The date and alleged origin of the Plague of Cyprian in Egypt

In the following I will reanalyze the substantial literary evidence of this undoubtedly important disease outbreak assembled and presented in full for the first time by Harper.Footnote ⁶ I present my analysis of the events in chronological order, following the spread of the epidemic around the Mediterranean. Harper's argument for the origin and first appearance of this disease hinges mainly on two letters by Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria quoted in Eusebius's Church History, the letter to Bishop Hierax (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 7.21.1–10) and the letter to the brothers in Egypt (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 7.22.1–11). Based on these two letters, Harper claims that it “seems incontestable that a pandemic disease event erupted by Easter of 249 in Egypt and quickly spread across the empire, reaching Rome by the second half of 251 at the latest and recurring for the next two decades.”Footnote ⁷ At another juncture, he places the arrival of the disease in Rome even earlier, in the first half of 251 CE:

Harper considers Dionysius's two letters as the earliest evidence for the Plague of Cyprian, vindicating his theory of an Ethiopian origin of the outbreak.

The dating of Dionysius's letters to Hierax and to the brothers in Egypt is, however, far less certain than Harper makes it look and has engendered a vast body of scholarship. In dating the two letters in question to the reign of Decius, Harper follows Strobel and glosses over an entire scholarly discussion (Table 1).Footnote ⁹ Multiple scholars before and after Strobel are actually in agreement that the two letters must have been written considerably later, and place them almost unanimously in the early 260s CE, a dating that entirely undermines Harper's chronology of how the epidemic unfolded. The sequence of the letters defended by most scholars also respects the order in which they are presented by Eusebius, who is believed to have had a dossier with Dionysius's letters at his disposal and who generally remained true to the chronology of events in his annalistic history.Footnote ¹⁰

Table 1. Dating of relevant letters in Eusebius's Church History

Ironically, Harper relies on Strobel's dating of these letters, while Strobel did not believe that Dionysius was referring to an actual plague outbreak at all, seeing here rather “a rhetorical, highly suggestive construct; it belongs to the rhetorical exaggerations.”Footnote ¹¹ While Harper accepts Strobel's dating, he does not follow his interpretation. The first possible reference to the pestilence in Alexandria occurs in Eusebius's Church History in an Easter letter to the brothers Dometius and Didymus (not mentioned by Harper), which has been most convincingly dated to 259 CE.Footnote ¹² From his place of exile in the Libyan desert to which he had been sentenced during the persecutions under Valerian between 257 and 260 CE, Dionysius writes:

I therefore conclude that there is no good evidence for an initial outbreak of the pestilence in 249 CE in Alexandria. According to my reading of the relevant sections in Eusebius's Church History, a major outbreak of the disease seems to have hit the city only almost a decade later in the later 250s CE. In the two further Easter letters discussed above − addressed to “Hierax, an Egyptian bishop,” and to “the brothers in Egypt,” and written according to most scholars during the last few years of his life between 262 and 264 CE – Dionysius then laments Alexandrinian factionalism, continuous or successive pestilences (συνɛχɛῖς λοιμοί) and a tremendous loss of men in Alexandria. In these two letters, in my opinion written with hindsight, Dionysius also defends himself against the accusation that he had fled from the persecutions instead of suffering martyrdom, thereby looking back on the past decade of his ministry. He places events in a clear sequence: he had spent the years 249–51 CE in hiding and the span of time from 257 to 260 CE in exile;Footnote ¹⁴ after that, gentiles and Christians alike had suffered from both “war and famine.”Footnote ¹⁵

This last point must refer to the suppression of the usurpation in Alexandria by the Macriani brothers, who had risen against the emperor Gallienus in August/September 260 CE. Their usurpation in Alexandria ended in fall 261 CE, as the papyrological evidence corroborates.Footnote ¹⁶ The role of Mussius Aemilianus, prefect of Egypt, in this conflict is not yet entirely clear.Footnote ¹⁷ The Historia Augusta, whose general trustworthiness has been the subject of ongoing debate,Footnote ¹⁸ suggests that this Aemilianus, who had been prefect since 257 CE, and was the one who sent the Alexandrinian bishop Dionysius into exile during the persecution of Valerian,Footnote ¹⁹ had supported the Macriani in 260/1 CE.Footnote ²⁰ Alföldi suggests that, after the brothers Macriani were defeated, Mussius Aemilianus probably initiated a revolt, since he had backed the brothers and not Gallienus, building a stronghold in the Fayum.Footnote ²¹ Aurelius Theodotus was sent to Egypt in fall 261 CE to suppress the rebellion which ended in spring 262 CE.Footnote ²²

The letter to Hierax (Euseb. Hist. eccl. 7.21.2 − 10) should thus date to the moment when the conflict had just ended – Easter 262 CE.Footnote ²³ Dionysius is looking back on months of civil war – rotting bodies still lying in the streets and drifting in the harbor. He has a presentiment that these unsanitary conditions might lead to another wave of the deadly pestilence that had hit Alexandria several years earlier, during the Valerian persecution:

Such a lament about the recurrent episodes of the pestilence makes no sense in 249 CE, where Harper places this letter, regarding it as a reference to the first outbreak of this disease. A brief respite then ensued, Dionysius narrates, before another outbreak of the disease irrupted violently in Alexandria.Footnote ²⁴ In his Easter letter to the brothers in Alexandria, written according to most scholars during the final years of his life, Dionysius laments that people were suffering and that many had died. By the time of its writing, around Easter, it seems that the pestilence had begun to ebb. This wave must thus have started in the winter months of 262/3 CE, and Dionysius most likely wrote the letter on Easter 263 CE.Footnote ²⁵ He died in 264 or 265 CE.

The timeline of the plague's spread around the Mediterranean

Let us reexamine the remaining evidence for the Cyprianic Plague, focusing on the reconstruction of the spread of this epidemic. Thanks to Harper's meticulous study we have an excellent overview of the existing sources, most importantly (apart from the letters of Dionysius already discussed): Cyprian and his biographer, Pontius of Carthage, Porphyry, Zosimus, Eutropius, Aurelius Victor, the Historia Augusta, the Chronicle of Eusebius in its Armenian and Latin translation, and later on Zonaras. While Cyprian, Pontius, and Porphyry were eyewitnesses of the epidemic, Zosimus, Aurelius Victor, and the Historia Augusta probably relied on the lost historic works of further contemporaries of the pestilence, the Athenian historians Dexippus and Philostratus, writing from the perspective of the Greek mainland, and the hypothesized Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte, a contemporary historical account in Latin, whose author was presumably based in Rome.Footnote ²⁶

Contrary to Harper's account, the emperor Decius was already dead by the time that we hear about the epidemic for the first time. Among the first victims seems to have been − at least according to Aurelius Victor − Decius's son and successor, 15-year-old Hostilianus, who allegedly died of the disease in summer 251 CE:

The Epitome de Caesaribus, presumably based on the lost Enmannsche Kaisergeschichte,Footnote ²⁷ echoes this without adding any further information: “Vibius Gallus, with Volusianus, his son, ruled two years. In their time, Hostilianus Perpenna was made imperator by the senate and, not much later, was consumed by the plague.” (Epit. de Caes. 30.1.2, transl. Banchich Reference Banchich2018). No date is given in any of our sources for the death of Hostilianus, but it must have occurred shortly after the beginning of Trebonianus Gallus's reign. Decius and his elder son, Herennius, perished in early June 251 CE in the battle of Abritus, and Trebonianus Gallus, one of Decius's generals, was made emperor by the troops immediately thereafter.Footnote ²⁸ Hostilianus, the surviving younger son of Decius, was also proclaimed Augustus and adopted by Trebonianus Gallus.Footnote ²⁹ On his own son, Volusianus, Trebonianus Gallus bestowed the title of Caesar.Footnote ³⁰ When Hostilianus died shortly thereafter, Gallus then appointed his son Volusianus as fellow Augustus and moved to Rome in fall 251 CE, where they remained until summer 253 CE.

There is a tradition according to which Hostilianus died of the pestilence in the military headquarters at Viminacium in Moesia Superior. The Archaeological Park of Viminacium boasts that a mausoleum excavated at the site and measuring approximately 20 × 20 m is his burial site.Footnote ³¹ The mausoleum contained a very rare bustum burial, which means that after the body of the deceased had burned on the funeral pyre, the tomb was built on the spot around the ashes. Moreover, after the burial a thin layer of earth was cast over the remains in the mausoleum, before the cremation site was sealed off by stone and lime plaster. Remains of the bones found in the tomb were recently sent for ancient DNA analysis.Footnote ³² However, no inscription confirming this identification has been found yet.

The possibility that Hostilianus was indeed in Viminacium around the time that his father and brother fell in battle in May/June 251 CE finds some confirmation in the numismatic evidence. An entire series of coins was struck by the mint of Viminacium in the local year 12 (250/1 CE) for Hostilianus as Caesar – undoubtedly on the occasion of the latter's visit to the town.Footnote ³³ Furthermore, the mint struck coins for Hostilianus as Augustus which also show the year 12 (250/1 CE), but no doubt belong to the final weeks of this year, i.e., July/August 251 CE.Footnote ³⁴ Peculiarly, for the year 13 (251/2 CE) coins were struck again in the name of Hostilianus as Caesar, and might point to the fact that the first few weeks of Trebonianus Gallus's reign were rather tumultuous, at least as long as Hostilianus was still alive.Footnote ³⁵ All this evidence suggests that the younger son of Decius did not remain in Rome but came to the region during the last year of his family's rule.Footnote ³⁶ Was he made emperor by the troops only to die during the first outbreak of the epidemic, weeks later, in the military headquarters?

Zosimus, a pagan historian writing at the turn of the 6th c. CE in Constantinople, is our most detailed source for the age of the 3rd-c. emperors. He does not mention the pestilence at all in connection with the young emperor's death, and, following a different tradition, reports that Hostilianus was murdered by his colleague, the emperor Trebonianus Gallus – an episode that apparently took place in Rome:

That Hostilianus's and Trebonianus Gallus's co-rule did not last more than a few weeks finds some support in the papyri from the province of Egypt. The first and last record of both emperors side by side on papyrus dates to August 13 of the first year of their rule – that is, 251 CE.Footnote ³⁷ This first year of their joint rule would have ended on August 31, 251 CE. Hostilianus, however, was probably already dead by the end of this month because we have another papyrus dated to “year one” of the emperors Trebonianus Gallus and his son Volusianus.Footnote ³⁸ The editors date this “year one” from September 1, 251 CE to August 31, 252 CE, but, since we have another papyrus dated to a “year three” of the two emperors in power until August 253 CE,Footnote ³⁹ “year one” of Trebonianus and Volusianus must refer to the period before August 31, 251 CE. Moreover, there seems to have been a short time in the latter half of August 251 CE when Hostilianus was already out of the picture and Volusianus had not yet been named co-emperor: an Oxyrhynchus papyrus is dated to “year one” of the emperor Trebonianus Gallus without mentioning any co-emperor. It must belong to the turbulent weeks before August 31, 251 CE.Footnote ⁴⁰ It thus seems likely that Hostilianus died in the second half of August 251 CE; however, the place and nature of his death, whether in Rome or Viminacium, and whether of disease or murdered by his colleague, remain uncertain.

Back to the epidemic and Rome: according to Zosimus, the disease arrived in the city when Hostilianus was already out of the picture. As it ravaged the population, Trebonianus Gallus and his son Volusianus gained popular support by providing proper burials for its victims even among the poor (Zos. 1.26). Zosimus's report must be given some credibility, as he is said to have largely relied on the lost history of the Athenian historian Dexippus, a contemporary of the Cyprianic Plague. Zosimus actually gives the most detailed account of the spread of the epidemic in the Roman Empire during the reign of Trebonianus Gallus, and provides us with very interesting additional information about its origins. While Harper places the first outbreak of the disease in 249 CE,Footnote ⁴¹ according to my reading of Zosimus the disease only made its first appearance under Trebonianus Gallus. Moreover, Zosimus's sources locate its first outbreak – contrary to Harper's account – in the regions affected by the renewed Scythian invasions: in other words on the Danube, in Lower Moesia, and in Asia Minor, rather than in Egypt:

Greek historians of Late Antiquity used “Scythians” as a catch-all term for the Gothic tribes from the steppe north of the Black Sea who fought on horseback, not the historical Scythians described by Herodotus who flourished from the 7th to the 3rd c. BCE in the Black Sea steppe. The Goths had arrived on the Pontic-Caspian steppe presumably from Scandinavia in the 2nd c. CE.Footnote ⁴² These marauding tribes may have been the same ones with whom Trebonianus Gallus had concluded a treaty in summer 251 CE. Zosimus lumped the Goths, the Borani, the Urugundi, and the Carpi (tribes at home in the regions north of the Lower Danube) together as Scythians who invaded the adjacent Roman territories and plundered whatever was still left (Zos. 1.27 and 1.31).

Zosimus thus appears to connect the origin of the pestilence with renewed Scythian invasions of Roman territories in 252/3 CE. His subsequent references to the disease, addressed below, likewise focused on the Danube, Lower Moesia, and Asia Minor. On the basis of the available evidence, therefore, it would seem that the disease appeared initially on the Balkan front and spread from there across the Empire. The contemporary 13th book of the Oracula Sibyllina – written from an Alexandrinian Christian/Jewish perspective between 264 and 267 CEFootnote ⁴³ – corroborates the timeline passed down by Zosimus: Decius and his sons died before the disease started to wreak havoc within the Roman Empire:

Eutropius, writing around 369/70 CE, strengthens my dating by placing the first appearance of the disease firmly in the reign of Trebonianus Gallus – erroneously conflating Gaius Valens Hostilianus Messius Quintus, son of Decius, with Gaius Vibius Trebonianus Gallus, and stressing the devastating power of the pestilence by employing three different terms for the same disease: “Subsequently Gallus Hostilianus, and Volusianus, the son of Gallus, were chosen emperors. … They achieved nothing at all remarkable. Their reign was notable only for the plague, diseases, and afflictions (pestilentia et morbis atque aegritudinibus) (Eutr 9.5, transl. Bird Reference Bird1993).Footnote ⁴⁴

The Chronicle of Jerome, a translation into Latin of Eusebius of Caesarea's Chronicle, also dates the arrival of the pestilence to the reign of Trebonianus Gallus, referring to Dionysius and Cyprian as witnesses for outbreaks in Alexandria and Carthage: “A pestilential sickness seized many provinces of the whole world, and especially at Alexandria and in Egypt, as Dionysius writes, and the book On Mortality by Cyprian is a witness” (Jer. Chron. p. 219a Helm (anno 2269), 258th Olympics, transl. Pearse et al. 2005, 303).

The Armenian translation of Eusebius's Chronicle, like Jerome's, equally places the pestilence after Decius's death, showing that it was Eusebius, not Jerome, who dated it to the reign of Trebonianus Gallus and further validating my dating.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Chronicle dates the first outbreaks of the Plague of Cyprian in Carthage and Alexandria simultaneously to 253 CE. Orosius, a Christian historian from the early 5th c. CE, emphasizes the pervasiveness of the pestilence, calling it basically a pandemic that affected all regions of the Empire, but (following Eutropius) wrongly identifies Hostilianus, the son of Decius, with Trebonianus Gallus:

Later on in his History against the Pagans, Orosius again places the beginning of the epidemic in the reign of Trebonianus Gallus and Volusianus:

Orosius's poisonous airs and pestilent waters are reminiscent of Bishop Dionysius's complaint to Hierax about “the air, reeking everywhere with the evil exhalation” and the pestilent “mist from the ground,” “breezes from the sea,” “airs from the rivers,” and “vapors from the harbors” that eventually brought on the pestilence in Alexandria.Footnote ⁴⁶ By quoting Vergil's verse about a cattle plague in Italy (Verg. G. 3.481), Orosius seems to imply that humans also spread the infection to their animals – unheard of in any other source for the Cyprianic Plague − an idea which Harper speculates Orosius found in the account of Philostratus.Footnote ⁴⁷

Aside from Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage was an eyewitness to the pestilence. One of Cyprian's sermons addressed to the Christian community at Carthage contains a detailed description of the symptoms of the disease; modern scholarship has therefore named the pestilence after him. Cyprian is held to have composed his De mortalitate in 253 CE in the middle of the outbreak in Carthage.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Cyprianic pseudo-epigraphical De laude martyrii belongs to the same circle around Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, and also mentions the pestilence, highlighting the unusual symptoms formerly unknown from other infectious illnesses and the high death toll.Footnote ⁴⁹ Cyprian's biographer, Pontius of Carthage, remembered the pestilence a few years later as a most gruesome event invading every house and carrying off numberless people.Footnote ⁵⁰ Orosius considers the pestilence a punishment for the persecutions of Christians initiated by Decius and points out that the duration of the epidemic was contemporary with the 15-year reign of Gallienus between 253 and 268 CE.

The Excerpta Salmasiana II from the 10th c. CE, Symeon the Logothete from the late 10th c. CE, the Byzantine chronicler of the 11th-c. CE George Cedrenus, and Zonaras, the Byzantine chronicler of the 13th c. CE, provide a very similar description of the epidemic reminiscent of Orosius.Footnote ⁵¹ However, they are the first who report that the pestilence originated in Ethiopia, probably all relying on the same lost tradition, which makes Harper conclude:

I find it rather futile to speculate with Harper whether this source might have been the 3rd-c. CE historian Philostratus of Athens, of whose existence and work we know so little; it might have rather been a much later Byzantine chronicler mingling the historical account of this pestilence with classic plague topoi. Harper rightly notes that Ethiopia had been the putative origin of many epidemics since Thucydides's description of the Athenian plague.Footnote ⁵³ This alternative tradition thus does not provide a solid argument that the Cyprianic Plague might have started there. Ethiopia in ancient historiography meant the region south of Egypt in landlocked Africa around the source regions of the River Nile. Harper's reconstruction of the spread of the disease from inner Africa via the Nile to the Mediterranean follows these Byzantine chroniclers − without mentioning different accounts in the earlier sources and using the highly unlikely dating discussed above for Dionysius's letters as further validation.

After its initial outbreak, the pestilence reappeared in several waves around the Mediterranean. Zosimos, who had placed the first outbreak of the disease in the context of the Scythian invasions in the reign of Trebonianus Gallus in 251/2 CE, mentions another outbreak among Valerian's troops marching from Antioch to Cappadocia in 259 CE, drawing almost certainly on the lost text of the Athenian Dexippus. Zosimus reports that more than half of the men infected died of the disease.Footnote ⁵⁴ As discussed above, it was also in 259 CE that Dionysius of Alexandria mentioned that a recent outbreak of the disease caused many among the members of his clergy to die, a reference Harper did not include.Footnote ⁵⁵ Then, according to Zosimus, the disease reached Illyricum during the same period and ravaged with unprecedented violence the cities recently captured by Gothic invasions; here again Gothic raids are connected with a renewed outbreak of the epidemic.Footnote ⁵⁶

According to the Justinianic historian Peter the Patrician, writing in the 6th c. CE and having as his source probably Dexippus, the disease broke out in spring 260 CE among Valerian's soldiers who were fighting against the Sassanians, and the contingent from Mauretania was particularly heavily affected.Footnote ⁵⁷ Valerian's troops were stationed at that time in northern Mesopotamia near Edessa, one of the frontier cities in the province of Osroene. Zosimus, who is the only other extant source for this episode, knows nothing, however, of an epidemic among Valerian's army in Mesopotamia.Footnote ⁵⁸ For the year 262 CE, the Historia Augusta reports that about 5,000 people a day were dying in Rome and the cities of Greece, possibly reflecting the perspective of Dexippus from the Greek mainland.Footnote ⁵⁹ The philosopher Plotinus, who was born in Lykopolis in Lower Egypt, but later moved to live in Rome, was witness to the devastation of “the pestilence” (τοῦ λοιμοῦ) in the city; the epidemic even took the lives of his massage therapists.Footnote ⁶⁰ Porphyry attests elsewhere that the city of Rome suffered for multiple years under this epidemic.Footnote ⁶¹

Probably the same wave of the disease devastating the population of Rome in 262/3 CE is mentioned by Aurelius Victor.Footnote ⁶² In spring 263 CE, according to my redating of the letter discussed above, Bishop Dionysius is lamenting recurrent pestilences and a tremendous loss of men in Alexandria.Footnote ⁶³ During what was possibly the final recurrence of the disease in August 270 CE, Zosimus reports that the pestilence also attacked the barbarians and took the life of Emperor Claudius.Footnote ⁶⁴ Again, we have references to the Scythians and to the Danube provinces for this last documented outbreak of the epidemic, which this time seems to have wreaked more havoc among the Gothic tribes than in the Roman army.Footnote ⁶⁵ Aurelius Victor, on the other hand, was ignorant about the cause of Claudius's death. Zonaras reports that Claudius fell ill in Sirmium after a hard winter followed by famines that took a toll on the Roman troops. Eutropius merely speaks of a disease that carried Claudius off within two years of the beginning of his reign, but does not give further details.Footnote ⁶⁶

Several authors agree that some regions experienced recurrent outbreaks of the pestilence. Evagrius Scholasticus transmits a passage from the lost contemporaneous history of Philostratus of Athens: “for Philostratus is surprised that the plague of his time lasted fifteen [years].”Footnote ⁶⁷ This passage is critical for Harper's claim that Philostratus did write about the Plague of Cyprian. Zonaras, who also reports that the pestilence lasted 15 years,Footnote ⁶⁸ might have gained this knowledge from Evagrius or directly from Philostratus. While the pestilence is attested for the period between late 251 and 270 CE, the “15 years” of Philostratus might thus refer to an Athenian experience of the disease recurring in multiple waves during one and a half decades. Also appealing is the explanation that the period of Gallienus's rule, which lasted 15 years from 253 to 268 CE, was associated by the biased contemporary historians with the years of the pestilence.Footnote ⁶⁹

A seasonality of the Cyprianic Plague is reported by the Byzantine chronicler Symeon the Logothete, who asserts that the disease started in the autumn and abated at the rising of the Dog Star in July/August.Footnote ⁷⁰ The connection between the abating of one wave with the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, could also, however, simply have been a topos. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the 1st c. BCE, asserts that the sacrifice made at the time of the rising of Sirius brought an end to outbreaks of pestilential diseases.Footnote ⁷¹

In sum, according to my reading of the sources, the disease made its first appearance on the Balkan front, not in Egypt, and reached many regions all over the Empire, from the Balkans to Greece, the major harbors of the Mediterranean, including Rome, Carthage, and Alexandria, and the Roman military headquarters in Illyricum, Asia Minor, and Osrhoene, over a duration of almost 20 years from 251/2 to 270 CE. Certain regions such as Rome, Athens, Alexandria, and the Balkan fronts were reportedly touched several times over these two decades.

The numismatic evidence

The numismatic evidence for the Plague of Cyprian is considerably less straightforward and thus more difficult to interpret than the literary sources. Harper invokes coins of Trebonianus Gallus that show Apollo Salutaris, salutary health-giving Apollo, on their reverses as evidence for the Plague of Cyprian as early as the second half of 251 CE. It was the mint in Rome that struck Apollo Salutaris on coins minted under Trebonianus Gallus of a type dated, by circular reasoning, with reference to the alleged death of Hostilianus from the pestilence in fall 251 CE.Footnote ⁷² However, these coins could originate from any point during the reign of Trebonianus Gallus, from summer 251 to summer 253 CE. Harper's argument that Apollo Salutaris's imagery might be connected to a pestilence does, however, fit the fact that coins of Volusian, Aemilian, and Valerian I, all of whom ruled during the epidemic, also show Apollo Salutaris.Footnote ⁷³ Gallienus and Claudius Gothicus portray Apollo with the legend Salus Aug(ustorum), praying for the health of the emperors.Footnote ⁷⁴

However, the invocation of Apollo as the healing god was nothing new. Apollo Medicus had a temple in Rome from the 5th c. BCE and features prominently in Augustan poetry.Footnote ⁷⁵ Moreover, the emperors during the third quarter of the 3rd c. CE seem to have had a particular affinity to Apollo, who appears as Apollo Conservator on the coins of Aemilian, Valerian, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus, Quintillus, and Aurelian,Footnote ⁷⁶ as Apollo Propugnator on the coins of Valerian and Gallienus,Footnote ⁷⁷ and as Apollo Palatinus on the coins of Gallienus.Footnote ⁷⁸ Apollo is shown without any legend on coins of Herennius Etruscus and Hostilianus as principes iuventutis.Footnote ⁷⁹ He also features without any epithet, but with his attributes – a laurel branch and a lyre – on coins of Gallienus and Aurelian.Footnote ⁸⁰ Coins referring to Salus publica, invoking the physical health of the Roman people, were also minted in the 3rd c. CE, during the reigns of Macrinus, Hostilianus, Valerian, Gallienus, Tacitus, Florian, and Probus, some of whom did not rule during the Plague of Cyprian.Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, the healing god Aesculapius appears on coins of Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Gallienus, Claudius Gothicus, and Aurelian.Footnote ⁸²

In sum, in my opinion Apollo Salutaris and recurrent depictions of Salus publica and Aesculapius on coins over the centuries are evidence for concern for health, but not necessarily for an epidemic. Harper adopts an extreme position by referring to the numismatic evidence as “attesting a major outbreak of disease in the middle of the 3rd c.” – a maximalist interpretation that overinterprets our data.Footnote ⁸³ The association of the appearance of Apollo Salutaris on coins with the Cyprianic Plague remains possible but hardly definite; drawing any conclusions from these coins about the extent of the epidemic means giving in to the temptation to overstretch the evidence.

The papyrological evidence

From Dionysius's letters, we learn that Alexandria was hit by several distinct waves of the pestilence, with one striking in 258/9 and another in 262/3 CE. According to Eusebius's Chronicle discussed above, the first wave seems to have hit Alexandria in 253 CE and to have spread to the Egyptian hinterlandFootnote ⁸⁴ – an important specification that his Church History does not contain. Whether the pestilence ever reached beyond the densely populated quarters of Alexandria is a matter of contestation. So far, no papyrological evidence dates unequivocally to the time span of the Cyprianic Plague, even though papyrological documentation for the 3rd c. CE is dense and continuous.Footnote ⁸⁵ Compared to 10,443 documentary papyri loosely dated to the 1st c. CE and 25,903 loosely dated to the 2nd c. CE, we have 25,086 for the 3rd c. CE.Footnote ⁸⁶ We can therefore hardly speak of a dark century, at least as far as Middle and Upper Egypt are concerned. Should we thus not expect to find multiple references among the papyri to a mass mortality event of that scale? By comparison, multiple securely dated papyri make reference to the Antonine Plague, the plague under Maximinus Daia, and the Justinianic Plague and potentially also the Hadrianic Plague.Footnote ⁸⁷ Harper refers to papyri documenting the Plague of Cyprian from the city of Oxyrhynchus in Middle Egypt without discussing their content further.Footnote ⁸⁸ As he gives little consideration to the papyrological evidence, I will discuss extant testimonies in more detail below.

The only papyrus (P.Merton 1.26) from the 3rd c. CE that refers to an infectious disease and can be securely dated – the appointment of a guardian for a little orphan girl from Oxyrhynchus whose parents had both died of the “shivering disease” (ἀπό τινος φρ{ɛ}ικώδους νόσου τɛτɛλɛυτηκότων) – was written on February 8, 274 CE, so it does not fit the timeline of the Cyprianic Plague. Moreover, the so-called “shivering disease” is generally identified as malaria.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, some other papyri refer to some form of infectious disease potentially related to the Plague of Cyprian, although these are only roughly dated to the 3rd c. CE based on their handwriting style.

In a letter on papyrus, POxy. 14.1666, dated to the 3rd c. CE for paleographic reasons, a certain Pausanias writes to his brother Heracleides that he had heard that an infectious disease was spreading in the region of Oxyrhynchus: “I beg you to write to me, my brother, about your safety, because I heard in Antinoopolis that in your region [i.e., the Oxyrhynchite] a pestilence (λοιμὸς) was spreading.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Pausanias was traveling down the Nile, probably from Thebes or Coptos in Upper Egypt all the way to Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, a journey that comprised nearly 900 km. When he reached Antinoopolis in Middle Egypt, he thought about making a stop to visit his brother in Oxyrhynchus, which lay 100 km further north. Because of rumors of a pestilence he refrained from doing so. Interestingly, the pestilence seems to have been limited to the region of Oxyrhynchus, while all other towns and cities which Pausanias passed through on his journey down the Nile remained untouched, which would be highly unusual if we were dealing with the very contagious Plague of Cyprian here.

Another papyrus found in Oxyrhynchus (PSI 4.299), a private letter, recounts some severe condition (νόσος) that befell several members of the same family. The letter writer, Titianus, reports that such a severe sickness had befallen him that he had been unable to move and – even though he had recovered – he was still suffering from infected, purulent eyes and pain in all parts of his body. Titianus's father, his mother, and all children of the family had also been infected but had recovered.Footnote ⁹¹ Titianus's description of the afflictions is very similar to the symptoms described by Cyprian of the plague of his time: “The pain in the eyes, the attack of the fevers, and the ailment of all the limbs.”Footnote ⁹² Titianus's festering eye infection reminds us in particular of Cyprian's description of “eyes … on fire with the injected blood,” which sometimes led to the loss of the sufferer's eyesight.Footnote ⁹³ The letter of Titianus has been dated paleographically (but also because of its vague references to Christianity) to the late 3rd c. CE and could therefore possibly refer to the Plague of Cyprian but also to the infectious disease outbreak limited to the Oxyrhynchite region mentioned in the previous papyrus letter.

Another papyrus letter, PStras. 1.73, of unknown Egyptian provenance and roughly dated by its editor to the 3rd c. CE, speaks about “a large pestilence” (νόσος μɛγάλη) that befell an entire family and caused a small boy to die: “After you had left us, we came down with a serious disease, I … and their children, [and] little Mimos died and my whole foot is infected from the illness.” Again, we might have a reference here to our pestilence, for Cyprian also speaks of infected feet or parts of the limbs: “that in some cases the feet or some parts of the limbs are taken off by the contagion of diseased putrefaction.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Potentially referring to a pestilence is the letter from a certain Lykarion to his father, Psonthuonsi, who is traveling abroad (Stud. Pal. 22.33). The son urges his father, who had been gone for quite some time, to return home. He tells his father that many members of their household had died this year – he speaks of “much dying” (πολλὴ θνῆσις). In the aftermath, most of the surviving family members had decided to leave.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, neither the provenance of the letter is known nor its dating – the 1st c. CE, but also the second half of the 2nd c. or the 3rd c. CE have been suggested − which leaves it open whether this great mortality has anything to do with our epidemic.

The same expression, “a great dying” (μɛγάλη θνῆσις), is also used in another papyrus letter, PMich. 8.510, found in Karanis in the Fayum, but probably sent from Alexandria. Its dating is equally uncertain. Here the letter writer, a woman named Taeis, reports about the many deaths that happened in Alexandria ([ἐ]π<ɛ>ὶ μɛγάλη θνῆσ[ις γέ]γονɛ ἐν Ἀλɛξανδρίᾳ). This letter has been dated to the late 2nd or 3rd c. CE; “the great dying” in Alexandria could thus refer to the Antonine or Cyprianic Plague, but also to any other violence such as local uproars, persecutions, or civil war, all of which were often reported for Alexandria.Footnote ⁹⁶

Furthermore, among the papyri from 3rd-c. CE Roman Egypt happens to be the largest coherent group of documents from the Roman Empire, consisting of roughly 1,000 papyri, dating exactly to the two decades that frame the Plague of Cyprian and that otherwise constitute the darkest decades of the Roman Empire, as far as the availability of source material is concerned. Documents from the so-called Heroninus archive offer in-depth insights into the running of a Roman estate from roughly 250 to 270 CE.Footnote ⁹⁷ This landed estate was owned by Aurelius Appianus, a Roman knight who belonged to the imperial elite and held a city councillorship in Alexandria.Footnote ⁹⁸ Appianus's estate was managed by a certain Heroninus, after whom the archive is named. Heroninus oversaw the day-to-day running of Appianus's land in Theadelphia from September 249 to summer 268 CE, when he was succeeded by his son Heronas. Appianus's lands in other regions of the Fayum were managed by colleagues of Heroninus, with whom he corresponded regularly. The central administration was located in the district's capital, Arsinoe, and consisted of men from the local elite who were city councilors and medium landowners in their own right. In their roles as Heroninus's superiors, they also feature frequently in the archive. However, no signs could be detected that the estate of Appianus had been affected by a demographic or economic crisis during the decades from 250 to 270 CE. The region was vigorous and heavily monetized at least until 270 CE, when the Heroninus archive breaks off.Footnote ⁹⁹

In sum, symptoms portrayed in at least two papyri dating to the 3rd c. CE resemble the disease described in detail by Bishop Cyprian of Carthage in his treatise De mortalitate and potentially confirm that the epidemic did reach beyond Alexandria. The papyri do not, however, offer any direct support for a mass mortality event on a scale such as Harper envisions in the Egyptian hinterland around the middle of the 3rd c. CE.

The archaeological evidence

Archaeology has so far added relatively little to our understanding of this epidemic. A mass grave from the catacomb of Saints Peter and Marcellinus in Rome has been adduced by Harper as potential material evidence for the impact of the Cyprianic Plague in the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In more recent publications not considered by Harper, the excavators interpret the excavated and partially excavated rooms (X80/T16, X82/T18, and X78/T15) differently: instead of a one-time burial, these publications argue for a careful interment over a number of years to decades between the middle of the 2nd c. and the early 3rd c. CE. In addition, the excavators stress the careful and very elaborate handling of the dead bodies, with plaster, resin, and amber and remains of gold and silver adornments, unknown for other mass burials resulting from an epidemic.Footnote ¹⁰¹ They argue that the burial place might have been reserved for members of a community whose funeral practices are found in the Near East and North Africa and who might have been the first Christians of the city – their burial ground might have formed the primitive pole of the vast underground Christian funerary space of Saints Peter and Marcellinus which was later created at the end of the 3rd c. and beginning of the 4th c. CE.

The catacomb also comprises a number of unexcavated rooms (X80, X81, X83, and X84), a later addition to the central portion of the catacombs, where preliminary soundings have revealed large body assemblages.Footnote ¹⁰² A coin of Gordian found in X81 points to a terminus post quem of 238 CE, which leads Harper to speculate that the mass burial might be connected to the Plague of Cyprian. However, as long as excavations at the site do not progress, this identification of the bodies with plague victims remains just speculation.

The same doubts arise concerning the funerary site excavated at Roman Egyptian Thebes, where in a layer of slaked lime in one Theban tomb (TT37, Tomb of Harwa and Akhamunru) remains of human skeletons were discovered by the Italian Archaeological Mission to Luxor and adduced by Harper as possible evidence for a mass burial at an entry point of the plague in the Upper Nile region.Footnote ¹⁰³ According to the first reports published by the excavation director, Francesco Tiradritti, in 1998, funerary equipment dating from the Ptolemaic period to the 3rd and 4th c. CE was found under the slaked lime layer, which does not support a dating of the incineration site to the middle of the 3rd c. CE, but rather suggests a date in the 4th c. CE or later.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 2014, Tiradritti published an article in Egyptian Archaeology in which he interpreted the corpses as an effort to quickly dispose of plague-infected individuals connected to the Cyprianic Plague.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ According to this article, 3rd-c. pottery and 3rd/4th-c. oil lamps narrowed the date further to the middle of the 3rd c. CE, a surprising conclusion that would need to be backed by the more detailed excavation reports. Moreover, given the lack of C-14 analysis, it is unclear whether the corpses actually date from the same period as the lime kilns. In the lime kilns the burnt remainder of decorative elements of limestone (identified as parts of the cenotaphs of Harwa and Akhimenru) were found. The human remains from earlier periods of the tomb might have similarly served as fuel for the lime kilns. It is worth noting that other lime production sites containing human remains have been found in Egypt: monastic communities from the 4th c. CE onwards are known to have burned limestone from ancient tombs for other building projects, and mummies and their coffins were used to fuel the fires.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Again, the archaeological evidence for a mass mortality event around the middle of the 3rd c. CE is thus hardly conclusive.