted to inspire the superstitious mind dent and Provost. He is the author with deep and solemn reverence,” in the words of of From Shame to Sin: The Christian Edward Gibbon.1 The celebration still carried shad- Transformation of Sexual Morality in owy associations with the underworld; the rituals Late Antiquity (2013), which won encouraged the diversion of pestilence. Despite the the Award for Excellence in the deliberate primitivism of the rites, the ludi saeculares Study of Religion, from the Amer- ican Academy of Religion, Histor- could be credited, like so much else, as a creative re- ical Studies, and Slavery in the Late discovery of the imperial founder, Augustus. The Roman World (2011), which won ludi saeculares were in every sense an imperial affair, the James Henry Breasted Prize. a stage-crafted display of the awesome power that

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 The Rome enjoyed, unbroken for centuries on in a truly alien world. The serene confi- Environ- end. Little did contemporaries know they dence of the empire had been rudely shak- mental Fall of the were witnessing a sort of valediction: the en. Hulking stone fortifications, the Aure- Roman last secular games of Rome. lian Walls, went up around a city in which Empire It is easy, from our distance, to imagine distance and mystique had so recently that there was some measure of denial in seemed protection enough. The silver had such an exuberant celebration of the Ro- dissipated from the empire’s coins, which, man millennium–as if the inhabitants of now spewed in super-abundance from the Rome were enjoying the ancient equiva- mints, more resembled crude wafers. A new lent of cocktails on the deck of the Titan- kind of man–the Danubian soldier with ic. But perhaps we are blinded by hind- little time or awe for the urbs–had irrevers- sight. The Rome of ad 248 offered much ibly wrested control of the state from the to inspire a sense of familiarity and confi- moneyed senatorial aristocracy. Careers dence. The pomerium, or urban boundary, were made and unmade in the barracks of remained a construct of the imagination northern garrison towns, rather than in the in an unwalled city that sprawled over into old capital. Beneath the imperial city itself, its hilly countryside. The coins minted to in the honeycomb of burial caverns known honor the games maintained a ponderous as the catacombs, there is evidence that texture of true silver; to hold one of these the obscure cult of Christianity was, for the coins even today is to feel the combination first time, making uncanny strides toward of precious metal and public trust that becoming more than a marginal curiosity. steadied the value of the imperial money. In short, in the space of a single genera- The Romans’ ancestral polytheism, nest- tion, the lineaments of the period we now ed in the very fabric of their civic life, gave call late antiquity had come into view. No pe- historical assurance that the city’s place riod of Roman history is so screened from was written in the stars. Presiding over our gaze as the generation that passed be- the spectacle was Emperor Marcus Ju- tween Philip and Aurelian; and few were so lius Philippus, also known as Philip the momentous. How we imagine the changes Arab. Though he hailed from the south- that occurred in those tumultuous decades, ern reaches of Syria, he was not a conspic- often beyond our ken, will decisively shape uous outsider in an empire whose integra- how we view that fathomless historical epi- tive capacities are virtually unmatched in sode: the decline and fall of the Roman Em- history. Early in his reign, he had shown pire. impressive energy: he attempted admin- istrative reforms in Egypt, oversaw a great Gibbon described the subject of his fa- burst of road improvements in places as mous history as the triumph of “barbarism removed as Mauretania and Britain, and and religion.” This was a vantage formed in enjoyed a satisfying victory over north- the heady world of Enlightenment letters. ern barbarians. Above all, as Philip clear- Gibbon’s genteel disdain for superstition ly recognized, the city herself demanded nurtured a sense of remote affinity for the obeisance, being the critical, central node Romans. And his ravaging critical faculty, of power at the nexus of people, army, and turned against the partisan ancient and ec senate. In Rome, campaigns were planned, clesiastical histories, made his Decline and careers plotted, fortunes decided.2 Fall of the Roman Empire a landmark then Philip’s Rome would have felt familiar (in the late eighteenth century) and a mon- to Augustus, its first emperor. And yet, ument still. In its sources and preoccupa- just one generation on, we find ourselves tions, Gibbon’s text is resolutely a prod-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 uct of its own age. Indeed, every genera- time-scales with razor precision.4 The cold Kyle tion looks upon the past through the eyes season became the frosted decade; the dry Harper of the present. It is no surprise or disser- year became the arid century. The discov- vice for us to return anew to the Roman ery of Holocene variability, on a scale and past, awakened to the fact that the environ- at speeds significant enough to influence ment can be a protagonist in human histo- human fortunes, has been a revelation. ry, armed with radically new tools for reconstructing the relationship between hu- The history of human health and disease manity and nature.3 While explanations is also a story of environmental change. The for the fall of Rome have never lacked, it physical testimony of human bones, the might seem surprising that environmental stories frozen in their isotope chemistry, change has nonetheless remained such a and the expansive possibilities of gene se- marginal candidate. The sudden assimi- quencing are enabling historians to trace lation of environmental history into the deep transformations in human health and mainstream of our historical conscious- disease in ways that were previously incon- ness is a testament to just how quickly we ceivable. The patterns of change emerg- have come to know the drama of environ- ing from the bioarchaeological record are mental instability in times past and pres- both stark and surprising. For instance, ac- ent. cumulated skeletal evidence has inescap- The environment is not an inert back- ably shown that the Romans were short drop to human history: from the cold win- in stature, unimpressive relative to their ter to the dry year, we experience seasonal Iron Age predecessors and Dark Age suc- and interannual variation. We are trained cessors.5 (Julius Caesar, reputed to have to notice and to respond to climate vari- been tall, may have stood imposing only ability on annual scales. Most of us are also among a population in which the average at least dimly aware that the hospitable man stood five feet, five inches.) Achieved clime we currently inhabit–the Holocene, stature is a function of both genes and en- circa 10,000 bc to the present–is really an vironment, and the environmental contri- interglacial, a periodically friendly inter- bution, in turn, is the result of net nutrition, lude between ice ages. The Holocene has or the income of nutrients during devel- been an epoch of relatively warm and sta- opment minus the expenditures of labor ble climate relative only to the jagged Pleis- and disease. For the Romans, the heavy tocene, when snowcaps could blanket the burden of infectious disease drained their mid-latitudes, and vast tracts of the earth’s bodies’ metabolic resources and stunted surface became uninhabitable in the geo- their growth. logical blink of an eye. The clinching evi- Deciding how to integrate environmen- dence for natural climate variability during tal change into the story of Rome’s de- the Holocene has come principally from a cline and fall will intersect with some al- new kind of physical archive. Natural ar- ready well-worn tracks in the historiogra- chives, like ice cores, tree rings, marine de- phy. Gibbon set a pattern that many have posits, and cave minerals, can stretch back followed since: he looked inward, to the thousands to tens of thousands of years. flaws inherent in the very constitution of Over the last few decades, glaciologists, empire, to find the cause of Rome’s fall. dendrochronologists, and other intrepid He wrote: “The decline of Rome was the explorers of the earth’s past have submit- natural and inevitable effect of immod- ted to historians the possibility of recon- erate greatness. Prosperity ripened the structing climate history on civilizational principle of decay; the causes of destruc-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 The tion multiplied with the extent of con- the Pleistocene, the mechanics of our or- Environ- quest; and as soon as time or accident had bital journey around the sun create icy mental Fall of the removed the artificial supports, the stu- spells lasting millennia. Within the Holo- Roman pendous fabric yielded to the pressure cene, solar cycles of shorter periodicity al- Empire of its own weight.”6 The environment tered the amount of heat received by the might well have a place within this in- earth, while volcanic eruptions coughed ternal chain of causes. Just ten years af- up clouds of sulfates that prevented en- ter the final volumes of Gibbon’s history ergy from reaching the planet’s surface. were published, the mother of all endog- The oceans and the atmosphere form a enous models appeared in the first edition coupled system, and the circulation of of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Princi- heat through the deep, interconnected, ple of Population. Malthus’s core insight and variously salty waters of the earth is was simple, and remains elegant: because responsible for pulses of climate change, of the limits on food production, popula- whose rhythms and effects are far from tion and well-being stand in an intrinsic completely understood. Until the very re- and inverse relationship to one another. cent past, the climate system has varied Growth, if not forestalled by some con- on its own tempo and terms, blissfully in- straint, inevitably recoiled back upon it- different to human endeavors. self, as “sickly seasons, epidemics, pesti- However, to lay the patterns of epidem- lence, and plague, advance in terrific ar- ic disease exclusively at the feet of na- ray, and sweep off their thousands and ten ture would too easily exonerate humani- thousands. Should success be still incom- ty in coaxing along the evolutionary his- plete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in tory of our own microscopic rivals. Quite the rear.”7 The reverend’s theory makes unawares, we humans have had a deter- ecological catastrophe the ironic fate of mining part in the evolutionary destiny human development. of the very bacteria and viruses that, until Conversely, environmental catastrophe recently, were the most important agents does not have to be self-induced. Power- of human mortality. The niches we con- ful exogenous determinism has its advo- struct for ourselves have inadvertently cates. As John Brooke writes in Climate shaped the evolutionary conditions of the Change and the Course of Global History, microbes that haunted our forebears. The “Until the onset of modern accelerated role of infectious disease has been exog- population growth, no pre-modern soci- enous, only in the narrowest neoclassical ety of consequence occupying a reason- sense of the term, which predicts that ably adequate biome suffered a purely mortality rates are determined by real- endogenous ‘Malthusian crisis’; rather, wage levels.9 Malthus can inspire more ca- adversity, crisis, and collapse were funda- pacious readings that urge us to look for mentally shaped by exogenous forces: the other pathways of feedback between civi- impacts of drought, cold, and epidemic lization and environment. Even in the case disease drove episodic and abrupt rever- of climate variability, it will benefit us to sals in societal complexity and the human give special attention to the precise means condition.”8 Up until the Industrial Revo- through which environmental turbulence lution, climactic fluctuation was unmoved sometimes did–and sometimes did not– by human stimulus, and climate variabil- stretch societies beyond their capacity to ity was driven foremost by changes in the endure. As with any good story, the drama amount of radiative energy entering the of environmental history lies in the inter- atmosphere. On geologic timescales like play between structure and contingency.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 At this moment, as new models of en- service, open pathways to citizenship, Kyle vironmental change and human impact co-optation of local elites, and, of course, Harper gather momentum, the watchword is resil- civil engineering nonpareil–meant that by ience: the capacity of human societies to re- the time Augustus brought the last signif- spond to the shocks of nature, to draw on icant stretches of Mediterranean shore- batteries of stored energy to fund the re- line under Roman dominion, it was no covery from the lashes of climate change idle boast for Romans to refer to the sea as and disease.10 Resilience is not infinite, mare nostrum, “our sea.” however, and to look for it in ancient soci- What kind of empire did the Romans eties is also to be alert for the signs of per- build? Foremost, it was an agrarian trib- sistent stress, and the realization that just utary empire. A comparative framework beyond the threshold of endurance lies trains our eyes to see the all-important cascading change and systemic reorgani- annual cycle of tax gathering as the cen- zation. Resilience asks us to consider the tral dilemma of Roman statecraft. It also ecological specificity of a social system, in threatens to flatten out the real unique- which lie its reserves of strength, as well ness of Roman ecological and economic as its tensions and vulnerabilities. The no- achievements, which constituted the true tion of resilience lets us look anew at Rome source of Rome’s vulnerability, and its ul- in the middle decades of the third centu- timate demise. This distinction begins with ry and allows us to see, perhaps, not a soci- the obvious–but extraordinary–fact that ety waiting for its “principle of decay,” as the Romans stand as the only people ever Gibbon phrased it, to unfold in course, but to unify the basin into a single political or- one whose depleted stores left it exposed ganism. Yet this fails to capture the full to the unforeseeable strokes of environ- geographical accomplishment of Roman mental misfortune. imperium, whose deep continental annex- es reached north across the 56th parallel, If you could go back in time from the sec- while the southern edges dipped below ular games of ad 248 to the very founda- the 24th parallel north. “Of all the contig- tion of the city of Rome–nearly ten “ages uous empires in premodern history, only of man”–you would have found an in- those of the Mongols, Incas, and Russian auspicious, but typical, Iron Age agglom- czars matched or exceeded the north-south eration of huts along the hilly banks of range of Roman rule.”11 Few empires, and the Tiber River. The eighth century bc none so long-lived as the Roman empire, was an age of beginnings, but for a long grasped parts of the earth reaching from time, the western reaches of the Mediter- the upper mid-latitudes to the fringes of ranean stood in the shadow of the Aege- the tropics. an and Near Eastern experiments. Centu- This empire was a network of cities ries elapsed before there were any signs looking toward the waters, and there is no of the coming Roman miracle; when it doubt that the Mediterranean Sea was at did arrive, it seemed sudden and inexora- its core. The Mediterranean basin is one ble. The Romans stepped forcefully into of the globe’s most complex climate re- the imperial space created by Hellenistic gimes. The delicate, moody features of kingdoms and, after razing the Carthagin- the Mediterranean climate–arid summers ians, their only western rival of any impor- and wet winters against a relatively temp tance, seized hegemony of the Mediterra- erate backdrop–are recognizable around nean. The Roman package–aggressive col the world. But the Mediterranean itself oni zation, assimilation through military is unique; the dynamics of a giant, inland

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 The sea, combined with the crenellated texture goods with ease. The high Roman Empire Environ- of its inland terrains, pack extreme diver- is notable for the distinct absence of se- mental Fall 13 of the sity into miniature scale. The region is a vere food crisis. Dearth is always relative, Roman patchwork of microclimates.12 And be- but Malthus’s “gigantic inevitable famine” Empire cause of its position at the juncture of the seems not to have stalked the Romans, so subtropics and mid-latitudes, the Mediter- much as periodic bouts of high prices. ranean zone is crossed by an array of dis- The Roman economy defied the dour tinct climate processes. The western terri- logic of Malthusian pessimism, accord- tories are subject to the influence of Atlan- ing to which the teeming populations of tic patterns, in particular North Atlantic the empire should have crunched the food pressure gradients, which decide wheth- supply. The high empire stands as one of er the storms carrying all-important rains the most significant phases of econom- will pass into the Mediterranean or spin ic “efflorescence” in the centuries before north over the European continent. The industrialization. In this period, the gains controls on the Eastern Mediterranean are from trade and the diffusion of technolog- even more complicated, still including the ical improvements allowed a large-scale sweep of westerlies from the Atlantic, but society to forestall the real and overarch- also hypersensitive to other mechanisms ing limits of the land’s productivity. The that influence the levels of winter precipi- Roman economy achieved growth, even tation. And Egypt, the breadbasket of the on a per-person basis, straight into the empire, plugged the Romans into wholly teeth of population expanse. The best ev- other climate regimes; the life-bringing idence comes from the dry sands of mid- Nile floods originated in Ethiopian high- dle Egypt: recovered papyri enable frag- lands, watered by the Indian Ocean mon- mentary reconstructions suggesting that, soons. here in a province subjected to heavy fis- Control of grain production along the cal extraction, the wages of the most or- Nile’s verdant flanks gave the Romans a dinary laborers (diggers, donkey drivers, natural insurance policy to buffer against dung haulers) increased across the first the vagaries of the Mediterranean climate. two centuries of Romanization.14 And this was only one of many. The Romans Trade and technology let the Romans had the advantage of building an empire outrun the Malthusian reaper for no short atop countless indigenous risk-manage season. But the success of the imperial econ ment strategies, a stock of peasant knowl- omy seems to have had another accom- edge accreted over millennia. Over that plice: the climate. The “Roman climate ground cover of local wisdom, the engi- optimum” emerges from a range of prox- neers of the Roman empire built a ma- ies as a distinct phase of late Holocene cli- chinery of food provision and water man- mate. In the Mediterranean, it was a pe- agement that was political in nature, and riod of unusually hospitable alignment: monumental in scale. Despite the renown warm, wet, and stable. Levels of total solar of the aqueduct and the grain dole, what is irradiance were consistently elevated, and truly striking is the extent of the imperial there was a striking absence of signatures food system left to the market. Public gra- of major volcanic eruption. Of the largest naries provided a margin of protection, and twenty-five eruptions in the last two and in times of acute crisis, the government in- a half millennia, none occurred between serted itself. But the best insurance poli- the death of Julius Caesar and the year ad cy was the network of roads and sea lanes, 169.15 Proxies of warm temperature, like along which private merchants moved bulk the glaciers that retreated up the Alps,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 stand in affirmation. Heat was matched ents. In the letters of Marcus, we catch Kyle with moisture in the West; Spain and It- glimpses of the fevers and diarrheas that Harper aly appear to have been well-watered. The laid low so many little scions of the im- effects in the East were uneven, although perial line. Yet the reign of Marcus was the Levant enjoyed a persistent cycle of the apex of what Gibbon, with justifica- humidity, for which the most concrete tes- tion, called “the period in the history of timony is the evidence of shoreline settle- the world, during which the condition ments high above the Dead Sea. And the of the human race was most happy and sacred floods of the Nile River revealed a prosperous.”18 Today we might look back period of astonishing dependability.16 on the happiest age and see not a lurking principle of decay waiting to unwind, but Climate, then, stood in alliance with a society in which cumulative ecological commerce and technical progress, as the pressure was entailed by the very terms Roman efflorescence defied or deferred of development. Such a perspective pre- the paradoxical laws of premodern de- pares us for what happened next: in the velopment. People crowded the basin. If middle of the ad 160s, a pestilence arose there is a sign, though, that quietly points in the immediate wake of an eastern mil- us toward a qualification of this optimis- itary campaign. The Romans believed the tic picture, it is the Romans’ short stat- soldiers who impiously sacked the city ure. Biological well-being remained as– of Seleucia on the Tigris had unlocked a or more–elusive than ever for the in deadly vapor. In reality, the unfamiliar habitants of the imperial Mediterranean; pathogen was probably introduced into life expectancy was low, even by ancient the virgin populations of the Mediterra- standards. The inadvertent consequence nean via Rome’s bustling Red Sea trade. of more people was a more insalubrious It was smallpox.19 environment.17 In Rome, the dog days of The Antonine Plague, as it is known, summer brought on an awful tide of gas- can claim to be considered the world’s troenteric illnesses, with an autumn surge first pandemic; it is the prime exhibit for of malaria following on its heels. Malthus, what William McNeill called the conver- we might say, was right for the wrong rea- gence of the civilized disease pools of Eur- sons. The poor health of the Romans was asia.20 Highly communicable and highly unmediated by food shortage or low wages. lethal, the disease was conducted along In a scenario not unlike the “antebellum the very networks that held the empire paradox,” when American stature suffered together. Signs of the plague, both giant a setback in the mid-nineteenth century and subtle, are ubiquitous. Building vir- despite the arc of development, urban den- tually ceased. Mass graves provide chill- sity and imperial connectivity in the Ro- ing testimony, and confirm literary reports man Empire were as conducive for micro- of unprecedented mortality. Invocations bial ecology as human prosperity. Thanks to Apollo, the diverter of plague, appear to their imperial ecology, the Romans across the empire. Emergency military were rich, but sick. conscriptions were levied. The price of Wealth offered no escape from the bru- goods leapt. Although the scale of the An- tal facts of life and death. The wife of the tonine Plague’s impact is hotly debated at emperor Marcus Aurelius bore him at least the moment, it is not unreasonable to be- fourteen children–six girls and eight boys lieve that the pandemic was as devastat- –yet only one of the girls and one of the ing and consequential as the introduction boys verifiably outlived both of their par- of smallpox into the New World. Marcus

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 The himself succumbed, probably, to the dis- pulsory purchases to its own advantage, Environ- ease. was grabbing wheat at prices that were mental Fall of the In a cruel coincidence, the pacific re- shockingly high even for the fair market, Roman gime of the Roman climate optimum end- implying acute desperation. One papyrol- Empire ed almost simultaneously with the advent ogist sensitive to the nuances of these data, of the great mortality. A massive volcanic has deemed this a sign of “unusual sever- eruption in ad 169 spelled the inevitable ity.”23 The contemporary bishop of Alex- end of an unusually stable chapter of cli- andria, the great metropolis at the mouth mate history. The climate of the next cen- of the Nile Delta, described the Nile riv- turies would be disorganized and indeci- erbed as drier than a desert.24 The rever- sive, before a sharp and unmistakable de- berations of a catastrophic food crisis in scent into what is starting to be known as Egypt could be felt empire-wide. Worse the “late antique little ice age.” While the was yet to come. If one purpose of the sec- Roman Empire was never quite the same ular games was to ward off the evils of pes- after the appearance of the smallpox pan- tilence, the millennium celebration was demic, the reality is that the empire did shortly to prove a stupendous failure. persist, and in recognizable form. A new The weather can induce famines or fan dynasty of Libyan and Syrian heritage the movements of people that stir sick- held sway for nearly half a century. If they ness. The weather can also upset the hair- failed ever to please the Roman Senate en- trigger ecological equilibria that some- tirely, there is no disguising the basic suc- times control the reproduction of disease cess of their restorative enterprise. Ro- vectors like mice or mosquitos. We can- man citizenship was made universal, and not say if the volatility of the mid–third Roman law entered its classical heights. century climate contributed to the out- It was in these years that the sour church- break of epidemic disease that again visit- man Tertullian proclaimed, “Everywhere ed the empire. Contemporaries noted the there are households, everywhere people, coincidence of drought and pestilence, but everywhere cities, everywhere life!”21 To to their ancient eyes, this was a sign of di- use the terms we have laid out before, the vine wrath rather than environmental dis- imperial system, with the Roman people turbance. Whatever the cause, just a few and the Senate at its center, endured with- generations after they had recovered from out fundamental reorganization, though the first attacks of the smallpox virus, the stressed by new levels of environmental Romans experienced what might be con- turbulence. The populace reveling in the sidered the second wave of pandemic dis- secular games of ad 248 was not deluded ease in global history. The Plague of Cyp to think that Rome would still be the cen- rian, named after the bishop of Carthage ter of the world after another age of man whose sermons provide our most detailed had passed. description of the disease, ravaged Alex- andria in ad 249. By ad 251, the plague had In ad 244, the Nile waters failed to rise. reached the Western capital. For nearly Two years later, they failed again. These pat- twenty years, it blazed sporadically across terns are inferred from haphazard scraps the Roman world. of papyri. In March of ad 246, a provin The Plague of Cyprian has managed to cial official in the Oxyrhynchite district evade serious attention from historians.25 of Egypt ordered that all private stocks of But if we look anew at the period, with our grain be registered.22 The provincial gov- eyes open to the power of environmen- ernment, which usually set prices in com- tal fury, the pandemic can be seen every-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 where. It is far better supported than the the spiral of inflation. The ageless civic pa- Kyle Antonine Plague, despite appearing at the ganism of the Mediterranean seemed to Harper worst-documented moment in imperial sputter, losing ground to an obscure, if vo- history. Pagans and Christians, from both cal and highly organized, rival that seized East and West, independently and unan- the mission field opened by the deep social imously insisted on the plague’s devas- dislocation and painful inefficacy of the tation. While the crisis summoned forth ancestral gods. Although late Roman rul- the full range of our witnesses’ rhetorical ers loved to advertise their “restoration of virtuosity, it also inspired some crucially the times,” this was clearly special plead- detailed reportage, from Cyprian’s exciting. What was ultimately to emerge from ed account of the disease’s hemorrhagic the wreckage in the later third century has presentation to Dionysius’s surprisingly rightly been called “a new empire.”28 specific claims about its demographic impact. Alexandria had lost 62 percent of its Human societies are embedded in their urban population, judging from the num- natural environment, and the challenge ber of recipients on the public grain dole. for historians is how to assimilate the Five thousand corpses a day were wheeled mountains of new knowledge about the out of Rome. According to the pagan his- past environment rising up around us. torian Zosimus, the Plague of Cyprian in- For centuries, historians have been able fested both towns and villages, and “de- to explain the transformations of the later stroyed whatever was left of mankind. No Roman world, including the crisis of the plague in previous times wrought such de- third century, without needing to consid- struction of human life.”26 er the blunt factors of climate change and The Plague of Cyprian did not cause the disease. It takes patience, as well as some fall of the Roman Empire, but it did insti- imagination, to go back and pretend we gate a phase of crisis that pushed the impe- do not know the ending. The proud urban rial system beyond the threshold of resil- people who cheered in the circus, or sang ience. When it struck, the fabric of empire in the processions of the ludi saeculares in unwound. The Romans had faced challeng- ad 248, could little have imagined that es before: dynastic conflict, external inva- dynamic cycles in our proximate star, or sion, class violence, and–yes–famine and the chance mutation of a virus in a far-off plague. Even in the sunniest days of An- forest, would rattle the foundations of the tonine rule, these adversities were not unfamiliar world they inhabited. That was familiar.27 But their concurrence and in- the revenge of the giant imperial ecol- tensity in the ad 250s induced cascading ogy they created, at the very moment in change. Barbarians no longer just menaced history they chose to create it. It is exhil- the frontier; they pillaged unwalled towns arating, if also a little daunting, for us to in the imperial interior. The struggle for be confronted with the evidence of glob- dynastic legitimacy turned into imperial al environmental history, which is just dissolution. beginning to let us reimagine the human The coinage of the period is a perfect ob- past, while allowing, always, an occasion- jective correlative: its fiduciary value with- al and wary glimpse to the present. stood repeated debasement of the precious metal content, until it did not. In this crisis, its value finally collapsed, and only the reorientation of the entire currency system around gold lifted the economy from

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 The endnotes Environ- 1 mental Fall Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 (London: William of the Strahan and Thomas Cadell, 1776), ch. 7. Roman 2 Empire For more about Philip the Arab, see Clifford Ando, Imperial Rome AD 193–284: The Critical Cen- tury (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 115, 121. 3 Of course, newer environmental history builds on the pioneering efforts of the Annales school, as well as scholars like Hubert H. Lamb and William H. McNeill. For an exciting conspectus of new approaches and tools, see Michael McCormick, “History’s Changing Climate: Climate Science, Genomics, and the Emerging Consilient Approach to Interdisciplinary History,” Jour- nal of Interdisciplinary History 42 (2) (2011): 251–273. 4 For an overview of what is possible, see the studies collected in Piero Lionello, The Climate of the Mediterranean Region From the Past to the Future (London: Elsevier, 2012). 5 Although this is the conclusion of several studies, the most methodologically sophisticated study to date is Monica Giannecchini and Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi, “Stature in Archeological Samples from Central Italy: Methodological Issues and Diachronic Changes,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 135 (3) (2008): 284–292. 6 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 39. 7 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church- yard, 1798), ch. 7. 8 John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2014), 9. 9 John Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670–1830 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 10 Carl Folke, “Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analy ses,” Global Environmental Change 16 (3) (2006): 253–267. 11 Walter Scheidel, “The Shape of the Roman World: Modelling Imperial Connectivity,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 27 (2014): 7–32. 12 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Ox- ford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). See also Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 13 Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 14 Kyle Harper, “Peoples, Plagues, and Prices in the Roman World: The Evidence from Egypt” (under review). 15 M. Sigl, M. Winstrup, J. R. McConnell, et al., “Timing and Climate Forcing of Volcanic Erup- tions for the Past 2,500 Years,” Nature 523 (7562) (2015): 543–549. 16 For a recent summary of what we know (which is already becoming outdated), see Michael McCormick, Ulf Büntgen, Mark A. Cane, et al., “Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire: Reconstructing the Past from Scientific and Historical Evidence,” Journal of Interdisci- plinary History 43 (2) (2012): 169–220. 17 Walter Scheidel, Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 18 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 3. 19 See the essays collected in Elio Lo Cascio, L’impatto Della “Peste Antonina” (Bari: Edipuglia, 2012). The identification of the pathogen will remain uncertain until it is genetically se-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DAED_a_00380 by guest on 25 September 2021 quenced, but a strong scholarly consensus has emerged around smallpox, as Lo Cascio’s vol- Kyle ume makes clear. Harper 20 William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976). 21 “Ubique domus, ubique populus, ubique respublica, ubique vita,” from Tertullian De Anima 30.3. 22 P. J. Parsons, ed., P. Oxy. 42.3048, “Proclamation of Iuridicus and Registration of Corn” (Ox- ford: Sackler Library, 1974). Low- and high-resolution images of the papyri are available at http://163.1.169.40/cgi-bin/library?e=q-000-00---0POxy--00-0-0--0prompt-10---4------0-1l-- 1-en-50---20-about-3048--00031-001-0-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=POxy&cl=search&d=HASH5412a0c- 44c9708ca044ded. 23 Dominic Rathbone, “Prices and Price Formation in Roman Egypt,” in Économie antique: prix et formation des prix dans les économies antiques, vol. 2, ed. Jean Andreau, Pierre Briant, and Raymond Descat (Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges: Musée Archéologique Départemental, 1997), 194. 24 Eusebius Historia Ecclesiastica 7.21. 25 For a full treatment, with detailed discussion of the sources cited here, see Kyle Harper, “Pan- demics and Passages to Late Antiquity: Rethinking the Plague of c. 249–70 Described by Cyprian,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 28 (2015): 223–260. 26 Ibid., 236. 27 C. P. Jones, “Aelius Aristides, ΕΙΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΑ,” The Journal of Roman Studies 62 (1972): 134–152. 28 Timothy D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1982).

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