1 00:00:10,580 --> 00:00:18,470 They'd heard it had come from Egypt running down the mountains and along the plains, sparing no one along the way. 2 00:00:18,470 --> 00:00:23,210 As soon as they could, Carsia and her family locked themselves in their insulin. 3 00:00:23,210 --> 00:00:29,890 And they'd hardly ventured out since. As she peered through the slats, she could see that there was hardly anyone on the streets. 4 00:00:29,890 --> 00:00:35,030 Now, neither the tradesmen and their stalls or the soldiers in their uniforms. 5 00:00:35,030 --> 00:00:43,640 Everyone was staying at home. It was quiet at first, only the trundling cartwheels carrying the dead along the flagstone. 6 00:00:43,640 --> 00:00:49,880 But these days there was a different down filled the air. Their apartment block was full of panic. 7 00:00:49,880 --> 00:00:55,520 Full of cries for physicians. Full of the shouts of fever, dream and demons. 8 00:00:55,520 --> 00:01:03,040 And full of the endless. An absolute beating of. Friends, neighbours pleading for help. 9 00:01:03,040 --> 00:01:11,630 But Carsia couldn't do it. Welcome to the eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century. 10 00:01:11,630 --> 00:01:17,370 Into the second episode of our history of pandemics sees this time. 11 00:01:17,370 --> 00:01:22,230 We need to play. But historians and medical experts alike agree. 12 00:01:22,230 --> 00:01:27,630 Was humanity's first recorded pandemic caused by this deadly disease. 13 00:01:27,630 --> 00:01:35,210 You might not have heard much about Emperor Justinian first or why he has a plague outbreak named after him. 14 00:01:35,210 --> 00:01:41,970 But by the end of this episode, you'll hear just how devastating and long lasting this pandemic was. 15 00:01:41,970 --> 00:01:45,510 So I'd like to introduce you to Mike McCormick, 16 00:01:45,510 --> 00:01:54,420 professor of mediaeval history and chair of the Science of Human Postin at Harvard University, who can set the scene for us. 17 00:01:54,420 --> 00:02:02,670 We are in the year of the Christian era. Five, four, two actually late five for one for the first outbreak, apparently in Egypt. 18 00:02:02,670 --> 00:02:07,620 But we get detailed information about what's going on in the spring of five four two. 19 00:02:07,620 --> 00:02:15,840 From an eyewitness at the centre of the world, as far as the Mediterranean was concerned, Constantinople, new Rome capital, the Roman Empire, 20 00:02:15,840 --> 00:02:21,420 the empire was Justinian one of the greatest emperors of all time in terms of his architectural achievements, 21 00:02:21,420 --> 00:02:25,350 in terms of his legislating legislation and his codification. 22 00:02:25,350 --> 00:02:27,860 Roman law, just an organic code, of course, 23 00:02:27,860 --> 00:02:34,980 is responsible for almost everything we know about classical and post classical Roman law and a number of tremendous conquests. 24 00:02:34,980 --> 00:02:40,650 He set out to reconquer the lost provinces of the West and recovered the two richest. 25 00:02:40,650 --> 00:02:44,820 Italy and Africa, Africa and Italy in that biological order. 26 00:02:44,820 --> 00:02:52,530 And in 542, he had overcome a violent uprising in the capital, which had burned most of downtown. 27 00:02:52,530 --> 00:02:58,650 He was in the process. He had been rebuilding fast and intensively, including the building of the idea. 28 00:02:58,650 --> 00:03:02,310 Sophia, the largest building in the ancient world, 16 stories tall. 29 00:03:02,310 --> 00:03:11,850 One of the greatest architectural innovations and creations of the ancient world with a gigantic dome and was rebuilding across the Roman Empire. 30 00:03:11,850 --> 00:03:16,350 Africa had been conquered triumphs. Ceremonies had been celebrated. Italy was. 31 00:03:16,350 --> 00:03:24,210 The war was grinding on. It had gotten off to a great start, but it slowed down with the severe climate downturn, 32 00:03:24,210 --> 00:03:29,490 which is then termed the late antique little ice age that began in the spring of 536. 33 00:03:29,490 --> 00:03:36,810 Suddenly, across western Eurasia, average summer temperatures dropped severely between one point five, 34 00:03:36,810 --> 00:03:42,600 then three degrees centigrade, which is a lot on average for summer temperature. 35 00:03:42,600 --> 00:03:49,380 And the costs for this was recently identified in 2015 as a massive volcanic explosion are 36 00:03:49,380 --> 00:03:54,720 actually three volcanic explosions that occurred in rapid succession from 536 forward. 37 00:03:54,720 --> 00:04:01,650 So the Roman Empire in the post Roman space was wrestling with severe climate change, 38 00:04:01,650 --> 00:04:07,710 severe and swift climate change that was affecting crop productions and where different things were produced, 39 00:04:07,710 --> 00:04:12,990 but was displaying considerable resilience when this terrible event broke out. 40 00:04:12,990 --> 00:04:17,490 Mike feels that Justinian himself got a bit of a raw deal for Justinian. 41 00:04:17,490 --> 00:04:23,540 He fought against incredible odds. Imagine you had a new little ice age dropped on your head and you would just wear 42 00:04:23,540 --> 00:04:28,440 reconquering the lost provinces and you just overcome this gigantic revolt. 43 00:04:28,440 --> 00:04:33,000 You were building the greatest structure of the Roman Empire put up and repairing the largest 44 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:38,490 aqueduct and expanding the largest aqueduct the Roman Empire ever built to feed the water. 45 00:04:38,490 --> 00:04:45,850 Poor side of Constantinople just published a codification of Roman law and of all the great Klotho digest, 46 00:04:45,850 --> 00:04:51,750 of all the great classical jurisprudence jurisprudential writers of the third century. 47 00:04:51,750 --> 00:04:58,410 And boom, you get this damn thing dropped on your head, first of all, and then you get it named after you. 48 00:04:58,410 --> 00:05:06,090 Of course, that wasn't remembered as such. He wasn't. It was simply called the death, the dying mortality, the great mortality. 49 00:05:06,090 --> 00:05:11,940 That's a modern name. And Justinian was taking claim for everything happening in his period. 50 00:05:11,940 --> 00:05:20,580 So in a way, it's just deserts that modern scholars have named it after the emperor in whose reign it broke out 51 00:05:20,580 --> 00:05:27,450 and in whose capital we have the most vivid and horrifying descriptions of the first outbreak. 52 00:05:27,450 --> 00:05:35,880 Yet we're not just talking about an isolated outbreak more a longer period of disease emerging and then dying down again. 53 00:05:35,880 --> 00:05:37,080 That is the consensus. 54 00:05:37,080 --> 00:05:48,660 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, 55 00:05:48,660 --> 00:05:55,230 five, four, two to about 750. There's some discrepancy on the dating of the last outbreak. 56 00:05:55,230 --> 00:05:58,770 Was it 764? I've written a lot on it, but I forget the details. We have to. 57 00:05:58,770 --> 00:06:05,230 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. 58 00:06:05,230 --> 00:06:11,990 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. 59 00:06:11,990 --> 00:06:17,950 And as far as we're aware, this is the first time humans encountered what we now call the plague. 60 00:06:17,950 --> 00:06:23,080 Let's even be more clear. The first historically recorded plague pandemic. 61 00:06:23,080 --> 00:06:32,920 It's entirely possible that plague pandemics may have occurred in unrecorded times and places before this molecular biology. 62 00:06:32,920 --> 00:06:38,560 Akio genetics has the power to reveal that. So we have to stay tuned and remain open. 63 00:06:38,560 --> 00:06:44,740 Now that we know that this organism existed for hundreds, even thousands of years before Justinian, 64 00:06:44,740 --> 00:06:50,860 we have to allow for the possibility that future discoveries may be every bit as stunning as the recent ones. 65 00:06:50,860 --> 00:06:52,930 So how do our sources describe it? 66 00:06:52,930 --> 00:07:00,970 The sources identified as inguinal plague or in, we know, plague an epidemic that causes swelling in the inguinal area, 67 00:07:00,970 --> 00:07:07,840 in the thighs in the form of buboes, sometimes also cervical in the neck and other places. 68 00:07:07,840 --> 00:07:11,980 Identification of the pathogen was controverted for many years. 69 00:07:11,980 --> 00:07:20,110 The descriptions of symptoms in the historical eyewitness reports did seem to point pretty clearly to bubonic plague. 70 00:07:20,110 --> 00:07:31,160 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, 71 00:07:31,160 --> 00:07:35,680 is clear that he identified the previous bubonic plague. 72 00:07:35,680 --> 00:07:42,640 The Black Death of the Middle Ages, what people call the second pandemic of plague and the probably the first pandemic as well. 73 00:07:42,640 --> 00:07:45,040 He he thought they were clearly bubonic plague. 74 00:07:45,040 --> 00:07:53,210 But debate race because the one could make different arguments from the sources and the Greek and the Latin is challenging. 75 00:07:53,210 --> 00:07:57,570 The languages aren't in a state of evolution at this time. 76 00:07:57,570 --> 00:08:02,140 And that requires grateful, logical insight to be able to understand them correctly. 77 00:08:02,140 --> 00:08:05,890 And we're better off now with the kind of computerised digital tools we have. 78 00:08:05,890 --> 00:08:14,860 And so, although the debate continued legitimately so, most scholars were inclined to think from the symptoms that it was bubonic plague. 79 00:08:14,860 --> 00:08:18,400 What do we know about those sources? How much can we trust them? 80 00:08:18,400 --> 00:08:26,850 It's important to understand that the evidence that the written historical evidence is rich, but it's quite uneven. 81 00:08:26,850 --> 00:08:32,530 It's particularly rich for the first outbreak, which starts in 542 and goes for two or three years. 82 00:08:32,530 --> 00:08:36,970 After that, the sources become more jejune for everything, including for plague. 83 00:08:36,970 --> 00:08:39,790 And that continues. Nevertheless, 84 00:08:39,790 --> 00:08:48,070 historians and archaeologists working from the written evidence have identified from those written sources between depending on how you count, 85 00:08:48,070 --> 00:08:51,820 between 18 and 32, I believe. 86 00:08:51,820 --> 00:08:58,060 Epidemic outbreaks of plague around the Mediterranean world and its hinterland 87 00:08:58,060 --> 00:09:03,310 between 541 542 and the last great outbreak in the middle of the 8th century. 88 00:09:03,310 --> 00:09:10,030 The first and the last are amongst the most. Those that are documented in written sources in greatest detail. 89 00:09:10,030 --> 00:09:13,180 Most of the places where we have plague. 90 00:09:13,180 --> 00:09:21,400 Now, most of those places are not documented as having been been affected by plague in the Justinian pandemic. 91 00:09:21,400 --> 00:09:25,600 At most, the region is indicated to my own sense. 92 00:09:25,600 --> 00:09:33,070 The discovery of ancient DNA of plague in Anglo-Saxon Britain was truly surprising. 93 00:09:33,070 --> 00:09:41,260 Others had made the case, but I thought that the written sources remained arguably ambiguous about it. 94 00:09:41,260 --> 00:09:50,470 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. 95 00:09:50,470 --> 00:09:57,730 And what's really striking about that tells us something about how this world of Justinian was so tightly connected. 96 00:09:57,730 --> 00:10:03,910 Is that genetically the form of your senior pestis identified in those victims in that 97 00:10:03,910 --> 00:10:10,270 Anglo-Saxon cemetery looks to be closest to the base to the beginning of the pandemic, 98 00:10:10,270 --> 00:10:20,650 which suggests very swift communications from the Egyptian delta to Anglo-Saxon England in the five forties. 99 00:10:20,650 --> 00:10:27,550 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. 100 00:10:27,550 --> 00:10:33,520 We are at the very beginning of our knowledge and understanding of this phenomenon. 101 00:10:33,520 --> 00:10:41,350 I myself, quite honestly, as a young assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, didn't think much of plague. 102 00:10:41,350 --> 00:10:44,740 How could a tiny microbe bring down the mighty empire? 103 00:10:44,740 --> 00:10:49,030 I had a graduate student who said, No, Mike, the plague was really important and you should study it. 104 00:10:49,030 --> 00:10:52,600 So I looked into a little bit somehow maybe, but you couldn't tell much. 105 00:10:52,600 --> 00:10:58,840 Everybody was arguing about what it was and whether absence of evidence is evidence of absence and so forth. 106 00:10:58,840 --> 00:11:05,030 And I didn't pay much attention to it for the next 20 years, 15 years, until I began studying ship. 107 00:11:05,030 --> 00:11:09,210 Communications. And that's how I personally got interested in the story. 108 00:11:09,210 --> 00:11:13,690 Just the pandemic, because it is a disease of rats. 109 00:11:13,690 --> 00:11:15,190 It is not a disease of humans. 110 00:11:15,190 --> 00:11:25,120 It's classic form of transmission is the transport, the passive transport of infected rats and their fleas from one place to another. 111 00:11:25,120 --> 00:11:30,250 And so I was working on shipping and communications in the late Roman world, in early mediaeval world. 112 00:11:30,250 --> 00:11:35,980 And it quickly became clear that outbreaks of plague were signals of the arrival of a ship from somewhere. 113 00:11:35,980 --> 00:11:40,960 And indeed, this is explicitly documented in a few cases from the Justinian pandemic. 114 00:11:40,960 --> 00:11:46,200 So I began studying it as a proxy for seafaring communications. 115 00:11:46,200 --> 00:11:56,650 And only later began to realise the potential importance of it for the economy overall as a causative factor for change in the economy, 116 00:11:56,650 --> 00:11:59,980 in the demography and indeed in the culture itself. 117 00:11:59,980 --> 00:12:04,900 And Mike Fields, there's a lot more we could learn from studying how the plague spread in this period. 118 00:12:04,900 --> 00:12:16,270 The host population, every senior pastors in the Roman Empire, Rochus Rochus is another avenue that needs tremendous research devoted to it. 119 00:12:16,270 --> 00:12:21,790 It is now established that the black rot was well-established in the Roman Empire. 120 00:12:21,790 --> 00:12:27,380 They do not travel long distances, according to this law, just under their own power, under normal circumstances. 121 00:12:27,380 --> 00:12:33,160 So they are possibly transported. So the presence of black rats allow you to follow the spread of the Roman transport 122 00:12:33,160 --> 00:12:37,470 infrastructure they piggybacked on this amazing communications infrastructure. 123 00:12:37,470 --> 00:12:40,900 The Roman Empire constructed in terms of ships, 124 00:12:40,900 --> 00:12:49,660 riverboats and carts to move around the empire and the study of the archaeology of the rat is in its infancy. 125 00:12:49,660 --> 00:12:56,290 But it is a very high performing technique that is becoming more common in Mediterranean 126 00:12:56,290 --> 00:13:01,900 archaeology now and will doubtless allow us to trace the spread of the black rod. 127 00:13:01,900 --> 00:13:06,190 We may be able to get evidence of your city of pestis from the rats themselves, 128 00:13:06,190 --> 00:13:14,860 or at least from the genetics of the evolution of the rat over time and space, which may shed unexpected independent light. 129 00:13:14,860 --> 00:13:20,680 I was keen to know more about the situation in just capital, just as the plague hit. 130 00:13:20,680 --> 00:13:26,350 It's clear that what happened in 542 543 in the capital was horrific. 131 00:13:26,350 --> 00:13:34,300 We have two eyewitnesses, copious who is the legal counsel to the most successful general in Just Finian's Army? 132 00:13:34,300 --> 00:13:40,090 The great general Bellus areas who had led the reconquest of Africa and Italy and supported the Persian 133 00:13:40,090 --> 00:13:46,780 invasion and would play a very important military role at various times in just Indians' reign. 134 00:13:46,780 --> 00:13:53,800 And the second eyewitness is also someone who liked the copious was very close to the Imperial Court. 135 00:13:53,800 --> 00:14:04,010 John of Emphasis, who was a monk from Mesopotamia who adhered to a variant Christology from the Emperor. 136 00:14:04,010 --> 00:14:10,010 The Empress Theodora adhered to the Christology of John of emphasis. 137 00:14:10,010 --> 00:14:14,080 And John was close to the Empress. So both copious. 138 00:14:14,080 --> 00:14:19,720 And John Lefsetz saw this with their own eyes, and they were very close to the Imperial Court. 139 00:14:19,720 --> 00:14:28,420 Indeed had been president the Imperial Court multiple on multiple occasions and what they described as quite, quite terrible starting in the spring, 140 00:14:28,420 --> 00:14:39,310 a new disease or disease that for them was new and it caused a total cessation of activities in Constantinople. 141 00:14:39,310 --> 00:14:49,090 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. 142 00:14:49,090 --> 00:14:52,660 The markets were still there was no one in the uniform. 143 00:14:52,660 --> 00:14:53,860 The civil service. 144 00:14:53,860 --> 00:15:02,530 In the late Roman Empire wore uniforms, as in Czarist Russia, the government itself had come to a halt and the mortalities were huge. 145 00:15:02,530 --> 00:15:08,600 Body disposal was a great challenge, according to John of emphasis. 146 00:15:08,600 --> 00:15:15,670 You can believe him or not, but he claims that Justinian wanted to find out exactly how bad the mortality was 147 00:15:15,670 --> 00:15:21,280 and said accountants at the gates of the city to count the bodies being counted, 148 00:15:21,280 --> 00:15:27,460 being carried out and gave up in despair when they hit two hundred and thirty thousand. 149 00:15:27,460 --> 00:15:32,890 In any case, it's clear that mortalities were very, very high. 150 00:15:32,890 --> 00:15:44,410 The emperor became involved in body removal, assigning troops and special forces from the palace to do this and hiring people to do it. 151 00:15:44,410 --> 00:15:56,170 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, 152 00:15:56,170 --> 00:16:05,150 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. 153 00:16:05,150 --> 00:16:13,790 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, 154 00:16:13,790 --> 00:16:20,180 where he was a member of the cathedral clergy, it killed the bishop and a relative of the bishop, amongst other people. 155 00:16:20,180 --> 00:16:27,290 Gregory himself is really a very rich witness, but a kind of an uneven witness. 156 00:16:27,290 --> 00:16:34,790 Again, he mentions that about 20 times in his histories and in his various geographical work. 157 00:16:34,790 --> 00:16:41,210 Interestingly, saints are curing everything. And Gregory George, there are hundreds, if not thousands of miraculous cures. 158 00:16:41,210 --> 00:16:45,980 And Gregory, of course, there's only one cure of bubonic plague. 159 00:16:45,980 --> 00:16:50,900 Everybody else doesn't make it in Gregory's account. 160 00:16:50,900 --> 00:16:56,150 He also describes other epidemics of other of what seemed to be other pathogens. 161 00:16:56,150 --> 00:17:05,150 He refers to six epidemics that he's aware of between 543 and about in the early five nineties. 162 00:17:05,150 --> 00:17:12,980 And he treats for in greater detail, and particularly the first outbreak when he was four, five or six years old. 163 00:17:12,980 --> 00:17:22,910 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, 164 00:17:22,910 --> 00:17:30,280 experienced it firsthand and provides a striking, brief but striking eyewitness account of that outbreak. 165 00:17:30,280 --> 00:17:35,840 Our other source is John of Ephesus. What does he tell us about the experience of this disease? 166 00:17:35,840 --> 00:17:42,350 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. 167 00:17:42,350 --> 00:17:47,510 But then he recycled the sermons in his church history and then the church history was lost. 168 00:17:47,510 --> 00:17:51,200 And it's only preserved in quotations from other writers, from leader writers. 169 00:17:51,200 --> 00:17:55,280 But Mike and I did discuss a very interesting quote from John of emphasis, 170 00:17:55,280 --> 00:18:01,550 which references an emerging divide between the experience of the rich and the poor. 171 00:18:01,550 --> 00:18:05,330 Initially, the plague killed vigorously the poor people who were dumped in the streets. 172 00:18:05,330 --> 00:18:09,590 Pestilence reached the capital. This is my summary of it. Pestilence, streets, the capital and kill the poor first. 173 00:18:09,590 --> 00:18:14,540 So they would be buried with dignity, understood by the rich who themselves would not be buried. 174 00:18:14,540 --> 00:18:19,640 So that's it, John. Emphasis, that's in his fourth account in the fragments that survived. 175 00:18:19,640 --> 00:18:27,010 Moving on to the burials that John mentions. What do we know about what happened during this first outbreak? 176 00:18:27,010 --> 00:18:33,820 First of all, the evidence of anomalous burials, not just mass graves in which you have five or more people, 177 00:18:33,820 --> 00:18:39,280 but exceptional frequencies of multiple burials, 178 00:18:39,280 --> 00:18:47,380 burying two people simultaneously together with no sign of violence or three people together, and burials in anomalous circumstances. 179 00:18:47,380 --> 00:18:54,500 People who show no sign of having died violently buried being buried in construction trenches. 180 00:18:54,500 --> 00:18:59,840 Or in wells or unusual body disposal. 181 00:18:59,840 --> 00:19:07,820 In the ancient world, bodies were treated with great respect and people were expected to to care for them 182 00:19:07,820 --> 00:19:14,240 and to do venerate and to continue to commemorate the memory of their ancestors. 183 00:19:14,240 --> 00:19:20,480 Through visiting the tomb and annual ceremonies and prayers and masses and what have you. 184 00:19:20,480 --> 00:19:28,790 So that any disruption of burial ritual in this society, which really attaches a lot of importance to it, is striking. 185 00:19:28,790 --> 00:19:37,310 It's also quite clear that at the beginning of the outbreaks, exactly as we have experienced tragically ourselves, 186 00:19:37,310 --> 00:19:43,730 the death rate was was relatively modest and the normal rituals were performed for copious. 187 00:19:43,730 --> 00:19:46,250 And I believe, John, of officers say this explicitly. 188 00:19:46,250 --> 00:19:56,630 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. 189 00:19:56,630 --> 00:20:02,810 Unfortunately, it's another one of the tragic insights that I've had since March as we've lived through this together. 190 00:20:02,810 --> 00:20:10,670 I did not really get that section of the copious, which he says, you know, sometimes in 2000, sometimes 2000, even 10000 a day. 191 00:20:10,670 --> 00:20:13,520 I just didn't get it. What what what does this mean? 192 00:20:13,520 --> 00:20:20,990 We're sitting here every day counting how many died in Boston, in Massachusetts and the United States in the world. 193 00:20:20,990 --> 00:20:25,490 And we're saying, oh, my God, we're you know, right now we're down to like 17 or 16. 194 00:20:25,490 --> 00:20:27,740 We're real happy in the state of Massachusetts. 195 00:20:27,740 --> 00:20:35,210 And I understood tragically why everyone who lived through that in Constantinople remembered the day counts. 196 00:20:35,210 --> 00:20:46,010 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, 197 00:20:46,010 --> 00:20:53,210 and he was he was certainly read by the the the elite of the Roman Empire and beyond. 198 00:20:53,210 --> 00:20:58,970 Everybody who had lived through that had a shiver. Remembering the day counts. 199 00:20:58,970 --> 00:21:07,880 The council daily dead and John emphasis as that show Justinian wanted to know and had accountants, local thieves, 200 00:21:07,880 --> 00:21:16,140 professional accountants working for the Imperial Fisk and the imperial government that are out there doing the the accounting and the Romans counted. 201 00:21:16,140 --> 00:21:20,300 Believe me, they counted. They had very detailed records. They don't survive. You paid your taxes. 202 00:21:20,300 --> 00:21:26,510 You pay customs dues. They had guy sitting at the bottom of the gangplank when you came down and they even found 203 00:21:26,510 --> 00:21:31,760 a tablet from the second century at the bottom of a wharf in Marseilles with a wax tablet. 204 00:21:31,760 --> 00:21:36,970 You know, that was their little notebooks in antiquity because you could use the wax with a smooth thing. 205 00:21:36,970 --> 00:21:41,930 And it has the initials for the Praetorian Prefecture of the Gauls. This is the tax collector sitting at the end. 206 00:21:41,930 --> 00:21:48,470 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. 207 00:21:48,470 --> 00:21:50,900 The Romans had these records, but they don't survive. 208 00:21:50,900 --> 00:21:57,780 I found it fascinating that Mike was discovering something new in texts that he'd been reading for years. 209 00:21:57,780 --> 00:22:07,860 As a scholar myself, I often find this noticing new connexions and subtle nuances in philosophical texts that I've been studying for decades. 210 00:22:07,860 --> 00:22:16,590 So I was curious to know if anything else had emerged in Mike's rereading these ancient sources during our current pandemic, 211 00:22:16,590 --> 00:22:21,420 the effect on people's psyche in particular. 212 00:22:21,420 --> 00:22:29,520 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. 213 00:22:29,520 --> 00:22:34,350 The fear, they talk about fear. And you said, yeah, there I was afraid. 214 00:22:34,350 --> 00:22:42,450 Of course, people are dying. I understand viscerally the men and women of late Roman Empire speak of their fear. 215 00:22:42,450 --> 00:22:47,420 Before this unintelligible. Bolt from the blue. 216 00:22:47,420 --> 00:22:54,590 Copious calls, it was just invisibly killing masses of people around them. 217 00:22:54,590 --> 00:23:07,450 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. 218 00:23:07,450 --> 00:23:11,820 What? What does he say about this? He said. I was terrified. There was a rumour that it was coming. 219 00:23:11,820 --> 00:23:14,750 He was terrified. They started doing processions. 220 00:23:14,750 --> 00:23:24,050 And so that is, I think, important for helping us understand our forebears and how they wrestled with this terrible tragedy. 221 00:23:24,050 --> 00:23:36,560 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 222 00:23:36,560 --> 00:23:44,540 to prefer suffering and death to deploying tools of science to defend our exposed populations. 223 00:23:44,540 --> 00:23:48,690 Does this mean that we should read these sources with more empathy and understanding? 224 00:23:48,690 --> 00:23:58,520 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. 225 00:23:58,520 --> 00:24:04,340 When I decide to be born, when I was born, I knew I was going to be, you know, living in a smarter time. 226 00:24:04,340 --> 00:24:09,470 The task, the challenge and the duty of the historian is to understand the past. 227 00:24:09,470 --> 00:24:13,880 With all the power of the tools of modern science and history and archaeology, 228 00:24:13,880 --> 00:24:24,500 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, 229 00:24:24,500 --> 00:24:34,040 unparalleled in their experience. Remember that ancient science had a very dim view of contagion as a cause of illness. 230 00:24:34,040 --> 00:24:43,670 So and for copious explicitly addresses this, because obviously scientifically, this disease is caused by imbalance in the liquids inside of you. 231 00:24:43,670 --> 00:24:47,210 Triggered by your environment and the environment, you know, didn't change. 232 00:24:47,210 --> 00:24:55,220 That spring in Constantinople. And yet they observed that people who carried the bodies to the mass graves did not die of plague. 233 00:24:55,220 --> 00:24:59,750 So. Doesn't seem like contagion was it was a factor. 234 00:24:59,750 --> 00:25:04,670 In other words, they're so bright, they're so bold, they're so shocked that they are even considering nonscientist, 235 00:25:04,670 --> 00:25:10,040 what for them were non-scientific explanations of contagion. And they find evidence against it. 236 00:25:10,040 --> 00:25:16,910 And our ancestors appreciated the importance of quarantine. Something that's very much on our minds today. 237 00:25:16,910 --> 00:25:28,010 It's clear that one way or another, they figured out that something was going on through the transmission of merchants and merchandise. 238 00:25:28,010 --> 00:25:35,030 We have a ladder. One of the very rare letters that survived from a bishop from Gaul from the 7th century. 239 00:25:35,030 --> 00:25:41,240 He received a bishop, a letter from a bishop in southern France, says Desideria SPCO. 240 00:25:41,240 --> 00:25:45,980 He received a letter letter from a bishop in southern France saying the plague has broken out, 241 00:25:45,980 --> 00:25:56,030 setup guards at the entrance to your diocese to make sure that no merchants come, clearly showing that by Circo 650 at the latest, 242 00:25:56,030 --> 00:26:05,720 they had understood that quarantines and the confinement were an effective weapon against bubonic plague, 243 00:26:05,720 --> 00:26:12,590 with no idea of the existence of bacteria, with no idea that contagion might work scientifically. 244 00:26:12,590 --> 00:26:17,240 They came through tragic experience to one effective solution. 245 00:26:17,240 --> 00:26:18,290 Tragically, 246 00:26:18,290 --> 00:26:27,950 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 247 00:26:27,950 --> 00:26:37,850 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. 248 00:26:37,850 --> 00:26:45,650 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. 249 00:26:45,650 --> 00:26:51,440 I would have 10 pages of questions, but I would really like to go to policial. 250 00:26:51,440 --> 00:26:59,090 The second part of Egypt famous for its exports of lentils, according to the written evidence, 251 00:26:59,090 --> 00:27:03,380 this is where it broke out and spread from palooza into Alexandria and then to 252 00:27:03,380 --> 00:27:07,550 the Holy Land and then through long shipping to Constantinople and everywhere. 253 00:27:07,550 --> 00:27:15,890 Egypt, of course, is the great source for the bread and circled bread distributions in Constantinople in the imperial capital. 254 00:27:15,890 --> 00:27:22,310 I would really like to see what was going on on the docks of plutonium in 541. 255 00:27:22,310 --> 00:27:27,410 But while a lot of antibiotics with me. What was unusual? What had changed? 256 00:27:27,410 --> 00:27:31,970 I would love to compare plutonium in 500 with 541 and see if there's any changes 257 00:27:31,970 --> 00:27:38,720 in the fauna or in the urban structures in the organisation of the docks. 258 00:27:38,720 --> 00:27:46,370 I have no idea what might have changed, but something changed and it may not have been a pelusi may have been elsewhere 259 00:27:46,370 --> 00:27:53,600 in the in the infrastructure of communications or in the host populations. 260 00:27:53,600 --> 00:27:59,680 But that would be where I would start. We hadn't talked much about the wide war going on at this time, 261 00:27:59,680 --> 00:28:08,300 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, 262 00:28:08,300 --> 00:28:12,620 I was interested to know what effect war had on the plague of Justinian. 263 00:28:12,620 --> 00:28:22,730 That's a very interesting avenue to pursue. And but I would suggest that with the new paleoclimate science and the evidence for 264 00:28:22,730 --> 00:28:28,370 the onset of this late Antec little ice age in 536 that we see beginning in 536, 265 00:28:28,370 --> 00:28:34,070 broader stress on the population of the northern hemisphere, in all likelihood, certainly in the Mediterranean. 266 00:28:34,070 --> 00:28:44,270 And then when you add to that the stress of war with its disruption of food supplies and physical violence being done, 267 00:28:44,270 --> 00:28:55,280 even with the weaponry of the late Roman army and their adversaries, you certainly would be creating a population that's much more frail. 268 00:28:55,280 --> 00:29:06,860 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, 269 00:29:06,860 --> 00:29:17,630 thanks to the disruption of solid food, preserving structures and even Kadak cadavers, which of course to be true for all kinds of rodents. 270 00:29:17,630 --> 00:29:23,210 So how did this outbreak spread to become a pandemic? The disease spread. 271 00:29:23,210 --> 00:29:32,360 We have very, very slim written evidence from anywhere else in the western part of the empire at this time. 272 00:29:32,360 --> 00:29:42,860 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. 273 00:29:42,860 --> 00:29:48,380 We now know from the ancient DNA that it also hit Britain in the first outbreak. 274 00:29:48,380 --> 00:29:56,010 There are other sources, eyewitnesses that tell us different things about the plague or about different. 275 00:29:56,010 --> 00:30:01,380 Epidemics of plague that broke out in subsequent decades. 276 00:30:01,380 --> 00:30:06,810 But it is the first outbreak that is most richly described. How long did it last? 277 00:30:06,810 --> 00:30:15,930 Do we know why it ended? We don't know what changed to make this tremendous outbreak so imposing and so lasting. 278 00:30:15,930 --> 00:30:21,750 It came back. Different scholars count in different ways. But the range so far is between 18 and 30. 279 00:30:21,750 --> 00:30:29,730 Some massive large scale epidemic outbreaks. Between five, four, one, five, four, two and about 750 in the Mediterranean. 280 00:30:29,730 --> 00:30:34,450 Why did it stop? We don't know. We don't know. 281 00:30:34,450 --> 00:30:43,030 Did the rats disappear? Were they all killed off by it and no other host mammal appeared that was suitable? 282 00:30:43,030 --> 00:30:49,210 Did something change in the communication structures that meant that people were no 283 00:30:49,210 --> 00:30:57,150 longer communicating and transmitting the pathogen as they had been over long distances? 284 00:30:57,150 --> 00:31:02,610 Was it something in the genome of the bacterium itself? 285 00:31:02,610 --> 00:31:11,070 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. 286 00:31:11,070 --> 00:31:20,910 It is part of his dissertation work that Dana has detected in two French genomes from the late six and from 287 00:31:20,910 --> 00:31:29,940 the 7th and 8th century deletion of two elements of the genome that have been associated with virulence. 288 00:31:29,940 --> 00:31:41,940 And intriguingly, the same gene deletion shows up in ancient DNA of your senior pestis from the 16th 289 00:31:41,940 --> 00:31:46,620 and 17th century plague in London and the 18th century plague in Marseilles. 290 00:31:46,620 --> 00:31:55,710 Is it possible that the bacterium itself evolved into a less lethal form? 291 00:31:55,710 --> 00:32:01,080 That would be not terribly surprising from the point of view of evolution, but we don't know yet. 292 00:32:01,080 --> 00:32:03,060 These are initial indications. 293 00:32:03,060 --> 00:32:13,140 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. 294 00:32:13,140 --> 00:32:21,570 So the question is open and only much more extensive and careful and robust and verified. 295 00:32:21,570 --> 00:32:29,010 Genetic analysis, the identification of more tragic victims and the successful extraction and people nation replication, 296 00:32:29,010 --> 00:32:36,830 analysis of the genomics of the DNA of the bacterium that led them low will clarify this. 297 00:32:36,830 --> 00:32:46,020 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. 298 00:32:46,020 --> 00:32:58,230 So our ignorance is becoming our ignace remains great, but it is becoming increasingly circumscribed and the debate is underway. 299 00:32:58,230 --> 00:33:07,500 There's a quite a range of opinions on it. Some people like my friend Kyle Harper and former student. 300 00:33:07,500 --> 00:33:18,540 Let it be said at the University of Oklahoma views the plague and the environmental crises of the sixth century as being quite significant. 301 00:33:18,540 --> 00:33:28,200 In the end of the ancient world, another extreme, my friend John Halden, emeritus of Princeton, views the impact as much more limited. 302 00:33:28,200 --> 00:33:32,880 Both of environmental disease change in this period. 303 00:33:32,880 --> 00:33:34,630 And then there's a huge spectrum in between. 304 00:33:34,630 --> 00:33:45,180 Professor Meesha Meyer in Germany is has been classified as a quote unquote, maximalists and is not happy with that, clearly from his publications. 305 00:33:45,180 --> 00:33:49,680 He has characterised his own opinion as seeing the first outbreak as very serious and 306 00:33:49,680 --> 00:33:53,850 having very serious consequences both for the economy and especially for the culture, 307 00:33:53,850 --> 00:33:58,320 but believes that subsequent outbreaks were less severe, had less impact. 308 00:33:58,320 --> 00:34:04,950 I myself think from the evidence from the first outbreak and now from the ancient DNA is unambiguous. 309 00:34:04,950 --> 00:34:11,390 Certainly the first epidemic of plague was extremely consequential and it's 310 00:34:11,390 --> 00:34:18,510 possible to make a similar assessment of a few of the subsequent outbreaks. 311 00:34:18,510 --> 00:34:23,190 But I think that we are at the beginning of discovery, not the end. 312 00:34:23,190 --> 00:34:32,060 Given that this was such a huge calamity, lasting for such a long period and perhaps the first recorded plague in human experience. 313 00:34:32,060 --> 00:34:38,390 Why isn't the plague of Justinian as notorious as later outbreaks like the Black Death? 314 00:34:38,390 --> 00:34:46,130 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, 315 00:34:46,130 --> 00:34:55,400 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. 316 00:34:55,400 --> 00:35:05,840 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. 317 00:35:05,840 --> 00:35:15,110 But that's where people think of it. Obviously, it may have hit Africa and Central Asia and so forth are under investigation now. 318 00:35:15,110 --> 00:35:27,920 So that's one element. The second is that in general, the including the Greek and Syriac records, the record keeping, the record preservation, 319 00:35:27,920 --> 00:35:35,330 we know that there are a lot of lost, lost histories and so forth diminishes greatly in the late sixth century. 320 00:35:35,330 --> 00:35:40,310 And certainly the seventh century is almost empty of historical. 321 00:35:40,310 --> 00:35:50,180 There are only a few Greek historians and very minor Latin historians writing surviving from the 17th century. 322 00:35:50,180 --> 00:35:56,870 So the written record was not strong. It's been a tremendous exploit, the achievement of historians and archaeologists, 323 00:35:56,870 --> 00:36:01,850 nakao scientists to begin to reconstruct this really, truly forgotten pandemic. 324 00:36:01,850 --> 00:36:11,180 I had a pretty serious graduate education and I came out of that not thinking that in the end of the ancient economy, 325 00:36:11,180 --> 00:36:14,750 whether it was the fall, the Roman Empire or not, in the end of the ancient economy, 326 00:36:14,750 --> 00:36:20,330 this disease had a big role to play, whereas everyone recognised it for the blacked out, 327 00:36:20,330 --> 00:36:31,580 where you can go to city archives and you can actually look at mortalities in Florence, in Lukáš, around the entire of Europe. 328 00:36:31,580 --> 00:36:41,480 You can see people's reacting to the death. And Giant found it, for example, in marriages and the concentration of wealth, 329 00:36:41,480 --> 00:36:46,970 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. 330 00:36:46,970 --> 00:36:56,780 So there's an increase in per capita wealth. We're able to see agrarian workers in Britain demanding now that they get meat 331 00:36:56,780 --> 00:37:04,130 in addition to beer and porridge for for doing harvest for doing field work. 332 00:37:04,130 --> 00:37:06,530 And they're able to do so because we can tap. 333 00:37:06,530 --> 00:37:14,060 We can tell that this reflects the shrinking of supply of labour and therefore the increase in the value of labour. 334 00:37:14,060 --> 00:37:18,080 So the black death is just much better documented. 335 00:37:18,080 --> 00:37:22,100 I mean, Samuel Peeps, people know about him and they read him. 336 00:37:22,100 --> 00:37:29,420 Far fewer people read copious, unfortunately. He's quite a fascinating writer. 337 00:37:29,420 --> 00:37:34,430 So there's that element the director written out here for that intact for the entire period 338 00:37:34,430 --> 00:37:41,090 of these six in seventh and eighth centuries is much thinner than for the late Middle Ages, 339 00:37:41,090 --> 00:37:45,950 early modern period. You know, if the 18th century week, we know the ship that brought it into Marseilles, 340 00:37:45,950 --> 00:37:55,010 we know the merchants who forded the quarantine's to make their quick buck and brought the ship with plague from the Ottoman Empire, 341 00:37:55,010 --> 00:37:58,070 brought the goods into Marseilles and sent off the final outbreak. 342 00:37:58,070 --> 00:38:07,820 So it's it's it's in part a general ignorance of this crucial period in which Europe and North 343 00:38:07,820 --> 00:38:15,080 Africa and the world of Islam was born in our great Western universities and schools in general. 344 00:38:15,080 --> 00:38:24,080 In part, it's the real unevenness of the end scarcity of surviving written records, 345 00:38:24,080 --> 00:38:31,100 which only now is beginning to be supplemented by the amazing work of archaeologists. 346 00:38:31,100 --> 00:38:32,750 And we're at the very beginning. 347 00:38:32,750 --> 00:38:45,670 Three studies, three articles since 2013, the the Arkia agentic Arkia genetic rediscovery of this terrible disease and its impact. 348 00:38:45,670 --> 00:38:52,070 As our conversation ended, I asked me what else he thought it was important for us all to appreciate about this 349 00:38:52,070 --> 00:38:56,660 somewhat forgotten and really that we're just at the beginning of understanding 350 00:38:56,660 --> 00:39:03,200 it and that the wonderful advances of classical philology in understanding the 351 00:39:03,200 --> 00:39:07,730 language of the texts and in identifying texts that are relevant to this event, 352 00:39:07,730 --> 00:39:13,490 the wonderful advances of archaeology and the wonderful advances of Arkia science are going 353 00:39:13,490 --> 00:39:22,430 to allow us to reconstruct in a very tragic and perhaps in some places not so tragic details. 354 00:39:22,430 --> 00:39:28,070 What whatever else it was, was clearly one of the major health events in the history of the ancient world. 355 00:39:28,070 --> 00:39:38,380 And in the birth of the at the at the passage at the transition point between the ancient world and the Middle Ages. 356 00:39:38,380 --> 00:39:45,190 Before you go, we wanted to play you a bonus conversation, which we couldn't quite fit into Episode one. 357 00:39:45,190 --> 00:39:50,200 It's a fascinating discussion I had with Dr. Abigail Bugles from Boxwoods, 358 00:39:50,200 --> 00:40:01,170 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. 359 00:40:01,170 --> 00:40:07,180 That seems to have been this idea that one can always be threatened by plague. 360 00:40:07,180 --> 00:40:19,300 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, 361 00:40:19,300 --> 00:40:21,790 but also individuals and their behaviour. 362 00:40:21,790 --> 00:40:30,010 So there was a real preoccupation with what disease would do to people not only physically with the symptoms, 363 00:40:30,010 --> 00:40:37,390 and they would give detailed descriptions, but also in terms of their moral behaviour and even their religious behaviour as well. 364 00:40:37,390 --> 00:40:44,830 There was a real preoccupation which does suggest that this is something that the readers of Lucretius would have been very familiar with, 365 00:40:44,830 --> 00:40:51,460 this idea of this threat of disease. The main source we're going to be talking about during this period is Lucretius. 366 00:40:51,460 --> 00:40:56,590 What do we know about him? Actually, we know very, very little about Lucretius. 367 00:40:56,590 --> 00:41:01,120 He's actually quite a shadowy figure. We know that he died in the mid to late 50s B.C. 368 00:41:01,120 --> 00:41:05,200 There is debate about exactly when his lifetime was. 369 00:41:05,200 --> 00:41:08,500 He wrote this remarkable poem called The Director Matara, 370 00:41:08,500 --> 00:41:14,050 which is also known as On the nature of the universe, sometimes known as on the nature of things. 371 00:41:14,050 --> 00:41:20,260 And it's really a poem that focuses on atoms and how everything in the world is made of atoms unvoiced. 372 00:41:20,260 --> 00:41:26,380 And Lucretius firmly believed that understanding this was the key, in essence, to happiness. 373 00:41:26,380 --> 00:41:36,670 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. 374 00:41:36,670 --> 00:41:45,190 And so Lucretius. His poem is is an extremely radical poem, which he wrote during the first century B.C. 375 00:41:45,190 --> 00:41:51,100 It's a poem in Latin. And his poem, which is an epic poem, is very, very long. 376 00:41:51,100 --> 00:41:58,800 It's divided into six books or chapters. And he describes the universe without involving God. 377 00:41:58,800 --> 00:42:04,480 So he says that gods have nothing to do with it and everything in the world ever is made up of atoms. 378 00:42:04,480 --> 00:42:10,390 And avoid the way that plague comes into this is that the poem has a really strange ending. 379 00:42:10,390 --> 00:42:16,040 And the poem ends very abruptly with a description of the plague in Athens, sihe. 380 00:42:16,040 --> 00:42:23,320 So Lucretius was writing, in a sense, with these cities on his desk, and he was describing the plague, Athens. 381 00:42:23,320 --> 00:42:32,230 So he was looking at the plague from hundreds of years earlier. And he has this extremely emotional account of the plague, Athens, 382 00:42:32,230 --> 00:42:37,360 and what this did to people in a philosophical sense as well as in a physical sense. 383 00:42:37,360 --> 00:42:45,610 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. 384 00:42:45,610 --> 00:42:49,990 He thinks that understanding things will mean that you're not afraid. 385 00:42:49,990 --> 00:42:56,320 And this actually causes or allows for rather peace of mind. 386 00:42:56,320 --> 00:43:00,760 And so Lucretius describes the plague. He describes the physical symptoms. 387 00:43:00,760 --> 00:43:07,690 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, 388 00:43:07,690 --> 00:43:17,990 but also the community. And Lucretius is played deeply entwined with the coverage from which we met in the previous episode. 389 00:43:17,990 --> 00:43:22,640 There is a lot of communication and dialogue between Lucretius and three cities. 390 00:43:22,640 --> 00:43:31,670 In a sense, Lucretius is very much building on and slightly retelling these cities account of the plague. 391 00:43:31,670 --> 00:43:41,390 And I would agree with that, that there are these sort of moral lessons that are drawn from the text, from the plague story. 392 00:43:41,390 --> 00:43:47,600 Interestingly, there has been a sort of dichotomy traditionally between in the CDC's account, 393 00:43:47,600 --> 00:43:54,920 between the kind of the scientific description of the plague and the idea that it is a moral account. 394 00:43:54,920 --> 00:43:58,160 And scholars have tended to sort of veer from one to the other. 395 00:43:58,160 --> 00:43:59,240 But actually, more recently, 396 00:43:59,240 --> 00:44:08,240 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, 397 00:44:08,240 --> 00:44:14,120 but rather that it was actually already there in some sense, at least, even if not quite as domineering. 398 00:44:14,120 --> 00:44:18,200 It's though already in these cities, both talk about burial practise. 399 00:44:18,200 --> 00:44:20,450 Both writers talk about burial. 400 00:44:20,450 --> 00:44:26,390 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. 401 00:44:26,390 --> 00:44:31,640 And there are piles of people that and this is you can see this in paintings like this Brueghel, 402 00:44:31,640 --> 00:44:35,990 the elders painting of the triumph of death, I think is the title of the painting. 403 00:44:35,990 --> 00:44:41,900 And there's just heaps of people about. So this really seems to be an affecting idea. 404 00:44:41,900 --> 00:44:51,110 Yeah, the idea of neglecting the visitation of the sick is essentially condemned in Lucretius. 405 00:44:51,110 --> 00:44:58,010 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. 406 00:44:58,010 --> 00:45:07,170 And this is interesting in the current time, of course, because there is a sort of fear of of people in general. 407 00:45:07,170 --> 00:45:14,570 Right. We were getting used to socially distancing. I do want to make this sort of a covert podcast. 408 00:45:14,570 --> 00:45:18,740 But we are we're sort of learning to keep our distance from people. 409 00:45:18,740 --> 00:45:24,890 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. 410 00:45:24,890 --> 00:45:32,270 And I think it's really clear that there seems to have been a real understanding of this feeling. 411 00:45:32,270 --> 00:45:40,220 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. 412 00:45:40,220 --> 00:45:42,630 I don't especially know what the answer is. 413 00:45:42,630 --> 00:45:50,330 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. 414 00:45:50,330 --> 00:45:58,370 Something that I do find quite fascinating when looking at these ancient plague narratives is the idea that 415 00:45:58,370 --> 00:46:07,940 they aren't focussed in a way on advice as to how to reduce infection and minimise the chance of contagion. 416 00:46:07,940 --> 00:46:12,320 Whereas a lot of articles we can read on Medium, for example, will advisee. 417 00:46:12,320 --> 00:46:16,520 How do you protect yourself? And there's a lot I mean, there's all the time practical advice, right. 418 00:46:16,520 --> 00:46:19,820 About, you know, we should all be wearing masks and protecting each other. 419 00:46:19,820 --> 00:46:26,030 And this idea of that responsibility, the collective responsibility to protect each other, 420 00:46:26,030 --> 00:46:30,260 is prominent in a lot of publications currently, as it should be. 421 00:46:30,260 --> 00:46:38,130 Whereas ancient narratives are really focussed on on how to deal with the moral and psychological effects. 422 00:46:38,130 --> 00:46:44,100 Of plague and of disease. And this is something that is also being written about right now. 423 00:46:44,100 --> 00:46:49,560 But I think that there could be more emphasis on how we deal with it actually mentally, 424 00:46:49,560 --> 00:46:58,320 because it's causing great mental strain on pretty much everybody who has to learn to live with disease in and around us. 425 00:46:58,320 --> 00:47:03,660 Right. As a philosopher, I was particularly intrigued by the idea that Lucretius might, in fact, 426 00:47:03,660 --> 00:47:10,530 be using this plague outbreak to make a wider model of his perception of the world in decline. 427 00:47:10,530 --> 00:47:12,180 It's a really interesting idea, actually, 428 00:47:12,180 --> 00:47:20,280 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. 429 00:47:20,280 --> 00:47:25,170 I think in a sense, this is true in the poem obviously ends with death. 430 00:47:25,170 --> 00:47:29,550 I like to look at it as it is and consider what if this is the right ending? 431 00:47:29,550 --> 00:47:31,530 And let's just go from that. 432 00:47:31,530 --> 00:47:39,070 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, 433 00:47:39,070 --> 00:47:43,320 and he writes this article called the Palin Genesis of during the tour, 434 00:47:43,320 --> 00:47:49,730 which means the rebirth of the director Matura or on the nature of the universe, the rebirth of Lucretius, his poem. 435 00:47:49,730 --> 00:47:55,740 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. 436 00:47:55,740 --> 00:48:03,840 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. 437 00:48:03,840 --> 00:48:09,780 And there's a lot of imagery of new life unberth on generation. 438 00:48:09,780 --> 00:48:13,740 I think there's definitely something to the idea of decline. 439 00:48:13,740 --> 00:48:19,980 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. 440 00:48:19,980 --> 00:48:28,410 It's it's dark for sure. You can't get away from that plague or pandemic or disease is difficult to live with. 441 00:48:28,410 --> 00:48:34,340 But I think Lucretius wants to teach us how to live well. 442 00:48:34,340 --> 00:48:40,520 And even if necessary, how to die well, actually. And you can see that as depressing. 443 00:48:40,520 --> 00:48:46,970 You can also see it as helping us to better control our lives and where we're going. 444 00:48:46,970 --> 00:48:55,370 I was also interested in whether Lucretius was talking about the health of politics or the city itself when he was talking about. 445 00:48:55,370 --> 00:49:02,060 Certainly my reading of Lucretius, his description of the Athenian plague and, you know, 446 00:49:02,060 --> 00:49:10,070 his examination of what plague can do to people and how we should deal with it is more about. 447 00:49:10,070 --> 00:49:15,950 It's certainly about the city. So in a way that, you know, the city or the Greek word is the polis. 448 00:49:15,950 --> 00:49:23,460 So in a way, it's political. In a sense, it's about public life. 449 00:49:23,460 --> 00:49:32,470 It's it involves burial and things like this. But I think in a sense, it's far less political than, you know, 450 00:49:32,470 --> 00:49:39,410 the coronavirus is now because we're talking all the time about how our politicians are reacting or acting. 451 00:49:39,410 --> 00:49:42,890 And, you know, are we satisfied with what they're doing? 452 00:49:42,890 --> 00:49:48,200 Could they be doing more? Could they be doing better? Are they doing too much? 453 00:49:48,200 --> 00:49:54,290 Some people would say that, you know, there there's this debate raging all the time actually, right now, which I found quite fascinating, 454 00:49:54,290 --> 00:50:02,270 which is, you know, there's this sort of struggle between the people who claim that there's actually infringement of civil rights. 455 00:50:02,270 --> 00:50:08,270 You know, how far is locked down, infringing civil rights? I personally don't really have much time for that. 456 00:50:08,270 --> 00:50:17,090 But it's an interesting thing to see this debate kind of raging and it's brought up interesting questions about the moral 457 00:50:17,090 --> 00:50:24,080 behaviour that one should be taking and how far this will affect members of the public who maybe who don't even know. 458 00:50:24,080 --> 00:50:33,470 So there's this idea of the public effect of disease and the effect of private behaviour on the public more broadly. 459 00:50:33,470 --> 00:50:38,540 But it's not so explicitly discussed, at least in my reading of Lucretius. 460 00:50:38,540 --> 00:50:45,560 As I say, it's certainly about the city and how the disease rages through Athens, 461 00:50:45,560 --> 00:50:53,720 but it's not so explicitly about the political body and what plague ever invoked by authors, 462 00:50:53,720 --> 00:50:59,210 the something which is brought about by ship or is the result of a curse. 463 00:50:59,210 --> 00:51:06,230 It's really interesting because in the beginning of the play, Oedipus tyrannis or Oedipus Rex is sometimes known by Sophocles. 464 00:51:06,230 --> 00:51:10,160 The play actually starts with this idea of the miasma or the curse. 465 00:51:10,160 --> 00:51:14,720 It's a moral curse on the town. And there's a plague on the town. 466 00:51:14,720 --> 00:51:22,760 So the two are quite interlinked. The idea of curse or sin and disease, they this actually goes back a really long way. 467 00:51:22,760 --> 00:51:28,040 And of course, there's the idea in the Book of Exodus in the Bible, 468 00:51:28,040 --> 00:51:35,720 the 10 plagues of Egypt are a kind of, in a sense, a punishment for arrogance on the part of humanity. 469 00:51:35,720 --> 00:51:43,970 What is fascinating is that plague in antiquity and before can be both a response to sin, 470 00:51:43,970 --> 00:51:47,990 but it can also be an indication of sin and it can also cause sin. 471 00:51:47,990 --> 00:51:55,970 So it's extremely intertwined with the idea of sin or moral curses, I suppose. 472 00:51:55,970 --> 00:52:03,200 But Lucretius would be really explicitly against such an idea that, you know, it's some sort of punishment from God for wrongdoing. 473 00:52:03,200 --> 00:52:09,480 He is giving the rational scientific reasons for plague or he is giving potential reasons. 474 00:52:09,480 --> 00:52:16,490 At least he doesn't claim to know all the answers. He gives many different suggestions and then leaves it to the reader. 475 00:52:16,490 --> 00:52:22,180 Mike mentioned rediscovering something fresh in case that he'd read for years because of his experience. 476 00:52:22,180 --> 00:52:26,060 Koby. Something that resonated strongly with me. 477 00:52:26,060 --> 00:52:31,970 I asked APJ whether she was looking at any of these orphans in a new year. 478 00:52:31,970 --> 00:52:41,570 Yeah, something that's been really striking to me and kind of rereading decreases plague and looking at other versions of disease from antiquity, 479 00:52:41,570 --> 00:52:46,250 but also into modernity. So, for example, if you look at Cumins in the past, 480 00:52:46,250 --> 00:52:56,900 something that's really striking is the anxiety is quite prominent as an effect and a really important effect of disease. 481 00:52:56,900 --> 00:53:02,180 Another thing apart from anxiety and perhaps it's intertwined, is loneliness and isolation. 482 00:53:02,180 --> 00:53:07,650 This comes up as well. So Lucretius talks about the isolation of the ill. 483 00:53:07,650 --> 00:53:14,600 And this is also being discussed now is Cauvin 19? You know, we've been thinking about the older people who are alone. 484 00:53:14,600 --> 00:53:19,190 Perhaps they don't have a family anymore and or they don't have a partner anymore. 485 00:53:19,190 --> 00:53:25,250 And they are alone in the houses and all those people in care homes who can't be visited by their families. 486 00:53:25,250 --> 00:53:29,390 Families can't comfort each other by putting their arm around each other at a funeral. 487 00:53:29,390 --> 00:53:35,200 This idea of isolation is is really important. But Lucretius talks about. 488 00:53:35,200 --> 00:53:40,820 Yeah, how people were basically afraid to visit each other and they were afraid to visit their loved ones. 489 00:53:40,820 --> 00:53:44,930 And what's super interesting is that Lucretius and before him, he said cities. 490 00:53:44,930 --> 00:53:52,190 In fact, they described the physical symptoms of the disease in great detail and they're extremely grim. 491 00:53:52,190 --> 00:53:58,220 And Lucretius ends with his list of symptoms with the cure, which would be, you know, cutting off their own limbs. 492 00:53:58,220 --> 00:54:02,840 People would cut off and limbs to try and cure themselves of this horrible disease. 493 00:54:02,840 --> 00:54:07,850 And they were flinging themselves in rivers and all sorts of things. But he says the worst thing of all. 494 00:54:07,850 --> 00:54:18,320 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. 495 00:54:18,320 --> 00:54:22,100 And this was the worst thing of all. So all these horrible symptoms are listed. 496 00:54:22,100 --> 00:54:25,610 And then the worst thing of all is despair. 497 00:54:25,610 --> 00:54:38,510 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. 498 00:54:38,510 --> 00:54:48,420 You've been following the story of the plague of Justinian. Second episode in our 10 part series on the history of. 499 00:54:48,420 --> 00:55:00,090 Next time we're heading to what's arguably the most famous and most deadly outbreak of play in human history, a black death. 500 00:55:00,090 --> 00:55:20,590 Hope you can join me then. I'm Peter Milliken, and you've been listening to Future. 501 00:55:20,590 --> 00:55:25,650 Feature makers was produced in-house at the University of Oxford. 502 00:55:25,650 --> 00:55:34,550 The show was presented by Peter Milliken. A voice actor at the beginning of the show was Liz McCarthy. 503 00:55:34,550 --> 00:55:42,380 The soundtrack was created by Richard Watts and the show was produced by Ben Harward and me, Steve Pritchard. 504 00:55:42,380 --> 00:55:45,588 Thanks again for listening. To Future Makers.