You didn't take the border up to the Antonine wall ?

Yeah I’m going to. I’m actually trying to get through a textbook on the third century at the moment to help prep for that

@@TheFallofRome Nice! Looking forward to that then. What's the textbook, if you don't mind me asking?

@@patrickbrown859 the Roman Empire from Severus to Constantine

So the Justinian plague was in fact Ebola?

What a spoiler

ya mean the city or the entire empire? the city had about 1 million inhabitants while the empire had about 40 million at its peak. i dunno where the 100 mil figure is pointing at

@@AsiandOOd yeah definitely the entire empire. But almost every former Roman empire region had a decrease in development for a long time to come.

@@8bitorgy hold on i dont get it. ur saying rome had 100 million people before the antonine plague?

@@AsiandOOd I think there's a "ceiling" that ancient civilizations dealt with before modernized inoculations

@@8bitorgy the chinese were able to reach 400 million by the end of the qing dynasty. they had plagues and such for sure, but the abundance of food in the form of rice allowed the population to outpace the wheat based europeans by a long shot. every time china suffered through massive famines and wars, its population has always came back higher than before.

Ba-dum TSS

Yes absolutely. The study of past infectious diseases is just getting started. But In some cases it’s going to be difficult because Romans often cremated their dead until the conversion to Christianity

there are several contemporary writings on this that i cant quite remember the source. one said that the northern peoples had strength and courage that made perfect warriors, while people in the south had cunning and shrewdness that created civilization. rome had both. generals usually preferred people from the rural areas as they were used to hardship and exercised frequently. and looking at the age of people who survived past childhood, i can assume that people in ancient rome were definitely fit, generally healthy (not a lot of pollution and no obesity). they also made significant strides in dental health as well. if i were to rank the health of romans by period, late republican to the late principate period were the best due to plenty of food and advancements in civilization that maintained a healthy population.

​@@AsiandOOd just my two cents here: there were also loads of diseases that did not kill but merely incapacitate the victim, sometimes even staying present itself. Many lung diseases can damage/scar the lungs, parasites can take residence in liver or bowels and malaria will sap a person's strength On one hand, people from rural areas were less likely to have been ravaged by these city swelling diseases, on the other hand, they might die quickly in an army because now they suddenly came into contact with diseases their immune system knew nothing about

hes an expert on rome why would he detail China...

Oh that’s a good idea, I’ll have to add that to the list. I don’t know very much about the black death in China, but as far as I’m aware we don’t actually have that much information on it. I don’t remember where I read that but I recall coming across that tidbit about a year or two ago

Maybe more empires fell but so fast and so thorough we have no idea they existed, or how they broke down

With everything going on in the world I tried to avoid using the terms, because I don’t want to get flagged by KZfaq, but the short answer is no. Disease outbreaks have existed since we started farming but those, and it includes Athens, are epidemics. The Antonine Plague appears to have been the first trans regional outbreak of anything that we know about, so, the first pandemic

Yes I do

@@TheFallofRome Great, I'll be on the lookout for that!

I was also wondering, too, according to Wikipedia, "The history of smallpox extends into pre-history, with the disease probably emerging in human populations about 10,000 BC.[1] The earliest credible evidence of smallpox is found in the Egyptian mummies of people who died some 3,000 years ago." The Britannica states, "Prior to that discovery, the disease had been thought by some scholars to have arisen among settled agricultural populations in Mesopotamia as early as the 5th millennium BCE and in the Nile River valley in the 3rd millennium BCE, though evidence for those events was lacking." It seems we are unsure at present.

@@WagesOfDestruction Yes, I read that too. In the german Wikipedia, of course :D. But still.

Ebola is the closest match we have for the pathology of the plague of cyprian. A type of flu was thought to be the culprit at one point but that’s been ruled oht

@@TheFallofRome Probably not Ebola itself in that case, but rather a member of the broader group Ebola is also a part of.

Simple History does masterful presentation, but I have issues with some of their content.

Kek