ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Forecasting Plague: Astrology and Epidemics in the Roman Empire

• In Event: Pestilence and the Weather: The Environmental Framing of Epidemics in Global Antiquity

English Abstract

Named historical epidemics—the ‘Plague of Athens’ or the ‘Antonine Plague’—have grabbed most of the attention in studies of largescale disease outbreaks in the ancient Mediterranean world. Pestilence thus becomes an exceptional event, with episodes separated by centuries, but there are indications to the contrary. The second, ‘general’ or ‘universal’ book of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, for example, includes loimos (‘plague’, defined as any illness that strikes lots of people in the same place at roughly the same time, causing lots of deaths) amongst the more substantial disasters which can be predicted through astronomy. This sits alongside and intertwines with climatic predictions—of abrupt seasonal shifts and extreme weather—affecting regions, peoples and cities. The later Greek astrological writer, Hephaistion of Thebes, picks up similar themes, and adds what he casts as ancient Egyptian eclipse lore. Variations in the configuration of eclipses signify a range of pestilential occurrences for humans and animals.

This paper will explore the richness of relations between plague and the climate which are represented in these treatises. Correlative rather than causal in their presentation, environmental explanations are none the less implicitly active in these texts, within a larger and interconnected cosmological frame. They also suggest pestilential regularity rather than rarity. That, plagues, like the weather, were part of the structure of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Finally what are the wider ramifications for our understandings of ancient epidemics that result? How do these writings fit with other surviving ancient evidence about plague—medical and historical? Do they speak to current concerns about climate and disease?

Author

• Rebecca Flemming, University of Exeter