Читать книгу The Power of Plagues - Irwin W. Sherman - Страница 30

The Roman Empire expanded its frontiers until A.D. 161. But from that time onward its defenses began to crumble. Toward the end of the 1st century A.D. a warlike people riding on horseback from Mongolia, the Huns, began a westward movement. The Huns brought to the Roman Empire new infections, but others such as the Roman fever also rebuffed them. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born in A.D. 121, and throughout his reign as emperor (140-180) he was engaged in defensive wars on the northern and eastern borders of the Roman Empire. In A.D. 164 the Roman legions under the command of Avidus Claudius were sent to Mesopotamia to repel an invasion by the Parthians, and in this they succeeded. But the troops returned with a devastating plague that spread throughout the countryside and reached Rome by 166. This epidemic of Antoninus, the Antonine plague, spread to other parts of Europe, causing so many deaths that cartloads of bodies were removed from Rome and other cities. Within the city of Rome, Emperor Antoninus made administrative reforms; he concerned himself with famine as well as plague in the empire. A devotee of stoicism, he ruthlessly persecuted the Christians, believing them to be a threat to imperial power. In 161, when the Huns had reached the northeast border of Italy, Antoninus was forced to contemplate battle, but fear and disorganization delayed a direct confrontation with the Germanic tribes on the Rhine-Danube frontier until 169. When he and his legions moved into the northern frontier with the objective of securing the empire’s northwesterly boundaries (as far as the Vistula River), a plague broke out among the troops; it raged until 180 and affected not only the Roman legions but also the Huns. As the plague ravaged his army, Antoninus elected to retreat to Rome but was never to reach his destination. In Vienna, on the seventh day of his illness, May 17, 180, he died from this plague. The plague returned again in 189, and though it was less widespread than the first epidemic, at its peak there were more than 2,000 deaths a day in the city of Rome.

The Antonine plague (A.D. 164 to 189) is also associated with the physician Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129-216), whose ideas dominated medicine until the 16th century. Galen’s hero was Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.), who had laid down the principles of medicine in Greece. Galen was first appointed surgeon to the gladiators in Asia Minor and then moved to Rome, where he practiced medicine. Though Galen was a skilled anatomist, an experimentalist, and a searcher for new drugs, when faced with the plague he fled Rome. He was, however, recalled by Emperor Marcus Aurelius to Rome, where he died. But before his death he left a description of the plague’s symptoms: high fever, inflammation of the mouth and throat, thirst, diarrhea, and a telltale sign: pustules on the skin that appeared after 9 days. Even today precisely what this plague was remains a mystery, but most historians suspect that this was the first record of a smallpox epidemic. Some believe either that smallpox moved into the Roman Empire with the legions returning from Mesopotamia or else that the Huns carried it with them from Mongolia and then on to Rome.