The Antonine Plague in Rome : Designing a Comparative Model of Different Pathogens
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian are considered by some scholars to have been major disease outbreaks in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, causing a significant population decline in the Roman Empire. Several authors have argued that the outbreaks led to the ideal conditions for Christianity to become a dominant religion in the Roman Empire. The magnitude of these pandemics was nevertheless questioned by other scholars. One way to advance the discussions surrounding the impact of the pandemics might be to inspect the currently available sources by novel methods and assess whether such an interpretation of the growth of Christianity is realistic at all. Recent adoption of the methods of mathematical and computational modelling by the humanities allows to demonstrate some phenomena related to the Antonine Plague and the Cyprianic Plague. Focusing on the Antonine Plague (ca. 165–189 CE), however, no molecular evidence of its causative agent is available. This makes it difficult to estimate the impact of the Antonine Plague on the population of the Roman Empire, let alone its Christian sub-population. Fortunately, the literary evidence (primarily the writings of Galen and Cassius Dio) indicates features of the disease and the extent of its impact on Roman society. The aim of this paper is to propose a way how to create a compartmental model of the Antonine Plague in the city of Rome between 165 and 189 CE, and compare its output with historical evidence to identify the most plausible cause of this disease outbreak. |
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