Haldonetal ReviewofKHarperThefateofRome

DOI: 10.1111/hic3.
12508
ARTICLE
Plagues, climate change, and the end of an empire:

A response to Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome (1):
Climate
John Haldon1 | Hugh Elton2 | Sabine R. Huebner3 |
4,5 | 1,6 | Timothy P. Newfield7
Adam Izdebski Lee Mordechai
1
History Department, Princeton University,
Princeton, NJ Abstract
2
Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, Trent Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome, written for a popular audi-
University, Peterborough, ON, Canada
ence, uses the environment to explain the decline and fall
3
Institute of Ancient History, Department of
Classical Civilizations, Basel University, Basel,
of the Roman Empire. The book asserts that Rome fell as a
Switzerland result of environmental stress, in particular through a combi-
4
Max Planck Institute for the Science of nation of pandemic disease and climate change. Although we
Human History, Jena, Germany
5 agree that the environment can and should be integrated
Institute of History, Jagiellonian University,
Kraków, Poland within traditional historical accounts, we challenge the
6
The Medieval Institute, University of Notre book's claims on several issues. These include Harper's use
Dame, Notre Dame, IN
7
of primary sources and secondary literature, his approach
Departments of History and Biology,
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. to analyzing palaeoclimate data, his interpretations of the
Correspondence impact of disease on the Roman state and society, and his
John Haldon, History Department, Dickinson
Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
synthesis of social, economic, and environmental history.
08544. Throughout this and the following two sections of this
Email: jhaldon@princeton.edu
review, we demonstrate that several major flaws undermine
the book's overarching argument, casting serious doubts on
its conclusions.
1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N
The debate around the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is centuries old, but Kyle Harper's 2017 book The Fate of
Rome puts the story into a very different context from that which usually prevails. Harper has written a carefully
structured and eminently readable account of the factors that contributed to the end of the Roman Empire in both
west and east. The style and pace draw the reader in. His descriptions directly engage with a modern readership
(whether lay or specialist)—as when, for example, he refers to the marriage between Justinian and Theodora as ‘it
would be as though a sitting president married a Kardashian’ (p. 203). In our contemporary times, in which criticism
of the humanities as aloof and disconnected from everyday realities is common, Harper does a very good job of mak-
ing his subject accessible to broad audiences. And the argument leads the reader inexorably toward his conclusions
History Compass. 2018;e12508. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hic3 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 of 13
https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12508
2 of 13 HALDON ET AL.
that a combination of environmental factors so weakened the societal and institutional resilience of the complex,
multifaceted, and geographically extensive Roman state that eventually a point was reached beyond which the
empire in its established form could not survive without radical change. Plagues on the one hand, and on the other
decreasingly favourable climatic conditions, are thus the culprits.
In fact, in Harper's account, there was a succession of key tests of Roman resilience (that is, the effectiveness of
an organization to resist challenges; Brand & Jax, 2007)—the Antonine plague of the second century CE, the
Cyprianic plague in the third century,1 the recently discussed Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA), and lastly the
Justinianic plague, which first appears in the historical record in the early 540s. In each case the basic structures
of the empire were stretched, and in none of them were they broken, but the cumulative impact of the last two in
particular introduced fundamental shifts into the political and economic fabric of the Roman state such that it was
sufficiently damaged to become less resilient in the face of further challenges.
The book is organized into seven chapters and an epilogue, presenting a thematically structured but chronolog-
ical account of the history of the Roman Empire from what Harper calls, after Edward Gibbon, “the happiest age”—
the empire at its height in the early second century CE—to “the failure of empire” in the period circa 550–640. An
opening chapter sets the Roman Empire in its local and global environmental and climatic contexts, and the prologue
sets out the agenda: here we have an empire that achieved unprecedented wealth and power—but that was ulti-
mately also a whim of moment and nature. As Harper puts it, “the Romans built a giant, Mediterranean empire at
a particular moment in the history of the climatic epoch known as the Holocene – a moment suspended on the edge
of tremendous natural climate change .... In an unintended conspiracy with nature, the Romans created a disease
ecology that unleashed the latent power of pathogen evolution. ... The end of Rome's empire, then, is a story in which
humanity and the environment cannot be separated” (p. 5).
We present our discussion of Harper's analysis of the fate of Rome in three linked articles, each dealing with a
particular set of issues that we have identified as representing questions of both method and of interpretation. In this
contribution we will begin with a discussion of Harper's treatment of Roman climate history, looking first at some
general issues before moving on to illustrate the problems inherent in his treatment of the written sources and his
approach to analyzing the palaeoclimate data. In part two we will discuss in detail one of Harper's central arguments,
disease and the impact of pandemics on the social, political, and economic fabric of the Roman state, and in the third
and final section we will deal with what was purportedly the most devastating of these pandemics, the so‐called
Justinianic plague, before concluding with a discussion of some of the broader questions relating to the social, insti-
tutional, political, and economic aspects of the Roman state.
Although Harper is not a specialist in either climatology or epidemiology (see Harper, 2011, 2013), some of his
recent essay‐length studies have concentrated on the Cyprianic plague and Roman‐era climate (Harper, 2015, 2016;
Harper & McCormick, 2018), and he has familiarized himself not only with much of the current science, but also with
many of the problems that accompany it. In particular the question of consilience—the effort to unify different
research methodologies that address similar problems (Izdebski et al., 2016)—which he raises early on, is methodolog-
ically important, given the different questions, approaches, and priorities of climate, environmental, and biological sci-
entists. But like most historians he has to depend in many respects on the work of specialists in other fields. This
means that in reading the book we are frequently faced with a helpful account of the way in which a particular sci-
ence has come to grips with its research agenda and what advances now permit us to make use of this data the better
to deploy and understand our own historical sources. For many—perhaps the majority of—readers this will be a wel-
come effort to present new material that introduces novel approaches.
Of course, Jared Diamond, at a yet more popular level, made a great impact with his books Guns, germs and steel
and Collapse. And although they have come in for substantial criticism and serious challenges from more specialist
readers in the fields they address, it is nevertheless important to recognize and value such efforts to make specialist
research relevant and accessible to non‐specialist readers (McAnany & Yoffee, 2010). So Harper is not the first to
deploy arguments of this type. But he is the first to attempt such a wide‐ranging synthesis of the historical and sci-
entific data pertaining to the Roman world and the first to engage with the full range of recently‐available ancient
HALDON ET AL. 3 of 13
DNA and palaeoclimate data. He brings the science to bear throughout in a way that challenges the traditional expla-
nations of the fall of the Roman Empire, often focused on aristocratic attitudes towards the empire, corruption, Chris-
tianity, or barbarian invasions. There is no doubt that we learn to appreciate the crucial importance of the
environmental factors in the study of the evolution of human society in general, quite apart from in the history of
the Roman Empire. Harper has done us a service in trying to refocus our attention in this way, and it will no longer
be possible to ignore such features in any discussion of the “rise and fall” of civilizations. Despite such positive devel-
opments, however, a closer reading of Harper's chapters reveals a more complex picture with respect to how the data
from climate, environmental, and biological sciences can be understood and deployed, and as we will see below, there
are some serious questions to be asked of his methodology and the ways in which he exploits the various types of
sources at the historian's disposal.
Harper is keen to stress the multiple factors contributing to the ways in which these natural interventions in
human affairs worked their way out in the economic and political sphere. In particular, he frames the history of
the “decline and fall” of Rome within the much broader framework of the Holocene and highlights the close rela-
tionship between the evolution and expansion of human society across the last 10 millennia and the evolution of a
range of pathogens that have accompanied that developmental trajectory. Here Harper takes his lead from McNeill
(1976). Crudely put (and Harper is more complex than this), demographic expansion, sedentarism, agriculture, and
urbanism are the key elements that recombined to generate welcoming environments for a range of microbial life‐
forms that evolved hand‐in‐hand with the increase in human population and (crucially) population density across
the world, often with devastating consequences. There is, nevertheless, a deafening silence in his treatment: the
history of complex social systems, politics, and state formation are either taken for granted or regarded as mere
secondary phenomena to the all‐embracing power of natural forces. The Fate of Rome, consequently, shows a
strong tendency towards an environmental determinist perspective.
Harper is willing to recognize that “there were deeper, material dynamics – of agrarian production and tax col-
lection, demographic struggle and social evolution – that determined the scope and success of Rome's power”
(p. 5). Yet in the course of the book, such complex and crucial systemic factors become marginal to his main argu-
ments, whereas disease, microbial evolution, and climate are the keys to unlocking the past.
There are several reasons why it would have been helpful to see a more detailed intervention at a
microregional or microstructural level of historical analysis in order to exemplify the causal relationships that
Harper assumes to have been involved and to clarify how they in fact worked themselves out. First, although
there is some description of social, administrative, and economic developments at various key moments, there
is nowhere any real attempt made to build them into the causal picture. One might argue that the book could
not really attempt this, given its other priorities and interests, and this might be fair enough—but then we believe
it would have been appropriate to include a much greater degree of uncertainty about the causal priority of the
features Harper does pick out. The result is a serious divergence between what the book promises to do and
what it does.
Secondly, if such emphasis is to be placed on the unpredictable impact of these environmental features, then the
scientific basis, statistical reliability, and methodological precision of the material employed needs to be handled with
the greatest care—and conveyed to readers.
Thirdly, ancient writers had a solid understanding of some aspects of the environment they inhabited, for exam-
ple, the relationship between seasonal climate variation and agriculture, soil types, and crop requirements; they
understood a great deal about animal husbandry and specialized breeding, and a great deal more. Some of this “tra-
ditional ecological knowledge,” based on empirical experience and generations of practice and observation, was
encapsulated in technical treatises and writings. But the understanding and insight into climate and disease available
to the modern scholar were obviously not something at their disposal. Harper relies heavily, and necessarily, on con-
temporary or near‐contemporary accounts of many of the phenomena in which he is interested. But by cherry‐pick-
ing quotations and passages from Roman writers to illustrate his arguments about the impact of these phenomena, as
well as in order to diagnose what phenomena are actually at issue, he inevitably generates some distortion of the
evidence. Genre and context recede into the background or are ignored, and selection for effect takes priority—the
most dramatic accounts are taken as illustrations, without discussion of their rhetorical context and form and with no
discussion of their potentially high ideological inflection.
Finally, similar issues arise with Harper's use of the archaeological evidence, on the one hand, and, on the other,
with his occasional reliance on the scientific literature to support his “maximalist” portrayal of events. The broad
strokes with which Harper vividly paints the impact of climate change and plague makes this a highly enjoyable read,
but a closer look reveals that this is sometimes to the detriment of historical accuracy. Indeed, we found that the evi-
dence is frequently distorted to fit the narrative and to maximize the dramatic impact. We will illustrate these points
below by zooming in a few key issues.
2 | A CL I M A T E I N D OU BT
Harper insists on dividing the seven centuries, which serve as the focus of his book into three climatic periods.
Despite referring to almost all the relevant palaeoclimate proxies (i.e., scientific studies of tree rings, lake sedi-
ments, and speleothems), including the most recent ones—which all show very considerable variability in temper-
ature and precipitation in particular, and vary both temporally and spatially, across the Mediterranean—Harper
wants to see a straightforward pattern of steadily deteriorating climate, one which is paralleled, implicitly, by
the declining fortunes of the Roman world. On this model we have, first, the benign era of the Roman Climate
Optimum (pp. 39–54); second, an unstable transitional period which Harper himself invents (addressed twice, on
pp. 129–136 and 167–174, in somewhat contradictory terms); and third, a terrifying LALIA (pp. 249–259).
Although we appreciate the rhetorical value of this approach, its simplicity does not engage with the complexity
of our evidence. Indeed, it resembles the way climate history used to be written in the early decades of the dis-
cipline, from the 1960s onward, when Hubert Lamb, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and others promoted notions such
as the “Medieval Warm Period” and the “Little Ice Age” (Lamb, 1965; Le Roy Ladurie, 1961, 1967)—and it is worth
noting that this approach is currently being abandoned, with the Medieval Climate Optimum being redefined
into an “anomaly” and the Little Ice Age now contested as a coherent phenomenon in the Earth's recent
climate history (Büntgen & Hellmann, 2013; Holsinger, 2017; Kelly & Ó Gráda, 2013, 2014; White, 2013; Xoplaki
et al., 2016).
Creating such a climatic‐historical periodization—in itself a perilous exercise, given current debates about the
validity of traditional divisions into historical “epochs”—is even more problematic in the context of the Mediterra-
nean. This part of the globe—connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa—has always been and remains characterized by a
great deal of climatic variability, and to impose such a simple model is artificial to say the least. More particularly,
Harper's understanding of a recent term, the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA), departs from both the actual defi-
nition used by Ulf Büntgen and his colleagues, who invented it, as well as from the current status quaestionis.
Whereas the initial proposition was to single out roughly 130 years that followed a cluster of volcanic explosions
in the 530s and 540s CE as a period of distinctive summer cooling, very visible in tree‐ring data from the Alps and
the Russian Altai (Büntgen et al., 2016), Harper proposes that this phenomenon lasted 250 years, from 450 to
700 CE, and directly impacted regions that the Alpine and Altai proxies do not address.
In fact, recently published studies, although obviously not available to Harper, but which use a variety of temper-
ature proxies that were available at the time of Harper's writing, persuasively argue that the LALIA should be short-
ened to a period of four or five decades following 536. Indeed, when drawing on Alpine and Altai data as well as
material from other regions, widespread Northern Hemispheric cooling only spans the mid‐530s to the 570s
(Büntgen et al., 2017; Helama, Jones, & Briffa, 2017a, 2017b). Rather than coming up with his own definitions of
climate periods, Harper could more profitably have focused on regional case studies—which is what is currently fea-
sible—to see how specific regional or local societies and environments interacted with a changing climate (Carey,
2012; Haldon et al., 2018; Izdebski et al., 2016).
A second observation concerns Harper's problematic conceptualization of the impact of climatic variability on
human affairs, in which a phenomenon dubbed an “enabling environment” is understood as “environmental change
cooperating with human initiative” (both on p. 167), or in more metaphorical terms, “the sun smiling” on human action
(p. 168), in this case the “age of [political] restoration” in the fourth century CE. At an earlier point, at the end of the
discussion of the Roman Climate Optimum, this approach provides grounds for the hypothesis that most Roman per
capita economic growth in the first‐second century CE may have occurred, thanks to the wet and warm conditions of
the Roman Climate Optimum (p. 54).
Proving or disproving such a general statement is, of course, impossible. Harper makes similar observations
about the economic growth that occurred in the fourth century CE, although the references intended to support
some of his views send the reader to studies that are irrelevant in this context. A reference on p. 170, for
example, to a description of the Campanian countryside is made to represent an unspecified wider region—yet
the relevant notes send the reader to Peter Brown's Through the Eye of the Needle (Princeton 2012), a study of
the role that wealth played in the development of Christian culture of Late Antiquity. Although the quoted
passage has no climate‐historical bearing in its original context, Harper deploys it with a rhetorical function that
remains undiscussed.
In failing to argue convincingly for the “enabling” climate Harper is not alone: connecting climate and societal
change is an extremely complex and difficult task. The best that historians can do is to suggest parallels that may have
entailed causal relationships. But these need to be pinpointed and evidence for them needs to be determined and
presented as a possible outcome rather than a necessary one. The relationship between climate (with warmer and
wetter seemingly always being better, though regional studies would suggest some areas where it was possible to
have too much sun or too much rain) and agricultural productivity is rarely pursued by modern writers. In the same
way the relationship between resources extracted by the state and agricultural productivity is also neglected but is
significant when states tax landholdings or heads rather than productivity. Simply assuming a causal connection is
not sufficient. In this respect, it is now generally admitted that we need to focus on finer scale studies, which are
now possible, rather than jump prematurely to popular but overly simplistic sweeping generalizations, however
“likely” they may appear (cf. Camenisch et al., 2016; Izdebski et al., 2016).
2.1 | The Roman Climate Optimum

2.1.1 | Regional and temporal variability of hydroclimate
In his discussion of the Roman Climate Optimum, Harper concludes that the period from 200 BCE to 150 CE was
“warm, wet, and stable” across the Mediterranean (p. 44), to the extent that it could be called the “era of rainfall”
for the entire Roman Empire (p. 46). Unfortunately, this is a statement that simply does not hold true when com-
pared with the available palaeoclimate proxies (including those discussed by Harper himself). This is also not
surprising, as precipitation is highly variable over space (as Harper indeed states on p. 46). Map 1 below is based
on a recent study by Labuhn and others (2018, in press), summarizing the information derived from all hydroclimate
proxies (speleothem and lake sediment data) that are currently available (and would have been available to Harper:
Roberts et al., 2012) for the Mediterranean in the first‐millennium CE. The map shows that in each century some
regions were experiencing drier conditions (i.e., decreased average precipitation levels), whereas others were
experiencing wetter conditions. Although there were places, such as Palestine, where wetter conditions did indeed
prevail over the entire two centuries, in many other places it was quite different. To claim that the Roman Climate
Optimum was warm, wet, and stable in both the southern and northern halves or in much of the Roman Empire
(pp. 14, 44, 46) is a clear exaggeration.
This approach also evades a deeper analysis. If the conditions at the start of the Roman Climatic Optimum helped
Rome's rise to power, how did they affect the Seleucid empire, the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt, the Parthians, or the
Carthaginians? The issue can be tackled either by a regionally nuanced approach or by reasonably trying to incorpo-
rate politics into these climatic narratives. Although attempting to relate political and military timescales to climatic
narratives is a challenging task, avoiding it leaves us with simple assertions of the importance of climate, not argu-
ments of competitive plausibility that can be tested.
Map 1 Patterns of dryness and wetness across the Mediterranean at the times of the early Roman Empire.
Drier/wetter indicates mean conditions for a given century as compared with the first‐millennium CE average for a
given site (map based on analysis in Labuhn et al., 2018; basic data accessible in Roberts et al., 2012).
Harper's discussion of the Tiber floods in Rome is equally questionable (pp. 48–49). Contrary to Harper's inter-
pretation of this data, the floods of the Tiber reflect a particular example from the imperial mega‐city of Rome and its
very peculiar hinterland, rather than a representation of a broader pattern characteristic for the entire Mediterranean
(Aldrete, 2006). For precisely this reason other scholars have been more cautious. Stathakopoulos (2004: 26–33, 53),
for example, hesitates to use the wealth of evidence for food shortages and disease outbreaks at Rome and Constan-
tinople to construct regional crises or to fill out the meager records for famine and epidemics in other urban centres.
In fact, the Italian hydroclimate records do not necessarily attest to increased wetness throughout the entire Roman
Climate Optimum. Further, Harper's discussion of the frequency of accounts of Tiber flooding in the written sources
(which is not the same as the actual occurrence of high water levels in the Tiber) does not take into account the fact
that floods are socio‐natural phenomena and not just “acts of nature.” Except for precipitation patterns, numerous
other factors, such as changes to settlement structures, implementation of new technological solutions, political con-
flicts, deforestation, and erosion, all contribute to the regional flood regime. The bias in the record also plays a role, of
course—it is very likely that we simply have more sources for Tiber floods from periods characterized by abundant
literary production that in addition enjoyed relatively good source preservation, as compared with other periods
(and this is the case for the golden age of Latin literature under the late republic and the early empire).
2.1.2 | Ptolemy's data on rainfall in second‐century Egypt

A closer look at Harper's selective deployment of the written sources in the context of his wide‐ranging
palaeoclimate reconstructions is instructive. Most discussions of climate in the book begin with a vivid evocation
of a written source, a famous ancient author who purportedly describes the predominant climatic conditions of
the era. This is, of course, a powerful rhetorical device, but from the methodological point of view suffers by failing
to take into account the context of largely anecdotal evidence. Harper's discussion of the Roman Climate Optimum,
for example—as is the case with almost all the chapters dealing with climate—begin with a reference to Ptolemy, in
Harper's words the “most illustrious scientist of the Roman Empire” (p. 39). It is suggested that Ptolemy collected
empirical data on the weather in Alexandria, in particular on the distribution of rainfall across the year, and that these
data differ in a surprising way from the modern experience of the occurrence of rain in Egypt. This difference would
suggest that actually the seasonal patterns of rain in the early Roman Empire were different from those of today,
much more evenly spread across the year. Ptolemy's data are presented in Harper's Figure 2.2 (p. 39), compared with
“present‐day” data.
Let us begin with the figure. As with most figures in the book, there is no reference, although the endnote pro-
vided for an earlier paragraph, which discusses the figure, refers us to two items of secondary literature, a book by
Daryn Lehoux on the Greek astronomical calendars and a general chapter on ecology by Robert Sallares in the Cam-
bridge Economic History of the Roman Empire (Lehoux, 2007; Sallares, 2007). Here we discover that Harper's account
of Ptolemy's data comes from Sallares, but much more to the point, while the caption claims that the figure repre-
sents “rainy days per month,” it actually reflects the percentage of total rainy days per month within a year. As a result,
the reader might be persuaded that both today as well as in Antiquity Alexandria received much more than 20–
30 days of rain each winter. Yet this is not the case. More surprising, however, is the fact that both Sallares and
Lehoux are themselves ambivalent about using Ptolemy's astrometeorological calendar, the Phases of the Fixed Stars
(the primary source from which the data actually come) as though they were as valid as modern observations of rain-
fall. Sallares notes that Ptolemy's observations are suggestive of a different pattern of seasonality in Northern Africa
in Antiquity, although a few pages before, in a subsection devoted explicitly to climate, he refers to Theophrastus, a
successor of Aristotle, whose descriptions of weather and vegetation patterns in Greece prompt him to conclude the
opposite, that the general patterns and seasonality of climate in the Graeco‐Roman Antiquity were similar to today. In
his “sensible reflections on Ptolemy's observations,” as Harper has it in his footnote (p. 321, n. 36), Lehoux is even
more uncertain about the interpretation of this data. Indeed, he observes that there is no certainty that any Greek
astrometeorological calendars report observations of weather that would have been made over several years and
then averaged, or any other observations that could in theory be compared with any modern standard data, or any
scientific palaeoclimate proxy (Lehoux, 2007: 119).
When we reexamine Ptolemy's data, however, it appears that Harper is using them at fourth hand. The data were
originally collected by G. Hellmann (1916). They were then included in George W. Murray's book on the Egyptian
Bedouins (Murray, 1935: 19), and then taken in this form by Sallares for his 2007 chapter on ecology in the Cam-
bridge Economic History of the Graeco‐Roman World. Sallares does, however, make it clear that the comparative data
come from observations made in 1889–1922, whereas Harper presents them as present day. Sallares follows Murray
in claiming that Ptolemy's data refer to the conditions of the second century CE, and Murray refers to Hellmann's
table as an “actual record of rainfall made early in the second century A.D.” (p. 19). Murray then proceeds to suggest
that the different distribution of rainy days (or, “more even rainfall”) would have explained why in Hellenistic and
Roman eras settlement was possible along the coast of the Mediterranean between Alexandria and Cyrenaica, and
in some remote parts of the Nile valley, which do not have independent sources of water (i.e., are not oases).
Yet on further inquiry, we find that Murray himself misunderstood Hellmann's article, for he failed to notice that
although Hellmann is initially quite enthusiastic about comparing Ptolemy's data on Egypt with modern patterns (for
the sake of evaluating ancient meteorology, not for the sake of climate reconstruction), he does not believe that
these observations were actually taken by Ptolemy. In fact, the original Greek text leaves no doubt in this respect:
Ptolemy took them from some “Egyptians,” whose names he does not specify—unlike all his other sources. There
is no way of knowing whether these were earlier generations of Hellenistic scientists in Alexandria, or some ancient
pre‐Greek Egyptian observations. But there is unquestionably no basis for claiming that these observations reflect
the realities of Ptolemy's lifetime, as suggested by Murray and picked up first by Sallares and then by Harper. In fact,
all the other observers mentioned by Ptolemy at the end of his calendar lived several centuries earlier—most of them,
except for Julius Caesar, lived in the fourth and fifth century BCE, and the majority can be looked up very easily in the
New Pauly (Brill), the standard online reference work for Ancient History. Lehoux (2007: 118) is less certain about
even an approximate dating of these Egyptians, although it is most probable that the mysterious Egyptians would
have been similarly ancient (Neugebauer, 1975: 929).
It is worth disaggregating these data. Indeed, on closer examination, it seems that the use to which Harper is put-
ting Ptolemy is completely incompatible with what this source actually represents. First, if we trust Ptolemy, the
Egyptians used two different basic terms for rain (or, if we consider different versions of the same roots in their nom-
inal and verbal forms, five terms, plus two terms for drizzle). This apparent inconsistency of the Egyptians might
suggest that this name does not represent a single source, but actually a compilation of sources, produced by Ptolemy
or an earlier scholar.2 To interpret this possibly heterogeneous material as observations made by Ptolemy during his
lifetime seems to us very problematic. Secondly, Hellmann also made some mistakes in his counting of the rainy days,
which actually render the supposed distribution of rainy days in Egypt even more anomalous, with more rainy days
appearing in the now almost rainless months of the year (see Figure 1).
Thirdly, it turns out that two versions of the root hyei (to rain), hyetos and hyetia, appear to derive from sources
that have different interests. Whereas instances of the days with hyetos seem to concentrate in the more usual rainy
months, hyetia is largely a phenomenon associated with spring and the summer, so unusual times for rain in the Nile
delta. If we add to that another key word, ombros (and epombros), we have yet another distribution of rainy days,
more typical for Egypt (Figure 2). Interestingly, the hyetos of the Egyptians actually parallels the hyetos of Eudoxus
0
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Hellmann 1916 "Egyptians": all rain
FIGURE 1 Difference between Hellmann's counting of rainy days in Egypt (quoted indirectly by Harper) and actual
reports of the “Egyptians” in Ptolemy's astronomical calendar (Hellmann, 1916: 337; Claudius Ptolemaeus, 14–65).
We follow Hellmann in relying on K. Wachsmuth's recalculations of Ptolemy's daily dates into the modern Gregorian
calendar (Wachsmuth, 1897)
0
"Egyptians": ombros (total) "Egyptians": hyetos "Egyptians": hyetia
FIGURE 2 Occurrence of days with the three main types of rain according to Ptolemy's “Egyptians” (Claudius
Ptolemaeus, 14–65)
(Figure 3). Both distributions are quite similar, despite the fact that Ptolemy says that Eudoxus reports phenomena
from Sicily, Italy, and Anatolia, whereas the Egyptians should obviously be referring to parts of Egypt. This may
perhaps confirm Hellmann's hypothesis that the data Ptolemy took from Egyptians and used for Egypt had over
the centuries become contaminated and contained some records of rainy days in other, more northerly parts of
the Mediterranean. The hyetia‐source, on the contrary, which seems to place most of the rainfall in spring and sum-
mer, might have been more concerned with unusual weather events, rather than in recording “normal” patterns of
rainfall across the year.
In fact, Ptolemy's “rainfall” data are not rainfall data at all, but the distribution of rainy days across the year, with
no indication of how abundant the rain on these days actually was! When relating rainfall to agricultural productivity,
we need to consider not just the annual average rainfall, but also its distribution over time (changes in seasonality).
Moreover, it is almost certain that these reports do not represent a single year, or even a single source.
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
"Egyptians": hyetia "Egyptians": hyetos Eudoxus: hyetos (total)
FIGURE 3 Occurrence of days with hyetos according to the Egyptians and Eudoxus (Claudius Ptolemaeus, 14–6)
Even more importantly, these reports were collected in order to understand the influence of stars on the
weather, not in order to provide empirically reliable records of the distribution of rainy days across the year. There-
fore, as Lehoux rightly suggests in passing in his study of this fascinating source material, we should not try to force
these data into our modern scientific frameworks of meteorological observations. Perhaps a close, geo‐tagged study
of all existing reports of weather in the Greek and Latin scientific literature would render interesting results, but tak-
ing one complex text and using it as a modern‐style observation record is simply erroneous. The reader should not be
misled by the fact that climate variability in the early modern period (after 1500 CE) in different parts of Europe and
China has been reconstructed on the basis of the written records: these are, in fact, huge databases containing thou-
sands of records from all types of sources, not single testimonies interpreted in isolation from their broader literary
tradition (Brázdil, Pfister, Wanner, Von Storch, & Luterbacher, 2005). In fact, in ancient and medieval sources, even in
official documents that refer to supposedly actual events, weather could play a purely literary or rhetorical role rather
than reflect an empirical observation (Janiszewski, 2000; Schuh, 2016).
As will readily be seen from this initial discussion, Harper's entirely justified wish to paint climatic and other
environmental factors more firmly into the picture are jeopardized by these methodological and interpretive issues.
However significant such factors may actually have been in combining with other causal elements to bring about
the decline of Roman power and a transformation of the Roman state along with the different regional societies
and cultures it embraced, the argument for their having had the impacts ascribed to them by Harper is thus seriously
compromised. As we have shown above and will continue to illustrate in the following articles, Harper's selective
treatment of the written sources often uses decontextualized passages from the ancient sources while overlooking
key issues of genre, purpose, and composition that radically affect the range of interpretations that may be placed
upon them. The value of any surviving ancient sources in developing a coherent argument depends on the method
being applied. In subsequent discussions we will show that the flaws and failings identified above recur in many other
parts of the argument of this book.
ENDNOTES
1
Named for the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius (138–161) and the mid‐third‐century bishop of Carthage, Cyprian,
respectively.
2
In comparison, for the sake of illustration, Eudoxus, who lived in Greece in the fourth century BCE, before the foundation
of Alexandria in Egypt (Folkerts, Nesselrath, & Brodersen, 2006) also reports data for “Asia [Minor], Sicily, and Italy” (Clau-
dius Ptolemaeus, 1907, 67, line 8–9), uses a single root in two nominal versions, singular and plural, for rain (and these are
as many as 27 daily weather records); in addition, only once does he use the term “to drizzle” (psekazei)—also used by the
“Egyptians.” To take another example, the same applies to Caesar, “reporting” for Italy, who provided just seven mentions
of “rain” and none for the “drizzle.”
ORCID
John Haldon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1210-0829
Hugh Elton http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4933-3343
Sabine R. Huebner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3324-5050
Lee Mordechai http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8474-0473
Timothy P. Newfield http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1451-5024
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
John Haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis'30 Professor of European History and Professor of Byzantine History at
Princeton University. He is Director of the Avkat Archeological Project (Turkey: www.princeton.edu/avkat) and
the Princeton University Climate Change and History Research Initiative (http://cchri.princeton.edu). His research
focuses on the history and archaeology of the early and middle Byzantine empire, on premodern state systems
across the European and Islamic worlds, on the impact of environmental and climate change and stress on soci-
etal resilience in premodern social systems, and on the production, distribution, and consumption of resources in
the late ancient and medieval world, particularly in the context of warfare.
Hugh Elton teaches in the Ancient Greek and Roman Studies program at Trent University, Canada. He was pre-
viously Director of the British Institute at Ankara and ran archaeological field surveys in the Göksu Valley and at
Avkat in Turkey. His research focuses on the functioning of the Late Roman Empire, with particular interests in
Anatolia and warfare.
Sabine R. Huebner holds the chair of Ancient History at the University of Basel in Switzerland and is head of the
Basel Doctoral Program in Classical Civilizations. Her research focuses on the everyday lives of the common peo-
ple in the Eastern Roman Mediterranean, on papyrology, and on the social, economic, and religious history of
Roman and Byzantine Egypt. She is the director of the Basel papyri project: https://altegeschichte.philhist.
unibas.ch/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/edition‐pbas/, the “Byzantine to Arab Egypt” project: https://

altegeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/change‐and‐continuities/ and the head of
the Basel Climate Science & Ancient History Lab: https://altegeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/de/forschung/
forschungsprojekte/climate‐science/.
Adam Izdebski is the leader of the “Byzantine Resilience” Independent Max Planck Research Group at the Max
Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. He is also an assistant professor at the Institute of His-
tory of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He specializes in late antique, Byzantine, and environmental history.
His recent publications include A Rural Economy in Transition. Asia Minor from Antiquity into the Early Middle Ages
and a series of papers co‐authored in the special issue of the Quaternary Science Reviews devoted to climatic and
environmental history of the Mediterranean, which he also coedited. He is a member of the Princeton
University's Climate Change and History Research Initiative.
Lee Mordechai is the inaugural Byzantine Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame and is the Asso-
ciate Director and co‐PI of Princeton University's Climate Change and History Research Initiative (http://cchri.
princeton.edu). His research focuses on premodern and especially late antique environmental history in the East-
ern Mediterranean, social and political history of the eleventh century Byzantine Empire, the late antique econ-
omy (as Director of Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy, http://coinage.princeton.edu), and
contemporary historical memory of the Middle Ages in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Timothy P. Newfield is Assistant Professor of History and Biology at Georgetown University. He codirects the
Princeton CCHRI with John Haldon and Lee Mordechai. He is an environmental historian and historical epidemi-
ologist. His research primarily addresses the history of infectious disease, both human and nonhuman; climate
change; and food production and food shortage in western Eurasia in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Recent publications, several of which are collaborative, have appeared in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
Royal Society Open Science, Early Medieval Europe, PNAS, Postclassical Archaeologies, Late Antique Archaeol-
ogy, Geology, Journal of Roman Archaeology, and Climatic Change.
How to cite this article: Haldon J, Elton H, Huebner SR, Izdebski A, Mordechai L, Newfield TP. Plagues, cli-
mate change, and the end of an empire: A response to Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome (1): Climate. History
Compass. 2018;e12508. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12508
DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12506
ARTICLE
Plagues, climate change, and the end of an empire.

Plagues and a crisis of empire
1
History Department, Dickinson Hall,
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey Abstract
2
Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, Trent This is the second of a three‐section review of Kyle
University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Harper's The Fate of Rome in which we examine in detail
3
Harper's treatment of two allegedly widespread and mortal
Switzerland Roman outbreaks of disease. In the case of the second‐
4
Max Planck Institute for the Science of century Antonine plague, we demonstrate that Harper
5 overlooked a major controversy and instead portrayed an
Krakow, Poland oversimplified narrative of a catastrophic event. In the case
6
The Medieval Institute, University of Notre of the third‐century Cyprianic plague, we call attention to
Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
7
several glaring methodological issues in Harper's treatment
Departments of History & Biology,
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. of the episode, point out the absence of corresponding evi-
Correspondence dence in the papyri, and cast doubt on the linkage previously
Hall, Princeton University, Princeton 08544, NJ.
drawn between the plague and archaeology.
As we argued in the first of this series of articles,1 Kyle Harper's book sets out to redraw the traditional picture of the
“decline and fall” of the Roman Empire, with a focus on the period from the second to seventh centuries CE. In par-
ticular, he argues that it was really a series of environmental impacts—plague and disease, in the context of shifting
and increasingly less favorable climatic conditions—that were the key causal factors that weakened the societal resil-
ience of the complex, multifaceted, and geographically extensive Roman state in such a way that a tipping point was
eventually reached, beyond which the empire in its established form was unable to survive. While we are in sympathy
with the fundamental aims of the book—that environmental factors of all kinds need to be taken much more centrally
into account in analyses and discussion of this period and its history—we also find that a closer reading of the sources
and literature upon which the argument is based reveals a number of substantial methodological problems as well as
issues of interpretation, casting serious doubt on the general lines of the argument as they are developed. In this arti-
cle, we look in particular at one of Harper's central arguments, disease, and the impact of two early pandemics on the
social, political, and economic fabric of the Roman state.
2 | CRITICISMS FORGOTTEN? THE ANTONINE PLAGUE
According to Harper, the Antonine plague was not the “neutron bomb” that the Justinianic plague was (on which see
the third in this series of articles). It claimed fewer lives—a mere seven‐to‐eight million (pp. 18, 115)—and was less
disruptive socioeconomically. Nevertheless, it serves in The Fate of Rome as the exemplar of the “awesome, uncanny
power of nature” (p. 22). Indeed, the second‐century pandemic, the first of three to allegedly “level” Mediterranean
populations in Late Antiquity, not only “triggered” the crisis of Marcus Aurelius' reign but was also the first of four
“decisive turns” or “points of transformation” (p. 21) the empire faced. Importantly, the Antonine plague is the most
hotly debated of the three “microbial mass murderers” (p. 13) to feature in Harper's book. Indeed, the only aspect of
the plague that is not regularly debated is its diagnosis: Most, like Harper, agree on Variola major, smallpox (pp. 18, 92,
102, 104–115).
Rarely does Harper give his readers a sense of the scholarship from which he selects to build his argument.
Nowhere is his selectiveness more apparent than in his treatment of the Antonine plague. We do not necessarily dis-
agree that “germs are far deadlier than Germans” (p. 18), that is, more people died of the “invisible” Antonine plague
than at the hands of the Marcomanni, but we do take issue with Harper's sweeping of an intense scholarly debate
under the academic carpet.2 In an endnote on page 329, Harper acknowledges that he has “side‐stepped some terms
of the debate.” In his account, he follows the lead of Duncan‐Jones (1996) and Scheidel (2002), adopting by default,
therefore, the extreme interpretation. Their oft‐cited essays epitomize the current maximalist stance on the Antonine
plague. Although Duncan‐Jones' work on the outbreak has been seminal and Scheidel's paper is a valuable explora-
tion in methods, others have undermined their efforts. That Harper leads his readers to believe otherwise and adopts
an extreme position on this plague by ignoring scholarship that suggests it had a less than catastrophic outcome is
seriously problematic. Exploring the debate on this plague is illuminating in that it evidences Harper's willingness
to cast aside criticisms in order to create a lethal pandemic.
Harper is not the only one to push an extreme position in recent years (Sabbatani & Fiorino, 2009; several con-
tributions to Lo Cascio, 2012). Yet for many scholars, the Antonine pandemic is nearly back where Gilliam left it in
1961. Gilliam countered the maximalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars like Seeck and
Boak who adopted a stance on the Antonine plague akin to Harper's on the Justinianic plague. These catastrophists
also sketched the second‐century pandemic with “vague but extravagant phrases” (Gilliam, 1961: 226). One argued
that the pandemic was akin to the Black Death; another ventured the view that it killed half of the empire's popula-
tion (Harper dismisses Gillam twice (p. 324 n. 5 and p. 329 n.78) and overlooks other minimalist readings, like Salmon,
1974: pp. 134, 137‐139). Most since have favored a mortality between 10 and 30% (p. 329 n. 78). By this measure,
Harper's estimate appears uncharacteristically reserved. We observe, however, that—following Duncan‐Jones' claim
(1996: 128–9, 134–6) that the mortality varied regionally—Harper estimates that the worst affected areas lost 20%
(p. 115).
Gilliam critically assessed the written sources for the Antonine plague. He concluded, “there is not enough evi-
dence to identify satisfactorily the disease or diseases responsible, to trace the epidemic's origin and spread with
much accuracy, or to determine even approximately the number of those who died” (Gilliam, 1961: 227, 247–51).3
Although maximalists writing around the turn of the 21st century were more creative than those working half a cen-
tury earlier, Gilliam's conclusion still stands: concrete evidence that the Antonine plague was a momentous event
remains elusive.
In 1996, Duncan‐Jones published an impressive array of nonliterary material in order to complement the spotty
and ambiguous textual evidence (to which we may now add newly‐acquired records of lead emissions from
Greenland, which indicate a decline of mining/smelting that corresponds temporarily to the Antonine Plague:
McConnell et al., 2018). He found that various proposed proxies for demography and economy all coincided in show-
ing the same downward curve at the time of the plague and that this provided a basis for arguing that the Antonine
plague was a cataclysmic event, one powerful enough to suppress record keeping (Duncan‐Jones, 1996: 108,
120–134). As impressive as Duncan‐Jones' collection of data is, in 2003, Greenberg (whom Harper lists without
comment: p. 324 n. 5) argued the congruence of his independent lines of evidence cannot substitute for mortality
statistics. Greenberg looked at the same evidence but over a longer term, showing clearly that the synchronicity of
the data assembled by Duncan‐Jones is not unique to the plague years. The alleged plague indices “rise and fall in
synchronization” throughout much of the second century (Duncan‐Jones, 1996: 114), which problematizes attempts
to assign a demographic value to the alignment of these datasets at any point. Greenberg's longer purview as well
illustrated that dips and gaps in Duncan‐Jones' datasets occur in many non‐outbreak years, such as in the midst of
what Harper calls, after Gibbon, the “Happiest Age” (p. 11), that is, in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, long before
the emergence of the Antonine Plague (Greenberg, 2003: 415–418). Harper overlooks the point, but this indicated
clearly for Greenberg, as it does for us, that correlation is not causation. Even if Duncan‐Jones' nearly harmonious
dataset‐dip did illustrate excess mortality, it is a leap to blame the Antonine plague for it. It is a leap that forces
one to revisit the methodology of the first cycle of maximalists and put full faith in the literary sources, something
Harper does in spite of the fact that Gilliam among others had already challenged the value of their testimony (clearly
Duncan‐Jones, 1996: 108, 116, 118‐120, 136 did not think the written sources enough). Not only did the Romans
suffer a number of defeats and rebellions in the 160s and 170s (Greenberg, 2003: 424) but there is also evidence
of subsistence crises and abrupt climate change at that time (Rossignol & Durost, 2007; Rossignol, 2012a, 2012;
Gilliam, 1961: 235; Elliott, 2016), points that, perhaps surprisingly, Harper plays down (pp. 45 and 321 n. 49).
Greenberg punched additional holes in Duncan‐Jones' other arguments, in particular making the point that more,
not less, documentary evidence and building activity characterizes later mass mortality events (Greenberg, 2003:
416); and others have likewise called Duncan‐Jones' methods into question (Bruun, 2003, 2007, 2012). But the
key point is clear: If the Antonine plague was cataclysmic, Duncan‐Jones' indices do not evidence it.
Scheidel took a closer look at the Egyptian papyri. Multiple interpretations exist for some pieces of evidence
(Bagnall, 2000, 2002: 115–116; van Minnen, 2001), but few doubt that the plague visited Egypt; Scheidel wagered
that the province was “among the most heavily affected.” It is certainly reasonable that a heavily urbanized region
largely connected by a single “artery of communication” was “prone to suffer during a pandemic” (Scheidel, 2002:
98), especially one primarily spread via respiratory secretions. But it is hardly definite that the demographic and eco-
nomic disruption visible in the papyri only or at all reflect the devastation of the Antonine plague, as others have sug-
gested. Once again, Harper casts aside existing criticisms of an extreme position.
Scheidel introduces a model to explain trends in wage and lease data visible in the papyri well into the third cen-
tury (Scheidel, 2001, 2002). Although Scheidel is circumspect, his model assumes, after Duncan‐Jones, that the
Antonine plague was “severe” and “catastrophic” (Scheidel, 2002: 97, 107, 108). The model ultimately seeks to
explain significant, if possibly limited, economic change in Egypt during and after the plague. In short, Scheidel finds
that “fewer people had to be fed” (Scheidel, 2002: 98–114). Whether the plague accounts for this, as Scheidel argues,
or not is very uncertain, as critics have pointed out (Bagnall, 2002: 114–120). But if we accept this to be true, we
must take two leaps before we arrive at the conclusion that the Antonine plague devastated the empire. We must
question how representative the Egyptian experience of the Antonine plague was of the experience elsewhere—
would a highly infectious disease, smallpox or not, have so thrived in less urbanized and less connected provinces?
And, more significantly, are we certain the pandemic thrived in Egypt at all? (doubts: Bagnall, 2000: 292; Bagnall,
2002). There is but one account in the papyri of a disease outbreak during the plague years, from an account written
in 172/73 but mentioning an outbreak a few years before (Kambitsis, 1985: 98–9; Blouin, 2014: 255‐6).4 The phras-
ing implies that the event was at least regional and therefore that it could have been connected to the pandemic
reported elsewhere (Duncan‐Jones, 1996: 119; Harper, 2017: 99). But is this enough to suppose that the plague
caused the disruption Scheidel illuminates as Harper accepts?
The question has much to do with whether the adult male taxpayers missing from the documents had, in fact,
died (alongside their families) in the pandemic. Some argue they simply relocated (Bagnall, 2000: 291). Others pro-
pose they died of something else. It was pointed out in 2013 that evidence presented decades ago for subpar Nile
flooding in the plague period might, alone or in congruence with disease and the Boukoloi uprising, explain
what Scheidel and others have seen in the papyri (floods failed frequently before, during and after the plague:
Wilson 2013: 265, using McCormick, Büntgen, et al., 2012: 183; also McCormick 2013: 76‐9; Elliott 2016; Newfield
and Labuhn 2017: 219‐228). If so, the Egyptian experience could hardly stand in for the plague experience in other
provinces. Again, the question is whether we can move beyond correlation.
Other supposed proxies for the wide extent of the pandemic have emerged in recent years. Harper draws upon
these, notably eleven inscriptions, an amulet, and a statue that refer to Apollo (Jones, 2005, 2016). Although we learn
from the varyingly reliable Vita Veri in the Historia Augusta that the plague was rumored at the time to have emanated
from a temple in Seleucia dedicated to Apollo, these assorted items only evidence concern for health in the Antonine
plague era, not a pandemic (pp. 100–101; cf. Gilliam, 1961: 235–6). It remains clear to us, therefore, that the latest
rendition of the extreme position is no longer tenable. The methodological and evidentiary grounds on which it is
founded are flawed. That Harper adopts such a position, but ignores an array of sound criticisms in doing so, raises
several points. Although only faintly perceptible, Harper's acceptance of Duncan‐Jones and Scheidel's essays ulti-
mately illustrates his willingness to trust almost at face value written reports of disease outbreaks. Only by doing
so could he attempt to ground his strong language and claims, that, for instance, “everywhere there might be evi-
dence of the plague, it is to be found” (p. 100), that the plague “was a mortality event on a scale the empire had never
experienced before” (p. 114), that the disease exploded outwards like a “bomb” from Rome and Alexandria (pp. 99,
111), or that the pathogen had a “transcontinental reach in the space of only a few short years” (p. 107).
Harper's selective reading of the scholarship also facilitates his acceptance and use of the popular smallpox diag-
nosis. There is no time here to get into the ongoing debate about whether smallpox, or a poxvirus ancestor anything
like V. major, existed in late antiquity, but Harper's handling of the literature on the epidemiology and evolutionary
biology of smallpox is very commendable. It is nevertheless striking that he accepts the results of maximalist work
on the Antonine plague that has been heavily criticized to validate a smallpox diagnosis of the plague, which he then
in turn exploits to further support his maximalist reading (pp. 108–110). The diagnosis explains how the disease could
have spread so widely and so fast. It also allows Harper to confirm that alleged later flare‐ups of the plague in, for
example, Egypt and Noricum were in fact the Antonine plague (p. 111), that the aforementioned missing Egyptians
had unquestionably died in the pandemic (pp. 111–112), and that, as Duncan‐Jones and others have speculated,
“the military was struck hard by the disease” (p. 112). The diagnosis of an acute respiratory infection also helps
Harper account for the plague's regionality, the idea that more densely populated regions were worse affected,
something Duncan‐Jones argued for to explain discrepancies (indications of less than catastrophic mortality) in his
data (Duncan‐Jones, 1996: 128–9, 134–6).
Harper's telling of the Antonine plague is therefore very selective about the sources and the scholarship used.
Provocative and persuasive as his version of the second‐century outbreak might be, it is as deliberately crafted as
the literary accounts of the Antonine plague themselves. Similar biases appear in Harper's accounts of the Cyprianic
and Justinianic plagues.
3 | T HE “C R I S I S ” O F T H E TH I R D C E N T U R Y A N D T H E CY P R I A N I C P L A G U E
REVISITED
Over the past few decades, many studies and a number of comprehensive handbooks have dealt with the Roman
Empire in the third century CE, most of which rightly refute the earlier scholarly characterization of the entire third
century as a period of continuous crisis and instead highlight cases of regional stability and even economic
flourishing. Nonetheless, recent scholarship agrees that an acute phase of transformation, leading to concurrent polit-
ical, economic, social, and cultural changes, took place between the reigns of Decius and Valerian (249–275 CE). One
question has been at the center of historical debate: what were the reasons for the concomitant challenges arising
particularly from the middle of the century on that led the Roman Empire to fall apart? While numerous explanations
have been brought forward to make sense of the profound transformations the Roman Empire underwent in the third
century, only recent scholarly approaches by McCormick, Manning, and Brooke have pointed to exogenous factors as
contributing to the disintegration of the Roman Empire between the third and sixth centuries (Brooke, 2014;
Manning, 2013; McCormick, Büntgen, et al., 2012). In his own book, Harper connects the acute crisis of the third cen-
tury CE with climate change and the Cyprianic plague. In his view, the plague was “an exogenous shock to an already
stressed system that triggered immediate, cascading change with rapid re‐organizational effects” (Harper, 2015: 224).
This is an intriguing, but potentially overly simplistic hypothesis that still awaits testing at the regional level with in‐
depth analysis of socioeconomic parameters that combines natural and historical evidence for climate.
3.1 | Plague and papyri

Harper starts from the assumption that the Cyprianic plague hit at a period “when basic facts sometimes are known
barely or not at all.” (p. 137). Although the surviving histories fit this description, we have continuous papyrological
documentation for the third century: compared with 10,443 documentary papyri loosely dated to the first century
and 25,903 documentary papyri loosely dated to the second century, we possess roughly 22,000 papyri dated to
the third century CE (according to a search in the online database papyri.info, which includes all edited papyri). We
can therefore hardly speak of a dark century, at least as far as the Roman province of Egypt is concerned, where
the plague is said to have taken its origin and made recurrent appearances. Should we thus not expect to find multiple
references among the papyri to a mass mortality event of that scale? We do not.
Harper claims the plague reached both cities and countryside and exemplifies the point by reference to the
prominent example of the city of Oxyrhynchus in Middle Egypt (p. 138). The problem is that there is not a single
papyrus referring to pandemic disease from Oxyrhynchus nor from any other town or village in Egypt that can be
dated to the years 249–262, the period that Harper assigns to the recurring episodes of the plague. The single Oxy-
rhynchus papyrus from the third century (P. Merton 1.26) that refers to an infectious disease and can be securely
dated—concerning the appointment of a guardian for an orphaned girl whose parents both died of a “shivering dis-
ease”—was written on February 8, 274, so clearly it does not fit Harper's timeline. Only two additional Oxyrhynchus
papyri and one papyrus of unknown provenance which refer to some form of contagious disease are roughly dated to
the third century (P. Oxy. 14.1666 esp. l. 20–21; PSI 4.299; P. Strasb. 1.73). Furthermore, and hardly surprising under
a grim premodern mortality regime, papyri reporting infectious diseases are not restricted to the third century but can
be found throughout the entire papyrological millennium from the early Ptolemaic period (third–second century BCE)
down to the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century (Casanova, 1984, 1988). The papyri simply do not offer
any direct support for a mass mortality event during the middle of the third century.
Harper claims that the 240 s were a decade of multiple, below average Nile floods, fatally coinciding with a series
of droughts on the southern coasts of the Mediterranean basin: “In AD 244, the waters failed to rise. In AD 245 or
246, the floods were weak again.” (p. 134). In support of this claim, reference is made to the database assembled by
McCormick, Harper, More, and Gibson (2012).5 Their data for the quality of the Nile flood is based on a study by
Bonneau (1971) who assembled all the information for the entire Graeco‐Roman period, from the third century
BCE to the end of the third century CE. Yet here we find that Harper's own dataset (based on Bonneau 1971:
256) is in direct contrast to his claim for weak floods in the 240 s CE. Bonneau lists for the years 239 CE–250 CE
six normal or even good years. As Manning et al. (2017) have noted, for the years for which we lack any evidence,
we should assume normal rather than below average floods, since it is generally adverse floods that find mention
in the sources. Just one year, 242 CE, is recorded with a possibly below‐average Nile flood. In particular, the years
244, 245, and 246 CE—according to Harper consecutive low flood years (p. 134)—are listed both in Bonneau and
Harper's own database as normal‐to‐good floods. Harper's claim that the Nile failed the Egyptian population spectac-
ularly in the years 244–246 CE, simultaneous with a series of droughts on the southern rim of the Mediterranean,
crumbles in face of the evidence.
In fact, Bonneau's (1971) assembled records imply a rather stable Egyptian climate for the third century. She lists
15 below‐average Nile floods for the first century CE, 23 for the second, and 15 for the third. Additionally, she
reports six very strong or even destructive Nile floods for the first century CE and 23 for the second, but a mere four
for the third century CE. This is in clear contradiction to Harper's claim (p. 133–135) that the Nile region showed con-
siderably more climatic turbulence in the third century than before.
3.2 | The Cyprianic plague
As far as the Cyprianic plague is concerned, Harper claims that it entered the Empire from Ethiopia sometime
before 249, reached Rome in 251, and spread around the Mediterranean between 249 and 262 CE (p. xii, Timeline).
Why Ethiopia and not, for instance, via Egyptian harbors on the Red Sea is never explained, since even the claim
that the plague started in Egypt at all rests on very shaky grounds. In support for his theory, Harper refers to a
funerary site excavated at Roman Egyptian Thebes where a number of bodies were covered in lime slake and incin-
erated: “The disposal site dates to the middle of the third century, and the utter uniqueness of the corpse‐burning
and mass disposal enterprise argues that something about the disease had startled the inhabitants into extreme
measures.” (p. 137).
This so‐called “body‐disposal unit” requires closer inspection. Initially, the site was reported in 1998 to consist
merely of a few human skeletons discovered in a hall of the Tomb of Harwa and within a layer of slaked lime
(Tiradritti, 1998: esp. 6). Beneath this, and above the floor, funerary equipment dating from the Ptolemaic period
through to the third and fourth centuries was uncovered. The first excavation report thus does not support the dating
of the bodies to the mid‐third century CE. Several excavation seasons later, the bodies were redated to “after the
second century AD” (Tiradritti, 2014). Harper accepts uncritically this 2014 report, which confidently connects
the site to the Cyprianic plague. Third‐century pottery and third–fourth century oil lamps narrowed the date of
the interred Egyptians, but they do not support the claim that the three lime kilns also reported at the site, which
likely burned all day and night (hence the lamps), were producing slaked lime in order to cover the bodies of large
numbers of disease victims. These were supposedly thrown onto the bonfire that was excavated at the site in
2010, at the time of the Cyprianic plague. How many corpses were incinerated, whether or not they were dis-
eased, and when they died we cannot know. The small number of skeletons found at the site so far, whether
or not it corresponds to the Cyprianic plague, cannot be interpreted as a mass grave.6
Harper's argument for the chronology and origin of the plague in southern Egypt hinges further on the letters of
bishop Dionysius of Alexandria quoted in Eusebius' church history: “The more decisive evidence for the pandemic's
southern origin is provided by the bishop of Alexandria, who places the disease in the Egyptian metropolis by at least
AD 249. The first dateable evidence for the pandemic in the west comes from AD 251, at Rome. The chronology
affirms an eastern point of entry and vindicates the chronicles.” (p. 137). Two of Dionysius' letters are cited: one
to the bishop Hierax (Euseb. HE VII.21.1–10), the other one to the brothers in Alexandria (Euseb., HE VII.22.1–11).
In the latter, Dionysius refers to a plague decimating the population of Alexandria, and Harper uses this to argue that
the plague entered the Roman Empire via Egypt in winter 248/249 and made its way from there westward before
reaching Rome in 251. He thereby roughly follows the dating of Dionysius' letters suggested by Bienert (1978)
and accepted by Strobel (1993). Unfortunately, however, he glosses over the fact that the dating of these two letters,
like the maximalist stance on the Antonine Plague, is highly contested. Scholarship on Dionysius' letters both before
and after Bienert in fact accepts a considerably later date for the two letters, ascribing them unanimously to the early
260 s (Von Harnack, 1893; Feltoe, 1904; Schwartz, 1909; Oost, 1961: esp. 9; Lane Fox, 1989: 555 n. l7; Tissot, 1997;
Jakab, 2001: esp. 31–32; Legutko, 2003: 27–41, esp. 33; Baumkamp, 2014: 79–85). This date entirely undermines
Harper's construction of the plague's chronology. As in his use of Ptolemy's “empirical rainfall records” (discussed
in the first in this series of articles), again Harper exploits sources uncritically in order to advance the more dramatic
outcome.
Once again, therefore, what could have been a strong argument for the dramatic impact of disease is weakened
by serious methodological flaws and in particular by a tendency to over‐interpret available (and often problematic)
data and to adopt a maximalist and dramatic approach to the evidence. As we shall see in the third and final article
in this series, these problems become especially pronounced when the question of the Justinianic pandemic is at
issue. Rhetorical overkill, together with an approach to the social and economic history of the Roman world that
tends to minimize the causal centrality of societal structures and human agents, compromise the interpretive coher-
ence and validity of Harper's whole project.
ENDNOTES
1
Plagues, climate change and the end of an empire. A Response to Kyle Harper, The fate of Rome. Climate, disease, and the
end of an empire (Princeton University Press: Princeton‐Oxford 2017), Part 1: Climate.
2
Plagues and their impacts are a focus for intense discussion, but a great deal more controversy surrounds the second‐
century plague than those of the third or sixth century. Durliat (1989) questioned the Justinianic plague's impacts in
earnest. His critiques were debunked, it appears satisfactorily for most studying that plague, in one paper published twice:
Sarris, 2002/2007. Later critics of maximalist readings of the Justinianic Plague include: Whittow, 1996: 66–8, and
Wickham, 2005: 13, 547–9; Devroey, 2009: 146, 148–9. While not unknown beforehand, the first serious study on the
Cyprianic plague was Harper's own work on the subject: Harper, 2015, 2016: 473–6, the conclusions of which have been
largely accepted, see, e.g. Scheidel, 2017: 333–4.
3
Gilliam (1961: 250) hazards a minimalist guess of one million deaths or, by his reckoning, the loss of two percent of the
empire's population. Harper's seven million deaths represent a mortality of nine percent of the empire, which he populates
with 75,000,000 people on the eve of the Antonine Plague (p. 10).
4
Katherine Blouin, pers. comm. 27 February 2018.
5
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1meoPMwiiVZ_buAYgasx5NBt7Gz3Ar9LJysco6npzEgY/edit#gid=0.
6
The published photograph of the bonfire shows three skulls. The more important point is that there are alternative and
better documented interpretations of this site possible. Lime production sites containing human remains are common in
Egypt, because old mummies were used to fuel the fires. The good burning qualities of coffins and mummies were well‐
known, and the human remains in the lime slake of the Harwa tomb might well come from mummies found in burials in
the neighbourhood used to fuel the fire of the lime kilns (potentially even those of the Egyptian official Harwa himself,
who was the Chief steward of the God's Wife of Amun, Amenirdis I, during the 25th Dynasty). It is also worth noting that
monastic communities from the fourth century on are known to have dismantled ancient tombs and burned pharaonic
monuments to slake lime for other building purposes: see Bagnall & Rathbone, 2005: 97; Römer, 2016: 112–114). This
is just as likely an explanation for the Harwa tomb. McCormick, 2015: 331 refers to the Thebes site as ‘Another mass
deposit of bodies, apparently dated to the 2nd or 3rd c., covered with lime, and provisionally associated with the plague
of the mid‐ 3rd c.’, citing Tiradritti, 2014 in support.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
John Haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis'30 Professor of European History and Professor of Byzantine History at
Princeton University. He is Director of the Avkat Archaeological Project (Turkey: www.princeton.edu/avkat) and
focuses on the history and archaeology of the early and middle Byzantine empire; on premodern state systems
across the European and Islamic worlds; on the impact of environmental and climate change and stress on soci-
etal resilience in premodern social systems; and on the production, distribution, and consumption of resources in
Avkat in Turkey. His research focusses on the functioning of the Late Roman Empire, with particular interests in
altegeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/change‐and‐continuities/, and the head of
His recent publications include A Rural Economy in Transition. Asia Minor from Antiquity into the Early Middle Ages
and a series of papers coauthored in the special issue of the Quaternary Science Reviews devoted to climatic and
environmental history of the Mediterranean, which he also coedited. He is a member of the Princeton University
Climate Change and History Research Initiative.
ciate Director and co‐PI of Princeton University Climate Change and History Research Initiative (http://cchri.
princeton.edu). His research focuses on premodern and especially late antique environmental history in the
Eastern Mediterranean; social and political history of the eleventh century Byzantine Empire; the late antique
economy (as Director of Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy, http://coinage.princeton.edu);
and contemporary historical memory of the Middle Ages in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Timothy P. Newfield is Assistant Professor of History and Biology at Georgetown University. He codirects the
ologist. His research primarily addresses the history of infectious disease, both human and nonhuman, climate
change, and food production and food shortage in western Eurasia in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
mate change, and the end of an empire. A response to Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome (2): Plagues and a crisis
of empire. History Compass. 2018;e12506. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12506
DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12507
ARTICLE
Plagues, climate change, and the end of an empire:

Disease, agency, and collapse
1
History Department, Dickinson Hall,
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey Abstract
2
Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, Trent This is the last of a three‐part review of Kyle Harper's The
University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Fate of Rome. Here, we scrutinize Harper's treatment of
3
the Justinianic Plague, demonstrating how he crafts a con-
Switzerland vincing narrative based on rhetorical flourishes but little evi-
4
Max Planck Institute for the Science of dence. We call further attention to several internal
5 contradictions within the chapter and misinterpretations of
Krakow, Poland evidence. We conclude this series of articles with a reflec-
6
The Medieval Institute, University of Notre tion on Harper's deterministic approach to environmental
Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
7
history. While the environment appears everywhere,
Departments of History & Biology,
Georgetown University, D.C., Washington agency (people: society and culture) is mostly absent. We
Correspondence finish by emphasizing the need to develop more nuanced
Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
causal explanations for complex historical processes and
08544. suggest that future attempts to bring together such wide‐
ranging material be done within interdisciplinary research
teams.
As we argued in the two preceding articles in this series,1 Kyle Harper's book sets up some powerful challenges to
traditional approaches to the history of the Roman Empire and the fate of its peoples in the period stretching from
the second to the seventh century CE, with a special emphasis on the exogenous causes—climate and disease—
underlying its decline and fall between the fifth and seventh centuries. In the course of a detailed scrutiny of some
key elements of the argument in the first two articles in this series, we identified a number of major flaws which
undermine the enterprise. In the first part of the present contribution, we place Harper's account of the Justinianic
pandemic under our microscope. We then wrap up the multi‐part review by pointing out significant problems of
method and interpretation in respect of the history of the late Roman state and society that run through the book
as a whole.
2 | P L A G U ED BY D O U B T ? TH E J U S T I N I A N I C P A N D E M I C U N D E R
SCRUTINY
Research into the Justinianic Plague has recently seen exciting developments. New historical publications have inves-
tigated the recurrent plague's lasting cultural effects. Archaeological syntheses have brought together evidence of mass
burials from across the Mediterranean world and beyond. Most noticeably, paleoscientific studies have not only found
evidence for the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, long thought culpable, in late antique remains, but they have also
developed an understanding of the bacterium's evolution and of its late antique ancestor's place in plague's family tree.
Harper builds upon these developments, bringing together an impressive range of sources and methodologies,
blending together historical and scientific knowledge. Again, he adopts a maximalist position as outlined in the first part
of this review. Throughout the chapter, he frequently personifies the plague bacterium as a dangerous murderer, using
colorful language. The term “killer” is used seven times; “deadly” or “deadliest” eight times; “explosion” and “lethal” five
times each; and so on. The frequency with which words like these are employed makes the chapter read like a detective
novel. As in the chapters on the earlier “microbial mass murders,” such impressionistic language stymies critical thinking,
attempting to convince readers through flair and form. Everything throughout the chapter points readers to the conclu-
sion that the plague was, in relative terms, one of the two “most severe biological catastrophes in history” (p. 244). The
language is powerful: “perhaps never before has humanity stared down an enemy so lethal and crafty” and “the rise
of Y. pestis was a landmark event in the history of the human species” (p. 244). The Justinianic Plague was “an epoch‐
making event,” while Y. pestis was “almost impossibly evolved to become a global killer” (p. 202).
Yet is the evidence strong enough to back such dramatic statements? We doubt so, and even Harper hesitates,
for example, when he admits the lack of corroborating evidence and weakly argues that “the mortality itself has
swallowed most of the testimony that ever existed” (p. 228).2 Besides going against the principle of Occam's razor,
this convenient explanation does not consider comparative research, such as that addressed above, demonstrating
that high mortality events actually generate more evidence because of their major effect, rather than unexplainable
lacunae (Greenberg, 2003, p. 416).
Harper tries to make his point using lists of abstract plague occurrences (pp. 241 and 242), creating the impression
of repeated plague “waves” or “amplifications,” a term he never defines, striking the Roman Empire.3 The evidence for
the transmission of such occurrences, depicted visually on pp. 239 and 243, is almost non‐existent. Instead, a closer
examination of the literary sources reveals multiple issues that Harper does not acknowledge in the chapter or the rel-
evant appendix of plague “amplification events” (pp. 304–315). Harper does not mention that many of the sources he
uses refer to plague very briefly, often in one or two words, and that references to plague sometimes form, with addi-
tional disasters, an abbreviated list that offers no details about the effects of the disasters that form it.4 What exactly can
we learn from these casual references in the sources? Are they enough to verify the existence of a series of major mor-
tality events, for which there is otherwise almost no evidence? And how would Harper explain the fact that several other
contemporary or near‐contemporary sources, like the Chronicon Paschale, the Liber Pontificalis, or Theophylact
Simocatta, barely refer to contemporary plague outbreaks, or do not do so at all?
For DNA, Harper cites the now well‐known examples of Aschheim and Altenerding, two cemeteries outside
Munich where evidence for plague was found. The discussion begins with an assertion that Aschheim had an “unusual
frequency of multiple interments” (p. 230). In fact, only 34 of the c. 438 burials (fewer than 10%) at the small site are
multiple burials. Rather than large “plague pits,” each multiple burial at Aschheim has between 2 and 5 skeletons. In
Altenerding, there are only 17 double burials out of more than 1,500 graves—around 1%. Furthermore, the archaeolog-
ical context of the multiple burials at both sites is normal—these are not the hasty burials we would expect from a period
of mass mortality. And although DNA evidence for plague has so far been reported for only a tiny fraction of the skeletal
material at both sites (Feldman et al., 2016; Harbeck et al., 2013; Wagner et al., 2014), the results are extrapolated as
evidence for an empire‐wide mass mortality event. Harper is resolute. “The beast was here. It is hard to overstate the
ramifications of finding the plague in a remote, rural outpost in the west. If the plague was here, it must have been in
many other places …” (p. 230). But why should the identification of the plague in a handful of teeth (to date 11 people
at most) among a tiny preselected group (of 39 remains; summary in Gutsmiedl‐Schümann et al., 2017, p. 409) in one
small rural area necessarily imply that it killed half the empire's population and spread into areas thousands of kilometers
away? With a handful of leaves he maps a forest.
This fixation on plague appears to blind Harper to alternative explanations. Syria, he claims, “was a hot zone of
plague activity across the entire two centuries of the pandemic” (p. 241), a finding supposedly confirmed by epi-
graphic evidence. Yet there is only a single inscription that refers to plague in Syria, alongside a few others that refer
to anonymous diseases. The work of expert scholars who examined sites in Syria, such as Banaji, who refers to
flourishing settlements in the sixth century, is completely ignored (Banaji, 2007, pp. 16–22; see also Foss, 1997,
p. 260).5 Other work available to Harper by several scholars in southern Syria (Palestine) also points to prosperity,
demographic and economic growth (Avni, 2014, pp. 328–329; Magness, 2003, pp. 195–214).
Occasionally, Harper contradicts himself. On p. 211, he asserts that rats are territorial and do not move far on
their own, following McCormick's groundbreaking work on rats in history, which argues that rats move with humans
on ships and carts. Yet on p. 225, Harper claims that the transmission of plague was independent of humans since it
could spread anywhere that rats could travel, implying that rats did in fact travel independently.6 In another case of
self‐contradiction, he asserts that “fundamentally everything about our knowledge of the Justinianic Plague is consis-
tent with the conclusion that the mortality also carried off an unfathomable half of the population” (p. 234) and that
“the fact is that plague is attested everywhere it might be expected” (p. 230), a claim we have seen he also makes
about the Antonine plague. Yet he also points out that “most cities in the east were probably struck [by plague],
but strict caution requires the caveat that we do not know” (p. 228) and that “we cannot exclude the possibility that
our eyes have been tricked in the dim light [in the West]” (p. 238).
In some cases, the reader is misled: on p. 206, we read that “A new darkness hung over the emperor, himself a
survivor of bubonic plague. It was an age of shocking reversals. ‘I cannot understand why it should be the will of God
to exalt the fortunes of a man or place, and then to cast them down and destroy them for no cause that is apparent to
us.’ ” The unsuspecting reader might think that these are the emperor's own words in response to the plague's
appearance, perhaps from one of his laws or as reported by one of his courtiers. A closer examination of the endnote
reveals that the citation is taken from the historian Procopius, expressing his own authorial voice in the context of the
Persian sack of Antioch in 540 CE, before the plague arrives. Harper thus mixes episodes completely unrelated to the
subject to introduce the arrival of the plague, thereby subordinating accuracy to rhetorical efficacy.
On other occasions, the maximalist stance on the plague is forced upon the evidence. On p. 235, Harper asserts
that the plague caused the reform agenda of Justinian to creak to a virtual halt: while an average of 14.2 laws per
year were promulgated between 533 and 542, before plague, only 1.3 per year were promulgated between 543
and 565. This might seem to reflect a significant impact (assuming the preserved Novellae represent all laws issued
during this period, which remains unclear). Yet a closer examination of the laws reveals that almost all of those in the
first period were issued between 535 and 539. The number of laws dropped to one or two in 540, well before plague
appeared. Subsequent legislation between 541 and 546 averages almost 5 laws/year, while the frequency drops to 1
law/year in the subsequent decade (for dating, see Blume, 2018). In other words, while there is certainly an observ-
able decrease in legislation over time, it cannot be explained by plague. Moreover, the laws themselves—with one or
two exceptions—do not even refer to plague. Even at the height of the plague outbreak, it seems, the emperor had
time and energy to deal with administering relatively mundane matters in his provinces.
A particular concern, alluded to in our introductory paragraphs and addressed in the Antonine plague section, is
the fact that Harper often takes the sources at face value and without context, undermining decades of careful tex-
tual‐historical work. At the same time, several of his assertions are puzzling. He repeats the colorful but false story about
Christian monks smuggling silkworm eggs from China during Justinian's reign (p. 216)—although it is well known that
there are references for silkworms in Roman Syria a century earlier (Muthesius, 2002). More seriously, he accepts the
death tolls reported by the sources as accurate even though these numbers are notoriously unreliable. On p. 226, for
example, he follows John of Ephesus and argues for 250,000–300,000 dead in Constantinople in the first outbreak
of plague, out of an estimated population of 500,000. How this should be squared with evidence for mortality in
subsequent outbreaks in Constantinople in the following half century, with numbers such as 400,000 (in 586) and
380,000 (in c. 599; another account has 3,180,000) is unclear, as Harper seems to reject the former and accept the latter
without explanation (pp. 237–238). These numbers would also contradict Harper's own claims of subsequent waves of
plague attaining around 10% mortality, indeed, to square both claims, Constantinople's population would have to swell
into the millions shortly after plague outbreaks. Moreover, Harper's attitude towards the sources is based on an overly
simple impression of the cultures from which they derive. For example, he assumes a uniformity among premodern
world views that is unjustified. Thus, he claims that “it is almost hard to believe” that John of Ephesus and Procopius
were contemporaries, as they represented entirely different cultural worlds (p. 220). Yet should we be surprised to dis-
cover that a state bureaucrat and a religious figure today think about their reality differently? Can we assume that the
handful of surviving voices from antiquity faithfully represent the entirety of their society?
Too often, digging into Harper's footnotes to pursue his references and the texts he has exploited generates more
questions than answers. Consider, for example, the evidence for rats in the Roman Empire. Harper claims that “the
Roman world was crawling with rats” (p. 201) and provides a visual representation of the patterns of rat remains as a
“Rat Atlas of the Roman Empire” (p. 214). Yet no evidence is presented for the first claim—the single footnote for the
paragraph in which it occurs refers only to a twentieth century novel titled “Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories”
(Mitchell, 1992). The Rat Atlas map is vague, especially for non‐specialists, since it is not explained or referred to in
the text. It depicts a blank map of the Mediterranean world. The shaded area on the map is not explained in the small
legend but seems to portray the Roman Empire's frontiers at its height during the second or fourth centuries. This is
somewhat misleading, since the chapter focuses solely on the sixth century. A few dozen rat‐shaped markers are
scattered over the map. The legend asserts that each refers to archaeological confirmation of black rat bones. There
is no attempt to represent the number of rat bones found in each site—yet there is a significant difference between find-
ing 2 or 2,000 rat bones in an archaeological excavation. The rodent bones and the map are undated—so readers cannot
know if the rat bones are evidence for rats in the first century BCE, the sixth century CE, or the fifteenth century CE. The
pattern of rat remain findings is uneven—finds are concentrated in Northwestern Europe, namely, Britain, France, and
the Low Countries. They are surprisingly sparse, however, in the provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, the focus of
the chapter. There is only one marker in the Balkans, one in Asia Minor, one in Syria‐Palestine, and one in North Africa
(Egypt has four, but only one within the territory marked as Roman). Considering that rat bones have been studied from
the 1970s, with catalogs since the 1990s, the evidence to support Harper's claims about the ubiquity of rats (and the
consequences for humans) seems at best underwhelming. Harper's map is based on data from the DARMC Atlas, with
Harper's own updates which are not specified (for the atlas, see McCormick, Hunag, & Gibson, 2007). An examination of
the DARMC Atlas reveals that the rat remains there cover the period 1–1500 CE [sic] and correspond only partially with
the finds in Harper's book. The criteria that led Harper to accept certain finds and reject others are not discussed at all.
This is all the more puzzling as Harper concedes that rat bones disappear from sites in the sixth and seventh centuries,
thus admitting that rat remains around the Mediterranean do not show continuity over time and thereby casting doubt
on his own interpretation of the evidence.
Some of the other visual representations are outright sloppy. Consider the graph entitled “Notional Model of the
Eastern Roman Population, ~AD 500–600,” which describes the population of the Eastern Roman Empire over the sixth
century (p. 245). There is no direct reference to the figure in the text. The line in the chart seems to have been drawn by
hand, to the extent that during the demographic collapse c. 540, it not only goes down (representing the supposed
reduction in population) but also left (going back in time?!), with a similar phenomenon taking place c. 558. Other pos-
sible demographic changes, such as the reconquests of Justinian—with the reincorporation into the empire of Vandal
Africa, Sicily, and at least part of Italy—are left out, as is the subsequent loss of much of Italy to the Lombards. Instead,
the single factor that appears to determine the population of the Eastern Empire is Harper's interpretation of the plague.
Graphics are often good to think with. Yet the most obvious question—whether our primary sources reflect the
loss of half the population of the Roman Empire in a few years—is not pursued. Given the gravity of this claim, this is,
to put it mildly, a very significant omission. Indeed, in light of such claims about the effects of the Justinianic Plague,
one would expect these graphics to be backed by a sizeable body of solid evidence. Yet Harper's analysis of the
Justinianic Plague is inconsistent and uncertain at the level of primary source use and integration of modern research,
resulting in a wobbly narrative. Similar doubts percolate deeper, into the overarching argument of the book, namely,
that environmental factors drove the decline and fall of Rome.
3 | I M P E R I A L C O L L A P S E A N D T H E F A L L OF TH E R O M A N E M P I R E
In light of the foregoing, it seems clear that Harper's take on the ways through which the Roman world was trans-
formed across some five centuries, from the middle of the second century to the middle of the seventh, provokes
as many questions as it seeks to answer. Recent discussions have tended to focus on the degree and intensity of
the social, economic, political, and cultural processes involved—how much continuity was there? What happened
to urban culture and civilization? Did the empire collapse, did it fade away, or was it simply overwhelmed by foreign
enemies? In all cases, how much damage was inflicted—on the infrastructure of the Roman state, on the rural econ-
omy of peasants and farmers, on the elites of the different provinces and their often very different cultures? How far
did standards of living decline, where they can be measured? How “primitive” did ordinary life become for the people
who lived on what was once Roman territory? Often these questions are presented as though there are absolutes—
continuity or discontinuity, survival or collapse, civilization or barbarity, primitive or advanced. In fact, we can find
elements of all, depending both on where we look geographically and at what level or instance of the society and
economy as a whole. There was a good deal of cultural continuity, for example, at many different levels in both east
and west; there was political and structural continuity in the east, less in the west (although elements can be identi-
fied); and there was continuity of identities—religious, cultural, linguistic—in some areas but not others. The views of
those who adopt a hard line on collapse and disintegration—perhaps best epitomized by Bryan Ward‐Perkins (2006)
and Peter Heather (2005), who focus on social‐economic and political change—can often be reconciled, to a degree at
least, with the somewhat different concerns of those who argue for a milder form of transformation, such as Peter
Brown (1971) and many other scholars of Late Antiquity, examining slow transitions in culture, for example. Harper's
book fits into the former group more comfortably than into the latter, and not only because he does not address
issues of cultural history. These are consigned firmly to the background in his dramatic picture of the microbial infil-
tration of Roman society, aided and abetted by shifts in climate that generated a somewhat different environment
from that in which the empire had its origins.
Harper avoids much comparison, which is a pity. Comparing the “fate” of the Roman state with that of contem-
porary societies and polities around it, or with premodern societies of different periods that experienced similar envi-
ronmental stress, like fourteenth century Europe, would be instructive. While Harper depicts the Roman Empire
staggering toward its eventual transformation (or fall, or collapse, or disintegration, equally loaded terms), because
of deteriorating climatic conditions and increasing microbial loads, late medieval Europe endured similar, and arguably
worse conditions, but no states collapsed, or even staggered much. And what happened outside the Roman Empire
during its final century of decline? If a maximalist position on each of the disasters highlighted in The Fate of Rome is
justified, we need to know how and why the rump eastern Roman state not only survived but eventually recovered to
become for a short time the dominant eastern Mediterranean power a few centuries later. Did the Sasanian Empire
suffer in the same way? If one judges by the activities of Sasanian rulers across the long sixth century, while we know
something about the impact of flooding and possible climate‐related developments, these do not appear to have set
up any existential challenges. And how was the Umayyad Caliphate able to prosper on such infected terrain?
Harper's account tells us much about climate and disease, but little about whether other phenomena such as the
rise of Christianity (and its bureaucratic structure), the decreasing differences between frontier societies (i.e., between
Romans and barbarians) in Europe, or even barbarian invasions, might also be important to the story of Rome's survival,
fall, or transformation. One might argue that these are well known and taken for granted here. But that would be disin-
genuous: first, because these are still hotly contested areas for scholarly debate and second, because they still need to
be causally integrated into the big picture.
Harper's is history without human agency, except in the broadest sense, as “society.” On the few occasions in
which people do appear in his account, they are distorted by his selection and juxtapositioning of particularly dra-
matic quotations from decontextualized sources. People become passive recorders of horror, rather than agents of
social organization. The “fall of the Roman empire” may well appear dramatic with hindsight and with the uncon-
scious compression of many generations of human experience and life into a few well‐crafted sentences. But we
need to historicize those generations and put them back into the temporality of the individuals they represent. Dra-
matic events there certainly were: the sack of Rome in 410, for example. Yet people carried on for the most part in
the same old way, day in and day out, thereafter throughout most of the Roman world. Change was more often than
not incremental, regionalized, and understood subjectively according to social status and cultural perception. We
might wish to talk in terms of collapse or fall, but for most of the people who populated the world we are discussing,
the occasional calamity was neither unusual nor unexpected, whether this was a series of failed harvests or a barbar-
ian incursion. Harper discusses processes of ecological change abstractly over a very broad perspective and presents
them as catastrophic even though their impacts may have been mediated across time and detached from the lived
experience of most people. The transformation of urban life, for example, was an ongoing process and reflected
the working out of long‐term structural tendencies, complex sets of interrelationships between local and regional
and imperial elites, local and supra‐local commerce, the various operations of the state and its fiscal demands, and
environmental factors too. These processes were all impacted in different ways by conjunctural factors—politics, war-
fare, disease, and so forth according to region and cultural context. We can say the same for the shifts in fiscal and
military administration or the so‐called barbarization of the Roman army. We cannot hope to understand the complex
processes of societal evolution without incorporating as many of a society's constitutive elements as possible more
centrally into our discussion.
4 | SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS
We know some of the answers to the questions posed in the preceding paragraphs, and reaching them has entailed
careful analysis of various key components of the society and economy of the states or cultures concerned. So if we
are not to doubt the significance of the plague, demographic decline and climate—features shared with other cultures
at other times but with many different outcomes—we need to integrate the natural phenomena that are the focus of
this book much more closely into an analysis of how the society and the state(s) in question worked. What are the causal
mechanisms connecting demographic decline or disease emergence or climatic instability with the social and economic
institutions through which people and their political arrangements operate on a day‐to‐day basis? Persuasive though
Harper is rhetorically, his analysis juxtaposes a series of natural phenomena with a curve of political‐civilizational trans-
formations, and an assumption of a causal connection. Yet by now, we all know that correlation is not causation. The
absence of an integrated structural analysis or some more focused case studies to demonstrate how the causation
works raises doubts about how, where, and why plague, climate, microbes, and the rest affected the way things worked
in this particular configuration of human society at this particular time. We read much about the conjunctural impacts,
far less about why the structures of Roman state and society responded in the ways in which they did.
To us, the “failure” or “fall” of a state or empire, as much as the “collapse” of a civilization, has more to do with
processes of transformation and their complex and interrelated causes, than it has with any notion of catastrophic
failure. This is not to deny that catastrophic change occurs, nor that when it happens it can bring with it the break-
down of traditional modes of social organization and the collapse of material cultural systems and technologies.
Indeed, a central question underlying the study of “Late Antiquity” is where and at what levels of socio‐cultural orga-
nization should one locate continuity and gradual transformations, as opposed to discontinuity and collapse?
The study of these complex and disputed processes is challenged by Harper's implicit thesis that the rise and fall
of the Roman state is the result of the Roman Climate Optimum and then of the Romans living in large and thus dis-
ease‐vulnerable cities. Somewhere the will of individual men and women to participate in or to retreat from the
political body of the Roman state has been lost. If the work had been framed as a study only of natural factors, it
would have been far stronger, but it fails to connect these phenomena to the end of significant Roman authority
in the west in the fifth century and in the east in the seventh century.
The outcomes we see through our various types of sources—historical, archaeological, climatological,
palaeoenvironmental, and biological—reflect the ways in which many different variables interacted, and Harper wants
us, reasonably enough, to work his particular foci of interest—disease and climate—more fully into an integrated picture.
This is commendable, and it reflects recent developments in the historical sciences more broadly, even if not common
enough (Haldon et al., 2018). And we agree with Harper that these factors have been underplayed in traditional histories
of the period and in attempts to explain why the Roman Empire was transformed in the way that it was.
Yet the methodological and interpretive failings in Harper's inquiry make it clear that some of his key conclusions
simply cannot follow from the data he cites, and this throws serious doubt on the overall picture he wants to paint.
Perhaps Harper's argument is not a simple decline‐and‐fall perspective, but though he does not claim that disease and
climate were the sole causal factors in events as they unfolded across the five centuries in question, that is, in the
end, the impression that is imparted.
So there remains a significant gap between the book's goal of foregrounding climate and disease effects in Late
Antique history (goals we expect most readers to think the book attained) and its actual achievement. It does not pro-
vide an explanation for the failure of the Roman Empire in either the West in the fifth century or the East in the sev-
enth century. These are fascinating and exciting periods to investigate, and climate and disease are certainly an
important part of this study. But the crucial question of how we integrate these new fields into the social, economic,
and political history of the Empire is consistently avoided.
We repeat, therefore, the points made several times above: we do not doubt that disease and climate had some
of the impact Harper describes, nor that the Roman Empire came to an end and that the regional cultures of which it
was composed and which it held together through fiscal, military, and commercial networks were transformed, nor
again that the picture of repeated shocks to the system and longer term structural constraints had some of the out-
comes described. All civilizations have been, and continue to be impacted in many different ways by natural forces
beyond human control, invisible forces that have pushed them in directions that could not be predicted and thus with
outcomes that challenged their very foundations. But we find exaggerated the maximalist claims about the impact
and extent of the plagues of the second, third, and sixth centuries in particular, as well as of the shifts in climatic con-
ditions. We suggest that, while it is important to take greater account of these questions, there still needs to be a
much higher degree of integration of the social‐economic and cultural history of the period into the overall picture.
The enormous effort at synthesis in Harper's book and the service it does for those who are less aware of the recent
scientific literature deserves praise. But effective consilience is not simply a question of a lead author familiar with
aspects of other disciplines consulting with specialists outside his or her own field of expertise, nor of putting
together a multi‐authored project or publication with colleagues from different disciplines. Consilience requires active
and intensive discussion to thrash out questions of methodology, scale, the use and abuse of results, and data from
other subject areas. We hope Harper's work will stimulate this kind of research. But it needs to be undertaken by
closely integrated, multidisciplinary teams, an approach that could well have obviated at least some of the weak-
nesses to which we have drawn attention.
ENDNOTES
1
Sections 1 and 2 of the review article of Kyle Harper, The fate of Rome. Climate, disease, and the end of an empire (Princeton
University Press: Princeton‐Oxford 2017).
2
Here then, Harper takes another page out of Duncan‐Jones' (1996) highly contested essay on the Antonine plague. As
noted above, Duncan‐Jones thought the vast mortality of the second‐century pandemic explains why there is little written
evidence for it. Of course, Duncan‐Jones turned to material evidence to attempt to fill the void.
3
Although “waves” was presumably taken from Biraben and Le Goff's seminal article (1975: 48–80, esp. 58–59, 64–71) on
the Justinianic Plague, it has lost favor in recent years.
4
For example, see most or all of the references in Agapios of Hierapolis, Chronicles of 724, 819, 1234, Elias of Nisibis, etc.
5
Foss offers a less positive account that still underemphasizes the effects of plague; both works are cited by Harper for
other purposes. For other recent work on northern Syria not cited, see also Casana (2007, pp. 195–221) and Giorgi
(2007). While Casana (2014) is cited with approval (p. 269, n53), Casana's observations (214) on the difficulties with
ceramic dating especially as it affects the Dead Cities are not discussed.
6
Harper (p. 213) cites McCormick (2003, p. 1), “The diffusion of the rat across Europe looks increasingly like an integral part
of the Roman conquest” but ignores McCormick's warning on the same page that despite its deadliness, Yersinia pestis
does not spread as easily as historians have imagined. McCormick later points out (p. 10) that the consensus is that rats
do not range much beyond 200 m in their 2‐year lifetime, a fact Harper ignores.
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
John Haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Professor of European History and Professor of Byzantine History at
Princeton University. He is Director of the Avkat Archaeological Project (Turkey: www.princeton.edu/avkat) and
focuses on the history and archaeology of the early and middle Byzantine empire; on premodern state systems
across the European and Islamic worlds; on the impact of environmental and climate change and stress on soci-
etal resilience in premodern social systems; and on the production, distribution, and consumption of resources in
Avkat in Turkey. His research focusses on the functioning of the Late Roman Empire, with particular interests in
altegeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/change‐and‐continuities/, and the head of
His recent publications include A Rural Economy in Transition. Asia Minor from Antiquity into the Early Middle
Ages and a series of papers co‐authored in the special issue of the Quaternary Science Reviews devoted to cli-
matic and environmental history of the Mediterranean, which he also co‐edited. He is a member of the Princeton
University's Climate Change and History Research Initiative.
ciate Director and co‐PI of Princeton University's Climate Change and History Research Initiative (http://cchri.
princeton.edu). His research focuses on premodern and especially late antique environmental history in the East-
ern Mediterranean; social and political history of the eleventh century Byzantine Empire; the late antique
economy (as Director of Framing the Late Antique and early Medieval Economy, http://coinage.princeton.edu);
and contemporary historical memory of the Middle Ages in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Timothy P. Newfield is Assistant Professor of History and Biology at Georgetown University. He co‐directs the
ologist. His research primarily addresses the history of infectious disease, both human and non‐human, climate
change, and food production and food shortage in western Eurasia in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
mate change, and the end of an empire: A response to Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome (3): Disease, agency,
and collapse. History Compass. 2018;e12507. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12507

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DOI: 10.1111/hic3.

Plagues, climate change, and the end of an empire:

2.1 | The Roman Climate Optimum

2.1.2 | Ptolemy's data on rainfall in second‐century Egypt

Hellmann 1916 "Egyptians": all rain

"Egyptians": ombros (total) "Egyptians": hyetos "Egyptians": hyetia

"Egyptians": hyetia "Egyptians": hyetos Eudoxus: hyetos (total)

unibas.ch/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/edition‐pbas/, the “Byzantine to Arab Egypt” project: https://

Plagues, climate change, and the end of an empire.

2 | CRITICISMS FORGOTTEN? THE ANTONINE PLAGUE

3.1 | Plague and papyri

3.2 | The Cyprianic plague

John Haldon http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1210-0829

Plagues, climate change, and the end of an empire:

4 | SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

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