This chapter argues that (1) explosive population growth is a major factor in the transition to the Anthropocene and (2) the control of infectious disease was the proximate cause of modern population growth. Thus, the changing patterns of mortality should be integrated into narratives of humanity’s takeover of planet earth. It also argues that human expansion (in both pre-modern and modern times) creates the ecological conditions for the emergence of new infectious diseases, and therefore the evolution of novel threats is likely to remain a dimension of life in the Anthropocene for the planet’s dominant species.

This chapter explores the state of knowledge about the Antonine Plague, an empire-wide pandemic that struck from the mid-160s. It emphasizes that even against the backdrop of the unhealthy environment of the Roman empire, the Antonine Plague stood out as an extraordinary event in its geographical scope and biological impact. The stories of the Roman armies introducing the plague on their return from the Parthian campaign deserve greater scrutiny, as they are likely colored by imperial propaganda concerning Avidius Cassius and Lucius Verus, but the notion that the disease was caused by a pathogen carried into the Roman empire from without, likely along Red Sea and Indian Ocean trading routes, is plausible.

RIGHTS AND ENLIGHTENMENT

Imagine, if you would, an Enlightenment that takes place in a Europe where there had never been a Constantine: no fiery sign in the sky, no Battle at the Milvian Bridge, no Nicaea. Imagine a thoroughgoing intellectual revolution, in which men “dared to know,” casting off half-believed myths of Zeus, demystifying all sacral kingships, seeking to understand the place of humanity in a mechanistic nature without superstition. Would such an Enlightenment have issued in the thunderous proclamations of the American and French Revolutions? The liberal revolutions of the late eighteenth century were the political offspring of the Enlightenment. The pronouncements of the inalienable rights of man were the avant-garde of modern ideology, and they now have triumphed as fundamental international norms. But would an Enlightenment without Constantine also have given birth to Enlightenment liberalism? Could we have had a Kant without a Constantine?

If you have indulged this lavish thought experiment so far, consider the answer of the Enlightenment's most acute critic, Friedrich Nietzsche: no. Proclamations of rights and human dignity were not a necessary political derivative of Enlightenment rationalism; rather, they were a relic, a secular myth born of weakness. “Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the needy products of slavedom hiding from itself…. Now the slave must vainly scrape through from one day to another with transparent lies recognizable to every one of deeper insight, such as the alleged ‘equal rights of all’ or the so-called ‘fundamental rights of man,’ of man as such, or the ‘dignity of labour.’” For Nietzsche, humanity bore no inherent dignity: “‘Man in himself,’ the absolute man possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties.” Only through culture, through art, could humans create beauty and meaning and thus come to possess dignity. Certainly this view set the illiberal Nietzsche apart from his age.

STUDYING THE ROMAN SLAVE SUPPLY

The definition of slavery in Roman law and ideology blended the imaginary order in which slavery was the rightful outcome of Roman conquest and the mundane, material fact of the slave trade. It is important, analytically, not to conflate the two. The Roman slave system was not in any simple sense the product of wars of conquest, and the slave supply was not a direct function of military expansion. Over the last generation, there has been a new recognition that it is necessary to account for the extraordinary movement of human bodies that was the Roman slave trade, without the easy, ideological explanation of mass warfare. In retrospect, the theory of conquest has never been able to offer a very detailed story of how millions of captives could be filtered through an infrastructure of trade, or how a massive sudden influx of slaves would be absorbed in society – consumed, managed, and exploited. More importantly, if war was instrumental in the generation of Roman slavery, it does not perforce follow that the end of conquest reversed the trajectory of the slave system, leading inevitably to a reduction in supply, a rise in prices, and overall decline.

THE MASTER–SLAVE RELATIONSHIP

Seeking a metaphor to describe the mysterious compound of love and wrath which God was capable of showing towards mankind, Lactantius found in the figure of the slave-owner an evocative parallel. “The master calls the good slave a friend and decorates him and puts him in charge of the domus and the familia and all the master's affairs, but the bad slave he punishes with cursing, lashes, nudity, hunger, thirst, chains. The one is an example to the others not to sin, and the other is an example to good behavior, so that some are coerced by fear, others driven by honor.” The use of the most horrifying terrors and the promise of such conspicuous rewards belonged on the same spectrum. The spectrum described by Lactantius was not merely conjured to serve his rhetorical purpose, for as we will see the Roman master was vested with an exceptionally broad range of powers to reward and to punish. This chapter is an exploration of that spectrum. It is an attempt to understand the techniques of domination in Roman society and to uncover the systemic forces promoting the use of particular techniques. We cannot accept, with Lactantius, that some slaves were simply “good,” others “bad.” Instead we want to discover the choices made by masters and slaves as they tried to maneuver towards their desired ends.