An Empire Exhausted

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1:42Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage. justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, Be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:31Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I've said this a lot of times, but I think it's true, and I think it's important. One of the best ways to understand the present moment is to study the past. Because when we study the past, our guard is down. We can see a bigger picture. We can see human beings doing human things instead of doing things that piss us off or make us afraid or threaten our identity or challenge our partisan ideas or beliefs about the world. During COVID, I raved about this book, The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, who I've had on the podcast.

3:11Fascinating book. I read this great book. Actually, let me pull it up here because I recommended it recently. Polio, an American story by David M. Oshinsky, which I believe won a National Book Award. That was fascinating. And so I was very excited to see a book about the Antonine Plague. Mark's really, as you'll hear about in an episode we have coming up, and you'll hear in today's excerpt, catches a bad break. He's not in power very long. and starts to be signs of something coming from the far eastern edges of the Roman Empire, probably brought back by his stepbrother and co-emperor Lucius Verus.

3:52And that becomes the Antonine Plague, which ravages Rome for at least a decade, potentially more. There's even still outbreaks of it during Commodus' reign many years later. So this is the defining event moment of Marcus Aurelius' reign. It changes everything, just as COVID changed everything, just as the Spanish flu changed everything. Of course, we tend to forget these pandemics or epidemics shortly after they happened because they were so unpleasant. They were so divisive. They were so scary. We were so powerless over them. I really love this book. It just came out. It's called Pax Romana. If you've heard of the phrase Pax Romana, that's the age of Roman peace.

4:29Actually, Seneca coins this phrase, another Stoicism connection. But this book is called Pax Romana, right? The Roman Plague. And it's called The Plague That Shook the Roman World. It's by Colin Elliott, a college professor at Indiana. And he and his publisher were nice enough to bring us an excerpt of that book. This is chapter six from that book, An Empire Exhausted. And it's about not just the plague itself, but the darkest moments of that plague. And I think you're really going to like this book. I have an episode with Colin coming soon, which you should definitely listen to also. So, and I love bringing these excerpts on a nice Sunday morning.

5:12Listen and enjoy. Check out the book, Pax Romana, The Plague That Shook the Roman World. You can get it anywhere books are sold. And I hope you enjoy this one.

5:41Chapter 6. An Empire Exhausted No one could have known that the economic challenges and social strife that multiplied under Marcus would cascade into crises that would permanently restructure Roman society. An era was ending. Mighty as Rome was, it lacked any man-made mechanism to arrest the evolution and transmission of pathogens. No emperor, pronouncement, or institution was powerful enough to alter the empire's changing ecological context. The Antonine Plague was not behind all the Pax Romana's problems, but the pandemic gashed Rome's ideological veneer, exposing the underlying fragility of the Roman system.

6:30In the end, the real scandal was not the collapse of the Pax Romana, but the fact that it survived so long. Roman soldiers pooled near the Danube in the autumn of AD 170. After enduring the loss of his co-emperor and brother the previous winter, Marcus alone relaunched his war against the Germanic tribes harassing Rome's northern provinces. Historian Peter Heather's account of Rome's centuries-long battle with European invaders commences with this moment for good reason. Indeed, unbeknownst to Roman military leaders, northern tribes had been migrating toward Roman borders in untold numbers. Rome's allies in the region, the Marco Mani and Victuali, among others, were under severe pressures and demanded admission into the Roman Empire for protection.

7:27Marcus answered their request with a declaration of war against them. The war morphed into a series of conflicts historians refer to as the Marco Manic Wars. This name underplays the full scope of the conflict, as more than a dozen different German tribes became involved. One Roman source named the struggle the War of Many Nations as all the peoples from beyond the Rhine and Danube conspired against Rome. But at least some Romans initially thought the campaign would become something of a cakewalk. Galen, for example, expected Marcus to return to Rome victorious after just one campaign season. The ferocity and desperation of the Germanic tribes, however, their own territory beset by invaders from still further north and east, pressed them up against Roman boundaries for the remainder of Marcus's life.

8:26The ensuing military quagmire so consumed the emperor's attention that Marcus would not see Rome for a full seven years.

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10:15In the thick of this sea of soldiers, Roman and German alike, plague foamed and frothed. Several sources confirm the devastation among the Roman troops. The least reliable of these characterizes the years of the Marcomannic Wars as a time when a grievous pestilence carried away thousands of civilians and soldiers. The more trustworthy imperial secretary, Eutropius, writing in the middle of the 4th century AD, interrupts his summary of Marcus's Germanic War with these chilling words. There occurred so destructive a pestilence that at Rome and throughout Italy and the province most of the empire's inhabitants, and almost all the soldiers, sunk under the disease.

11:04Similarly flamboyant, the Christian author Jerome says that an outbreak in AD 172 slaughtered the Roman army almost to extinction. These later authors relied on earlier accounts, which have since been lost. And while their interjections are exaggerated, and therefore or suspect, there should be little doubt that the Roman army, beleaguered by barbarians, suffered concurrent terrors of war and pestilence during the early 170s. A wider crisis spread into social and economic systems across the empire. Supplies of metal, stone, and other goods were disrupted. Food shortages in several regions continued unabated.

11:49Violence became endemic in parts of Egypt and Asia Minor. In this chaotic moment, one of Marcus's most capable generals turned renegade and openly proclaimed himself ruler of the empire. But he was not the only one to go rogue. Many rank-and-file soldiers also betrayed their allegiances and turned to pillaging and terrorizing their own countrymen. Rampant disease, unending war, the lack of money, the supply shortages, All these things destroyed morale and loyalty in soldier and citizen alike. Gangs of ex-soldiers and runaway slaves proliferated in the countryside like parasites, devouring the waning resources of an exhausted empire.

12:38Eventually, the worst occurred. Marcus himself became sick. After generations of apparent glory, the Pax Romana crashed in one horrific decade.

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