Classical Culture

Trade between cities

Picture obtained from:  www.ub.uit.no/northernlights/ eng/trade.htm

Plagues of Egypt, Greece, and Rome

            Following an increase in population size on certain parts of the globe, an inevitable onslaught of disease was perpetuated by ever-increasing cities and disease was made world-wide with these cities’s participation in trade and commerce.  By 3000 BC great city-empires were rising in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China; such settlements maintained huge cattle herds which spread lethal pathogens to packed populations which as yet had no immunity.  Factors such as trade, travel, and war detonated these pathological explosions on other parts of the planet as well, playing a vital role in the occurrence of epidemics.  Extended trade and commerce enhanced the spread of infectious organisms between geographic areas, as one region’s familiar “tamed” disease would become another’s deadly plague.

            Due to these settlements, Egypt and Greece found themselves devastated by epidemic, with the Old Testament documenting diseases being hurled down upon the kingdom of the pharaohs in Egypt.  Epidemics also occurred in classical Greece, notably with the Plague of Athens in 430 BC.  We have a historical record provided by historian Thucydides, who noted the symptoms of this deadly disease taking place during the Peloponnesian War.  He saw victims succumbing to headaches, coughing, vomiting, chest pains, and convulsions.  For more information on Thucydides accounts, see Plague in the Ancient World.  It is still unknown exactly what this disease was, but it was so catastrophic that it spelt an end to the ascendancy of Athens. 

            As Rome became more powerful and its legions conquered the known world, deadly pathogens were given free passage around the Empire.  For example, the Plague of Antoninus slew a quarter of the inhabitants of stricken areas between AD 165 and 180.  Other diseases such as measles and chickenpox had dire effects on populations, but eventually abated into routine childhood diseases, which today are mostly curable or preventable by vaccines.  Similarly, bubonic plague first appeared in the Roman Empire as the Plague of Justinian (AD 542-543), which had originated in Egypt in AD 540 and later blitzed Constantinople, massacring a quarter of the population of the eastern Mediterranean.  But the plague didn’t begin to hit Europe with full force as the Bubonic Plague until AD 1346, later referred to more in depth. 

For more information on the plague throughout history, see http://209.106.8.193/summer/plague.htm.