They'd heard it had come from Egypt running down the mountains and along the plains, sparing no one along the way.
As soon as they could, Carsia and her family locked themselves in their insulin.
And they'd hardly ventured out since. As she peered through the slats, she could see that there was hardly anyone on the streets.
Now, neither the tradesmen and their stalls or the soldiers in their uniforms.
Everyone was staying at home. It was quiet at first, only the trundling cartwheels carrying the dead along the flagstone.
But these days there was a different down filled the air. Their apartment block was full of panic.
Full of cries for physicians. Full of the shouts of fever, dream and demons.
And full of the endless. An absolute beating of. Friends, neighbours pleading for help.
But Carsia couldn't do it. Welcome to the eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century.
Into the second episode of our history of pandemics sees this time.
We need to play. But historians and medical experts alike agree.
Was humanity's first recorded pandemic caused by this deadly disease.
You might not have heard much about Emperor Justinian first or why he has a plague outbreak named after him.
But by the end of this episode, you'll hear just how devastating and long lasting this pandemic was.
So I'd like to introduce you to Mike McCormick,
professor of mediaeval history and chair of the Science of Human Postin at Harvard University, who can set the scene for us.
We are in the year of the Christian era. Five, four, two actually late five for one for the first outbreak, apparently in Egypt.
But we get detailed information about what's going on in the spring of five four two.
From an eyewitness at the centre of the world, as far as the Mediterranean was concerned, Constantinople, new Rome capital, the Roman Empire,
the empire was Justinian one of the greatest emperors of all time in terms of his architectural achievements,
in terms of his legislating legislation and his codification.
Roman law, just an organic code, of course,
is responsible for almost everything we know about classical and post classical Roman law and a number of tremendous conquests.
He set out to reconquer the lost provinces of the West and recovered the two richest.
Italy and Africa, Africa and Italy in that biological order.
And in 542, he had overcome a violent uprising in the capital, which had burned most of downtown.
He was in the process. He had been rebuilding fast and intensively, including the building of the idea.
Sophia, the largest building in the ancient world, 16 stories tall.
One of the greatest architectural innovations and creations of the ancient world with a gigantic dome and was rebuilding across the Roman Empire.
Africa had been conquered triumphs. Ceremonies had been celebrated. Italy was.
The war was grinding on. It had gotten off to a great start, but it slowed down with the severe climate downturn,
which is then termed the late antique little ice age that began in the spring of 536.
Suddenly, across western Eurasia, average summer temperatures dropped severely between one point five,
then three degrees centigrade, which is a lot on average for summer temperature.
And the costs for this was recently identified in 2015 as a massive volcanic explosion are
actually three volcanic explosions that occurred in rapid succession from 536 forward.
So the Roman Empire in the post Roman space was wrestling with severe climate change,
severe and swift climate change that was affecting crop productions and where different things were produced,
but was displaying considerable resilience when this terrible event broke out.
Mike feels that Justinian himself got a bit of a raw deal for Justinian.
He fought against incredible odds. Imagine you had a new little ice age dropped on your head and you would just wear
reconquering the lost provinces and you just overcome this gigantic revolt.
You were building the greatest structure of the Roman Empire put up and repairing the largest
aqueduct and expanding the largest aqueduct the Roman Empire ever built to feed the water.
Poor side of Constantinople just published a codification of Roman law and of all the great Klotho digest,
of all the great classical jurisprudence jurisprudential writers of the third century.
And boom, you get this damn thing dropped on your head, first of all, and then you get it named after you.
Of course, that wasn't remembered as such. He wasn't. It was simply called the death, the dying mortality, the great mortality.
That's a modern name. And Justinian was taking claim for everything happening in his period.
So in a way, it's just deserts that modern scholars have named it after the emperor in whose reign it broke out
and in whose capital we have the most vivid and horrifying descriptions of the first outbreak.
Yet we're not just talking about an isolated outbreak more a longer period of disease emerging and then dying down again.
That is the consensus.
That is to say, a series of outbreaks recurring every four to 10 years in different places around the Roman and post Roman world from five four one,
five, four, two to about 750. There's some discrepancy on the dating of the last outbreak.
Was it 764? I've written a lot on it, but I forget the details. We have to.
You can look them up. And I worked out the chronology from my perspective with the evidence I had in my book and the origins the European.
Me, there's a there's a little appendix and attracts it just like a plague in the index and you'll get the details.
And as far as we're aware, this is the first time humans encountered what we now call the plague.
Let's even be more clear. The first historically recorded plague pandemic.
It's entirely possible that plague pandemics may have occurred in unrecorded times and places before this molecular biology.
Akio genetics has the power to reveal that. So we have to stay tuned and remain open.
Now that we know that this organism existed for hundreds, even thousands of years before Justinian,
we have to allow for the possibility that future discoveries may be every bit as stunning as the recent ones.
So how do our sources describe it?
The sources identified as inguinal plague or in, we know, plague an epidemic that causes swelling in the inguinal area,
in the thighs in the form of buboes, sometimes also cervical in the neck and other places.
Identification of the pathogen was controverted for many years.
The descriptions of symptoms in the historical eyewitness reports did seem to point pretty clearly to bubonic plague.
It's clear that Alexander Sand, the Swiss biologist who was sent by Louis Pasteur to East Asia during the second pandemic to see what was going on,
is clear that he identified the previous bubonic plague.
The Black Death of the Middle Ages, what people call the second pandemic of plague and the probably the first pandemic as well.
He he thought they were clearly bubonic plague.
But debate race because the one could make different arguments from the sources and the Greek and the Latin is challenging.
The languages aren't in a state of evolution at this time.
And that requires grateful, logical insight to be able to understand them correctly.
And we're better off now with the kind of computerised digital tools we have.
And so, although the debate continued legitimately so, most scholars were inclined to think from the symptoms that it was bubonic plague.
What do we know about those sources? How much can we trust them?
It's important to understand that the evidence that the written historical evidence is rich, but it's quite uneven.
It's particularly rich for the first outbreak, which starts in 542 and goes for two or three years.
After that, the sources become more jejune for everything, including for plague.
And that continues. Nevertheless,
historians and archaeologists working from the written evidence have identified from those written sources between depending on how you count,
between 18 and 32, I believe.
Epidemic outbreaks of plague around the Mediterranean world and its hinterland
between 541 542 and the last great outbreak in the middle of the 8th century.
The first and the last are amongst the most. Those that are documented in written sources in greatest detail.
Most of the places where we have plague.
Now, most of those places are not documented as having been been affected by plague in the Justinian pandemic.
At most, the region is indicated to my own sense.
The discovery of ancient DNA of plague in Anglo-Saxon Britain was truly surprising.
Others had made the case, but I thought that the written sources remained arguably ambiguous about it.
There can now be no doubt that plague at Anglo-Saxon England, the small rural cemetery south of Cambridge and Mr E.D. Hill is the name of the place.
And what's really striking about that tells us something about how this world of Justinian was so tightly connected.
Is that genetically the form of your senior pestis identified in those victims in that
Anglo-Saxon cemetery looks to be closest to the base to the beginning of the pandemic,
which suggests very swift communications from the Egyptian delta to Anglo-Saxon England in the five forties.
That's quite remarkable. It sounds like it's fair to say that there's a great deal we don't yet know about this pendant.
We are at the very beginning of our knowledge and understanding of this phenomenon.
I myself, quite honestly, as a young assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, didn't think much of plague.
How could a tiny microbe bring down the mighty empire?
I had a graduate student who said, No, Mike, the plague was really important and you should study it.
So I looked into a little bit somehow maybe, but you couldn't tell much.
Everybody was arguing about what it was and whether absence of evidence is evidence of absence and so forth.
And I didn't pay much attention to it for the next 20 years, 15 years, until I began studying ship.
Communications. And that's how I personally got interested in the story.
Just the pandemic, because it is a disease of rats.
It is not a disease of humans.
It's classic form of transmission is the transport, the passive transport of infected rats and their fleas from one place to another.
And so I was working on shipping and communications in the late Roman world, in early mediaeval world.
And it quickly became clear that outbreaks of plague were signals of the arrival of a ship from somewhere.
And indeed, this is explicitly documented in a few cases from the Justinian pandemic.
So I began studying it as a proxy for seafaring communications.
And only later began to realise the potential importance of it for the economy overall as a causative factor for change in the economy,
in the demography and indeed in the culture itself.
And Mike Fields, there's a lot more we could learn from studying how the plague spread in this period.
The host population, every senior pastors in the Roman Empire, Rochus Rochus is another avenue that needs tremendous research devoted to it.
It is now established that the black rot was well-established in the Roman Empire.
They do not travel long distances, according to this law, just under their own power, under normal circumstances.
So they are possibly transported. So the presence of black rats allow you to follow the spread of the Roman transport
infrastructure they piggybacked on this amazing communications infrastructure.
The Roman Empire constructed in terms of ships,
riverboats and carts to move around the empire and the study of the archaeology of the rat is in its infancy.
But it is a very high performing technique that is becoming more common in Mediterranean
archaeology now and will doubtless allow us to trace the spread of the black rod.
We may be able to get evidence of your city of pestis from the rats themselves,
or at least from the genetics of the evolution of the rat over time and space, which may shed unexpected independent light.
I was keen to know more about the situation in just capital, just as the plague hit.
It's clear that what happened in 542 543 in the capital was horrific.
We have two eyewitnesses, copious who is the legal counsel to the most successful general in Just Finian's Army?
The great general Bellus areas who had led the reconquest of Africa and Italy and supported the Persian
invasion and would play a very important military role at various times in just Indians' reign.
And the second eyewitness is also someone who liked the copious was very close to the Imperial Court.
John of Emphasis, who was a monk from Mesopotamia who adhered to a variant Christology from the Emperor.
The Empress Theodora adhered to the Christology of John of emphasis.
And John was close to the Empress. So both copious.
And John Lefsetz saw this with their own eyes, and they were very close to the Imperial Court.
Indeed had been president the Imperial Court multiple on multiple occasions and what they described as quite, quite terrible starting in the spring,
a new disease or disease that for them was new and it caused a total cessation of activities in Constantinople.
Those who'd been in Manhattan or perhaps London during the pandemic will read the pages of the copious describing how there was no one on the street.
The markets were still there was no one in the uniform.
The civil service.
In the late Roman Empire wore uniforms, as in Czarist Russia, the government itself had come to a halt and the mortalities were huge.
Body disposal was a great challenge, according to John of emphasis.
You can believe him or not, but he claims that Justinian wanted to find out exactly how bad the mortality was
and said accountants at the gates of the city to count the bodies being counted,
being carried out and gave up in despair when they hit two hundred and thirty thousand.
In any case, it's clear that mortalities were very, very high.
The emperor became involved in body removal, assigning troops and special forces from the palace to do this and hiring people to do it.
It's clear from the richest Latin I witness in contemporary Gregory Bishop of Tours, who is writing in the five eighties or five nineties,
although he was a small child at the time and he doesn't remember it directly, but the one that he experienced most intensely in.
Was the outbreak of 571. It's quite clear that that was a devastating outbreak in Gregory's experience of it in his hometown of Claremont,
where he was a member of the cathedral clergy, it killed the bishop and a relative of the bishop, amongst other people.
Gregory himself is really a very rich witness, but a kind of an uneven witness.
Again, he mentions that about 20 times in his histories and in his various geographical work.
Interestingly, saints are curing everything. And Gregory George, there are hundreds, if not thousands of miraculous cures.
And Gregory, of course, there's only one cure of bubonic plague.
Everybody else doesn't make it in Gregory's account.
He also describes other epidemics of other of what seemed to be other pathogens.
He refers to six epidemics that he's aware of between 543 and about in the early five nineties.
And he treats for in greater detail, and particularly the first outbreak when he was four, five or six years old.
And he knows through his elders and the one of five seven one as well as one, which his deacon, who had been sent to Rome to collect relics,
experienced it firsthand and provides a striking, brief but striking eyewitness account of that outbreak.
Our other source is John of Ephesus. What does he tell us about the experience of this disease?
The promise Jarvis's. He gave a bunch of sermons about the plague. He's preaching to his monks about how san, you know, mother, blah, blah, blah.
But then he recycled the sermons in his church history and then the church history was lost.
And it's only preserved in quotations from other writers, from leader writers.
But Mike and I did discuss a very interesting quote from John of emphasis,
which references an emerging divide between the experience of the rich and the poor.
Initially, the plague killed vigorously the poor people who were dumped in the streets.
Pestilence reached the capital. This is my summary of it. Pestilence, streets, the capital and kill the poor first.
So they would be buried with dignity, understood by the rich who themselves would not be buried.
So that's it, John. Emphasis, that's in his fourth account in the fragments that survived.
Moving on to the burials that John mentions. What do we know about what happened during this first outbreak?
First of all, the evidence of anomalous burials, not just mass graves in which you have five or more people,
but exceptional frequencies of multiple burials,
burying two people simultaneously together with no sign of violence or three people together, and burials in anomalous circumstances.
People who show no sign of having died violently buried being buried in construction trenches.
Or in wells or unusual body disposal.
In the ancient world, bodies were treated with great respect and people were expected to to care for them
and to do venerate and to continue to commemorate the memory of their ancestors.
Through visiting the tomb and annual ceremonies and prayers and masses and what have you.
So that any disruption of burial ritual in this society, which really attaches a lot of importance to it, is striking.
It's also quite clear that at the beginning of the outbreaks, exactly as we have experienced tragically ourselves,
the death rate was was relatively modest and the normal rituals were performed for copious.
And I believe, John, of officers say this explicitly.
But as the bodies piled up in the streets, this went by the boards and new forms of dealing with the dead were forced to emerge.
Unfortunately, it's another one of the tragic insights that I've had since March as we've lived through this together.
I did not really get that section of the copious, which he says, you know, sometimes in 2000, sometimes 2000, even 10000 a day.
I just didn't get it. What what what does this mean?
We're sitting here every day counting how many died in Boston, in Massachusetts and the United States in the world.
And we're saying, oh, my God, we're you know, right now we're down to like 17 or 16.
We're real happy in the state of Massachusetts.
And I understood tragically why everyone who lived through that in Constantinople remembered the day counts.
I don't know whether he's exaggerating or not, but I now understand that everyone who read that and he was writing only a few years afterward,
and he was he was certainly read by the the the elite of the Roman Empire and beyond.
Everybody who had lived through that had a shiver. Remembering the day counts.
The council daily dead and John emphasis as that show Justinian wanted to know and had accountants, local thieves,
professional accountants working for the Imperial Fisk and the imperial government that are out there doing the the accounting and the Romans counted.
Believe me, they counted. They had very detailed records. They don't survive. You paid your taxes.
You pay customs dues. They had guy sitting at the bottom of the gangplank when you came down and they even found
a tablet from the second century at the bottom of a wharf in Marseilles with a wax tablet.
You know, that was their little notebooks in antiquity because you could use the wax with a smooth thing.
And it has the initials for the Praetorian Prefecture of the Gauls. This is the tax collector sitting at the end.
He dropped his damn tablet in the thing and he probably thought health from his boss for losing count of how many sacks of whatever it was due to.
The Romans had these records, but they don't survive.
I found it fascinating that Mike was discovering something new in texts that he'd been reading for years.
As a scholar myself, I often find this noticing new connexions and subtle nuances in philosophical texts that I've been studying for decades.
So I was curious to know if anything else had emerged in Mike's rereading these ancient sources during our current pandemic,
the effect on people's psyche in particular.
I had read it. I had translated it. But I didn't really understand it until March when my kids were in Manhattan trying to figure out how to get home.
The fear, they talk about fear. And you said, yeah, there I was afraid.
Of course, people are dying. I understand viscerally the men and women of late Roman Empire speak of their fear.
Before this unintelligible. Bolt from the blue.
Copious calls, it was just invisibly killing masses of people around them.
So I now have both greater empathy and a great a more accurate sense of the gravity of the words reflecting fear of those greggy of tours.
What? What does he say about this? He said. I was terrified. There was a rumour that it was coming.
He was terrified. They started doing processions.
And so that is, I think, important for helping us understand our forebears and how they wrestled with this terrible tragedy.
With so many fewer tools than we possess. The real tragedy is our own society where we possess the tools and certain political forces seem
to prefer suffering and death to deploying tools of science to defend our exposed populations.
Does this mean that we should read these sources with more empathy and understanding?
Now we have a tendency to think that just because we were smart enough to choose to be born now we are superior to people who lived in the past.
When I decide to be born, when I was born, I knew I was going to be, you know, living in a smarter time.
The task, the challenge and the duty of the historian is to understand the past.
With all the power of the tools of modern science and history and archaeology,
but also to understand the past as the people of the past saw it with the tools that they had to deal with something completely unexpected,
unparalleled in their experience. Remember that ancient science had a very dim view of contagion as a cause of illness.
So and for copious explicitly addresses this, because obviously scientifically, this disease is caused by imbalance in the liquids inside of you.
Triggered by your environment and the environment, you know, didn't change.
That spring in Constantinople. And yet they observed that people who carried the bodies to the mass graves did not die of plague.
So. Doesn't seem like contagion was it was a factor.
In other words, they're so bright, they're so bold, they're so shocked that they are even considering nonscientist,
what for them were non-scientific explanations of contagion. And they find evidence against it.
And our ancestors appreciated the importance of quarantine. Something that's very much on our minds today.
It's clear that one way or another, they figured out that something was going on through the transmission of merchants and merchandise.
We have a ladder. One of the very rare letters that survived from a bishop from Gaul from the 7th century.
He received a bishop, a letter from a bishop in southern France, says Desideria SPCO.
He received a letter letter from a bishop in southern France saying the plague has broken out,
setup guards at the entrance to your diocese to make sure that no merchants come, clearly showing that by Circo 650 at the latest,
they had understood that quarantines and the confinement were an effective weapon against bubonic plague,
with no idea of the existence of bacteria, with no idea that contagion might work scientifically.
They came through tragic experience to one effective solution.
Tragically,
this knowledge was lost until they the letters were published a few years back and the Venetians had to reinvent at the hardway themselves with
their quarantine to keep ships out from entering the harbour of Venice for 40 days until they were sure that there was no plague on of them.
With this in mind, I was curious to know what Mike would have liked to find out if only he could go back in time to this period.
I would have 10 pages of questions, but I would really like to go to policial.
The second part of Egypt famous for its exports of lentils, according to the written evidence,
this is where it broke out and spread from palooza into Alexandria and then to
the Holy Land and then through long shipping to Constantinople and everywhere.
Egypt, of course, is the great source for the bread and circled bread distributions in Constantinople in the imperial capital.
I would really like to see what was going on on the docks of plutonium in 541.
But while a lot of antibiotics with me. What was unusual? What had changed?
I would love to compare plutonium in 500 with 541 and see if there's any changes
in the fauna or in the urban structures in the organisation of the docks.
I have no idea what might have changed, but something changed and it may not have been a pelusi may have been elsewhere
in the in the infrastructure of communications or in the host populations.
But that would be where I would start. We hadn't talked much about the wide war going on at this time,
but thinking back to the siege during the plague of Athens in our first episode and also the Spanish flu that struck in the First World War,
I was interested to know what effect war had on the plague of Justinian.
That's a very interesting avenue to pursue. And but I would suggest that with the new paleoclimate science and the evidence for
the onset of this late Antec little ice age in 536 that we see beginning in 536,
broader stress on the population of the northern hemisphere, in all likelihood, certainly in the Mediterranean.
And then when you add to that the stress of war with its disruption of food supplies and physical violence being done,
even with the weaponry of the late Roman army and their adversaries, you certainly would be creating a population that's much more frail.
German zoologist also observed that war is a really good thing for rats and that the rat population of Germany multiplied at the end of World War Two,
thanks to the disruption of solid food, preserving structures and even Kadak cadavers, which of course to be true for all kinds of rodents.
So how did this outbreak spread to become a pandemic? The disease spread.
We have very, very slim written evidence from anywhere else in the western part of the empire at this time.
But it's clear from that that it hit Africa, the Roman province of Africa, that this is a modern day Tunisia, parts of Algeria, Spain, Italy and Gaul.
We now know from the ancient DNA that it also hit Britain in the first outbreak.
There are other sources, eyewitnesses that tell us different things about the plague or about different.
Epidemics of plague that broke out in subsequent decades.
But it is the first outbreak that is most richly described. How long did it last?
Do we know why it ended? We don't know what changed to make this tremendous outbreak so imposing and so lasting.
It came back. Different scholars count in different ways. But the range so far is between 18 and 30.
Some massive large scale epidemic outbreaks. Between five, four, one, five, four, two and about 750 in the Mediterranean.
Why did it stop? We don't know. We don't know.
Did the rats disappear? Were they all killed off by it and no other host mammal appeared that was suitable?
Did something change in the communication structures that meant that people were no
longer communicating and transmitting the pathogen as they had been over long distances?
Was it something in the genome of the bacterium itself?
And here I work at the Mossbank Harvard Research Centre, this wonderful paper that I've referred to by Marcel Keller, who's the lead author.
It is part of his dissertation work that Dana has detected in two French genomes from the late six and from
the 7th and 8th century deletion of two elements of the genome that have been associated with virulence.
And intriguingly, the same gene deletion shows up in ancient DNA of your senior pestis from the 16th
and 17th century plague in London and the 18th century plague in Marseilles.
Is it possible that the bacterium itself evolved into a less lethal form?
That would be not terribly surprising from the point of view of evolution, but we don't know yet.
These are initial indications.
These are not the main virulence factors that everyone is focussed on, and rightly so in terms of the lethality of your city of pestis.
So the question is open and only much more extensive and careful and robust and verified.
Genetic analysis, the identification of more tragic victims and the successful extraction and people nation replication,
analysis of the genomics of the DNA of the bacterium that led them low will clarify this.
I was keen to know what the consensus view was regarding the longer term impacts this huge period of plague had on the populations it affected.
So our ignorance is becoming our ignace remains great, but it is becoming increasingly circumscribed and the debate is underway.
There's a quite a range of opinions on it. Some people like my friend Kyle Harper and former student.
Let it be said at the University of Oklahoma views the plague and the environmental crises of the sixth century as being quite significant.
In the end of the ancient world, another extreme, my friend John Halden, emeritus of Princeton, views the impact as much more limited.
Both of environmental disease change in this period.
And then there's a huge spectrum in between.
Professor Meesha Meyer in Germany is has been classified as a quote unquote, maximalists and is not happy with that, clearly from his publications.
He has characterised his own opinion as seeing the first outbreak as very serious and
having very serious consequences both for the economy and especially for the culture,
but believes that subsequent outbreaks were less severe, had less impact.
I myself think from the evidence from the first outbreak and now from the ancient DNA is unambiguous.
Certainly the first epidemic of plague was extremely consequential and it's
possible to make a similar assessment of a few of the subsequent outbreaks.
But I think that we are at the beginning of discovery, not the end.
Given that this was such a huge calamity, lasting for such a long period and perhaps the first recorded plague in human experience.
Why isn't the plague of Justinian as notorious as later outbreaks like the Black Death?
First of all, because it's more remote in time and also in place, the memory of the black death is particularly strong in European countries,
which were not very developed at the time of the Indiana pandemic and for which there was virtually no written method outside of Greggory of tours.
So there is scant historical evidence in Europe, which has been the locus of memory for the black deaths because the black death hit beyond Europe.
But that's where people think of it. Obviously, it may have hit Africa and Central Asia and so forth are under investigation now.
So that's one element. The second is that in general, the including the Greek and Syriac records, the record keeping, the record preservation,
we know that there are a lot of lost, lost histories and so forth diminishes greatly in the late sixth century.
And certainly the seventh century is almost empty of historical.
There are only a few Greek historians and very minor Latin historians writing surviving from the 17th century.
So the written record was not strong. It's been a tremendous exploit, the achievement of historians and archaeologists,
nakao scientists to begin to reconstruct this really, truly forgotten pandemic.
I had a pretty serious graduate education and I came out of that not thinking that in the end of the ancient economy,
whether it was the fall, the Roman Empire or not, in the end of the ancient economy,
this disease had a big role to play, whereas everyone recognised it for the blacked out,
where you can go to city archives and you can actually look at mortalities in Florence, in Lukáš, around the entire of Europe.
You can see people's reacting to the death. And Giant found it, for example, in marriages and the concentration of wealth,
because plague is a very good thing if you survive, because there's a lot of wealth that didn't disappear that you can inherit.
So there's an increase in per capita wealth. We're able to see agrarian workers in Britain demanding now that they get meat
in addition to beer and porridge for for doing harvest for doing field work.
And they're able to do so because we can tap.
We can tell that this reflects the shrinking of supply of labour and therefore the increase in the value of labour.
So the black death is just much better documented.
I mean, Samuel Peeps, people know about him and they read him.
Far fewer people read copious, unfortunately. He's quite a fascinating writer.
So there's that element the director written out here for that intact for the entire period
of these six in seventh and eighth centuries is much thinner than for the late Middle Ages,
early modern period. You know, if the 18th century week, we know the ship that brought it into Marseilles,
we know the merchants who forded the quarantine's to make their quick buck and brought the ship with plague from the Ottoman Empire,
brought the goods into Marseilles and sent off the final outbreak.
So it's it's it's in part a general ignorance of this crucial period in which Europe and North
Africa and the world of Islam was born in our great Western universities and schools in general.
In part, it's the real unevenness of the end scarcity of surviving written records,
which only now is beginning to be supplemented by the amazing work of archaeologists.
And we're at the very beginning.
Three studies, three articles since 2013, the the Arkia agentic Arkia genetic rediscovery of this terrible disease and its impact.
As our conversation ended, I asked me what else he thought it was important for us all to appreciate about this
somewhat forgotten and really that we're just at the beginning of understanding
it and that the wonderful advances of classical philology in understanding the
language of the texts and in identifying texts that are relevant to this event,
the wonderful advances of archaeology and the wonderful advances of Arkia science are going
to allow us to reconstruct in a very tragic and perhaps in some places not so tragic details.
What whatever else it was, was clearly one of the major health events in the history of the ancient world.
And in the birth of the at the at the passage at the transition point between the ancient world and the Middle Ages.
Before you go, we wanted to play you a bonus conversation, which we couldn't quite fit into Episode one.
It's a fascinating discussion I had with Dr. Abigail Bugles from Boxwoods,
faculty of classics about the authors who wrote in the period between the plague and this plague of Justinian and the way they describe the disease.
That seems to have been this idea that one can always be threatened by plague.
And we know this because poets such as Lucretius and Virgil were actually interested in writing about plague and how it would affect society broadly,
but also individuals and their behaviour.
So there was a real preoccupation with what disease would do to people not only physically with the symptoms,
and they would give detailed descriptions, but also in terms of their moral behaviour and even their religious behaviour as well.
There was a real preoccupation which does suggest that this is something that the readers of Lucretius would have been very familiar with,
this idea of this threat of disease. The main source we're going to be talking about during this period is Lucretius.
What do we know about him? Actually, we know very, very little about Lucretius.
He's actually quite a shadowy figure. We know that he died in the mid to late 50s B.C.
There is debate about exactly when his lifetime was.
He wrote this remarkable poem called The Director Matara,
which is also known as On the nature of the universe, sometimes known as on the nature of things.
And it's really a poem that focuses on atoms and how everything in the world is made of atoms unvoiced.
And Lucretius firmly believed that understanding this was the key, in essence, to happiness.
And the key to peace, peace of mind. His poem is based heavily on the philosophy, the philosophical writings of a Greek philosopher called Epicurus.
And so Lucretius. His poem is is an extremely radical poem, which he wrote during the first century B.C.
It's a poem in Latin. And his poem, which is an epic poem, is very, very long.
It's divided into six books or chapters. And he describes the universe without involving God.
So he says that gods have nothing to do with it and everything in the world ever is made up of atoms.
And avoid the way that plague comes into this is that the poem has a really strange ending.
And the poem ends very abruptly with a description of the plague in Athens, sihe.
So Lucretius was writing, in a sense, with these cities on his desk, and he was describing the plague, Athens.
So he was looking at the plague from hundreds of years earlier. And he has this extremely emotional account of the plague, Athens,
and what this did to people in a philosophical sense as well as in a physical sense.
So he describes the causes of disease. These oddities did not venture on the cause of this disease, whereas Lucretius tries to explain the cause.
He thinks that understanding things will mean that you're not afraid.
And this actually causes or allows for rather peace of mind.
And so Lucretius describes the plague. He describes the physical symptoms.
And then he gets into kind of the nitty gritty of what this does to people in a moral sense and how it affects not only individuals,
but also the community. And Lucretius is played deeply entwined with the coverage from which we met in the previous episode.
There is a lot of communication and dialogue between Lucretius and three cities.
In a sense, Lucretius is very much building on and slightly retelling these cities account of the plague.
And I would agree with that, that there are these sort of moral lessons that are drawn from the text, from the plague story.
Interestingly, there has been a sort of dichotomy traditionally between in the CDC's account,
between the kind of the scientific description of the plague and the idea that it is a moral account.
And scholars have tended to sort of veer from one to the other.
But actually, more recently,
people are much more at ease with the idea that it wasn't Lucretius who sort of inserted the philosophy in the morality into the plague story,
but rather that it was actually already there in some sense, at least, even if not quite as domineering.
It's though already in these cities, both talk about burial practise.
Both writers talk about burial.
You know, it's supposed to be one of the sort of more tragic elements of the plague that the dead were just sort of left there.
And there are piles of people that and this is you can see this in paintings like this Brueghel,
the elders painting of the triumph of death, I think is the title of the painting.
And there's just heaps of people about. So this really seems to be an affecting idea.
Yeah, the idea of neglecting the visitation of the sick is essentially condemned in Lucretius.
And he sort of says, you know, you die if you visit the sick, but you're also haunted if you don't visit the sick.
And this is interesting in the current time, of course, because there is a sort of fear of of people in general.
Right. We were getting used to socially distancing. I do want to make this sort of a covert podcast.
But we are we're sort of learning to keep our distance from people.
And people will ask you to keep your distance if you're not. And there is a sort of fear that builds up around each other.
And I think it's really clear that there seems to have been a real understanding of this feeling.
If you read these plague stories from antiquity, you can see that this was something that they were living with and trying to deal with.
I don't especially know what the answer is.
I don't know that Lucretius, his lessons are necessarily straightforward other than he wants you to be able to keep your peace of mind.
Something that I do find quite fascinating when looking at these ancient plague narratives is the idea that
they aren't focussed in a way on advice as to how to reduce infection and minimise the chance of contagion.
Whereas a lot of articles we can read on Medium, for example, will advisee.
How do you protect yourself? And there's a lot I mean, there's all the time practical advice, right.
About, you know, we should all be wearing masks and protecting each other.
And this idea of that responsibility, the collective responsibility to protect each other,
is prominent in a lot of publications currently, as it should be.
Whereas ancient narratives are really focussed on on how to deal with the moral and psychological effects.
Of plague and of disease. And this is something that is also being written about right now.
But I think that there could be more emphasis on how we deal with it actually mentally,
because it's causing great mental strain on pretty much everybody who has to learn to live with disease in and around us.
Right. As a philosopher, I was particularly intrigued by the idea that Lucretius might, in fact,
be using this plague outbreak to make a wider model of his perception of the world in decline.
It's a really interesting idea, actually,
and one that I could definitely think more about the idea of whether this is all a kind of hint that things are sort of declining.
I think in a sense, this is true in the poem obviously ends with death.
I like to look at it as it is and consider what if this is the right ending?
And let's just go from that.
But there's this really brilliant piece of work that was done in the 90s by a professor at Manchester University called I was under Qasar,
and he writes this article called the Palin Genesis of during the tour,
which means the rebirth of the director Matura or on the nature of the universe, the rebirth of Lucretius, his poem.
So he claims that if you look sort of if you zoom out and look at the poem as a whole, it's all about it.
The poem kind of dies innocence at the end and then it's reborn at the start of the poem because the start of the poem is called the Him to Venus.
And there's a lot of imagery of new life unberth on generation.
I think there's definitely something to the idea of decline.
At the end of the poem. But I don't think it necessarily needs to be a bleak or depressing idea, if that makes sense.
It's it's dark for sure. You can't get away from that plague or pandemic or disease is difficult to live with.
But I think Lucretius wants to teach us how to live well.
And even if necessary, how to die well, actually. And you can see that as depressing.
You can also see it as helping us to better control our lives and where we're going.
I was also interested in whether Lucretius was talking about the health of politics or the city itself when he was talking about.
Certainly my reading of Lucretius, his description of the Athenian plague and, you know,
his examination of what plague can do to people and how we should deal with it is more about.
It's certainly about the city. So in a way that, you know, the city or the Greek word is the polis.
So in a way, it's political. In a sense, it's about public life.
It's it involves burial and things like this. But I think in a sense, it's far less political than, you know,
the coronavirus is now because we're talking all the time about how our politicians are reacting or acting.
And, you know, are we satisfied with what they're doing?
Could they be doing more? Could they be doing better? Are they doing too much?
Some people would say that, you know, there there's this debate raging all the time actually, right now, which I found quite fascinating,
which is, you know, there's this sort of struggle between the people who claim that there's actually infringement of civil rights.
You know, how far is locked down, infringing civil rights? I personally don't really have much time for that.
But it's an interesting thing to see this debate kind of raging and it's brought up interesting questions about the moral
behaviour that one should be taking and how far this will affect members of the public who maybe who don't even know.
So there's this idea of the public effect of disease and the effect of private behaviour on the public more broadly.
But it's not so explicitly discussed, at least in my reading of Lucretius.
As I say, it's certainly about the city and how the disease rages through Athens,
but it's not so explicitly about the political body and what plague ever invoked by authors,
the something which is brought about by ship or is the result of a curse.
It's really interesting because in the beginning of the play, Oedipus tyrannis or Oedipus Rex is sometimes known by Sophocles.
The play actually starts with this idea of the miasma or the curse.
It's a moral curse on the town. And there's a plague on the town.
So the two are quite interlinked. The idea of curse or sin and disease, they this actually goes back a really long way.
And of course, there's the idea in the Book of Exodus in the Bible,
the 10 plagues of Egypt are a kind of, in a sense, a punishment for arrogance on the part of humanity.
What is fascinating is that plague in antiquity and before can be both a response to sin,
but it can also be an indication of sin and it can also cause sin.
So it's extremely intertwined with the idea of sin or moral curses, I suppose.
But Lucretius would be really explicitly against such an idea that, you know, it's some sort of punishment from God for wrongdoing.
He is giving the rational scientific reasons for plague or he is giving potential reasons.
At least he doesn't claim to know all the answers. He gives many different suggestions and then leaves it to the reader.
Mike mentioned rediscovering something fresh in case that he'd read for years because of his experience.
Koby. Something that resonated strongly with me.
I asked APJ whether she was looking at any of these orphans in a new year.
Yeah, something that's been really striking to me and kind of rereading decreases plague and looking at other versions of disease from antiquity,
but also into modernity. So, for example, if you look at Cumins in the past,
something that's really striking is the anxiety is quite prominent as an effect and a really important effect of disease.
Another thing apart from anxiety and perhaps it's intertwined, is loneliness and isolation.
This comes up as well. So Lucretius talks about the isolation of the ill.
And this is also being discussed now is Cauvin 19? You know, we've been thinking about the older people who are alone.
Perhaps they don't have a family anymore and or they don't have a partner anymore.
And they are alone in the houses and all those people in care homes who can't be visited by their families.
Families can't comfort each other by putting their arm around each other at a funeral.
This idea of isolation is is really important. But Lucretius talks about.
Yeah, how people were basically afraid to visit each other and they were afraid to visit their loved ones.
And what's super interesting is that Lucretius and before him, he said cities.
In fact, they described the physical symptoms of the disease in great detail and they're extremely grim.
And Lucretius ends with his list of symptoms with the cure, which would be, you know, cutting off their own limbs.
People would cut off and limbs to try and cure themselves of this horrible disease.
And they were flinging themselves in rivers and all sorts of things. But he says the worst thing of all.
And he said he says this, too. The worst thing of all was the fact that the victim of the disease would just give up all hope and lie that despondent.
And this was the worst thing of all. So all these horrible symptoms are listed.
And then the worst thing of all is despair.
So I really think we could care more about this despair and fear and anxiety and maybe take care of our minds as well as our bodies.
You've been following the story of the plague of Justinian. Second episode in our 10 part series on the history of.
Next time we're heading to what's arguably the most famous and most deadly outbreak of play in human history, a black death.
Hope you can join me then. I'm Peter Milliken, and you've been listening to Future.
Feature makers was produced in-house at the University of Oxford.
The show was presented by Peter Milliken. A voice actor at the beginning of the show was Liz McCarthy.
The soundtrack was created by Richard Watts and the show was produced by Ben Harward and me, Steve Pritchard.
Thanks again for listening. To Future Makers.