Plague of Cyprian

Ancient writers say that the disease began in Ethiopia — a charge that goes back to Thucydides’ account of the plague of Athens — and reached Alexandria before spreading around the Mediterranean; its dates are usually given as about 249–262, though some historians extend it to 270. In Carthage, according to Pontius, the deacon and biographer of Cyprian, corpses lay throughout the city and people abandoned their sick relatives for fear of contagion, while Cyprian told the Christians to care not only for their own but for everyone, even their persecutors. His sermon On Mortality (De mortalitate, around 252) lists the symptoms — unrelenting diarrhoea, fever, vomiting, bloodshot eyes and in some cases loss of hearing or sight or the crippling of the feet — to reassure his flock that death was no cause for despair. In Alexandria Bishop Dionysius wrote that the city had lost so many people that those now aged from fourteen to eighty were fewer than those aged from forty to seventy had been before; one modern calculation puts the fall in its population at from about 500,000 to 190,000, though flight may account for part of it. Later sources speak of 5,000 deaths a day in Rome, a figure that cannot be checked and may be exaggerated.

The pathogen is unknown: smallpox and measles have been proposed, and the historian Kyle Harper has argued that the symptoms fit a viral haemorrhagic fever better. Coming on top of civil wars, invasions and the persecution of Decius, the epidemic deepened the crisis of the third century, while the organised care offered by the Church may have helped Christianity to grow.