You're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Malin Hay. In 165 AD, the first cases began to be reported of a new infectious disease.

The symptoms included fevers, coughing up blood and a puscular dry rash with black sores that would cross over and fall off.

Over the next decade, what would later come to be called the Antonine Plague

would return in waves across the Roman Empire and potentially further afield.

Joining me today on the podcast is Josephine Quinn, an archaeologist and professor of ancient

history at the University of Oxford.

She's written for the LRB about ancient societies from Persia to Carthage.

And in the most recent issue of the paper, she reviews Colin Elliott's book,

Pox Romana, the plague that shook the Roman world.

Jo, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's great to be here.

So could you give us a little bit of background about the Antonine plague, first of all?

What up to that point was the history of serious epidemics in Rome?

Well, it's the first really big one that we hear about.

I mean, obviously, it was a huge amount of illness, disease and so on.

This was Rome itself was a massive city, very dense, huge amount of coming and going,

and people got sick a lot of the time. But it's epidemics, if you like, aren't something that gets a great deal of attention. This is the first

one that people really latch on to, to some extent at the time, particularly later, as something

that they call a plague.

And by plague, what they mean in Greek, because actually when people write about medicine

and antiquity, it's almost always in Greek, what they mean by plague is any kind of

reasonably long-lasting, pretty serious epidemic. And this is the first one they really point to,

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