Antoninska kuga – prva pandemija u europskoj povijesti?

Abstract

The goal of this paper was to examine whether we can refer to the Antonine Plague, which ravaged the Roman Empire between 165 and approximately 190 AD, as the first pandemic in European history. The methodology employed to analyse the pandemic character of the aforementioned plague was taken from the epidemiological criteria which were established to differentiate epidemics from pandemics. The criteria for determining whether a disease outbreak can be labelled a pandemic are: wide geographic scope, disease movement, high attack rates and explosiveness, minimal population immunity and novelty, contagiousness, and finally, severity. Next, all of these criteria were tested by analysing ancient sources, as well as the results of historiographic and scientific research in order to ascertain if any of them might be used as evidence for the verification of each separate criterion. Besides the Antonine Plague, this analysis was also applied to two historical disease outbreaks which may also be viewed as pandemics. These were the possible Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age bubonic plague pandemic and the Plague of Athens. A brief survey of all currently known diseases which struck the Roman world is also presented. The conclusion which emerges based on an evaluation of the aforementioned criteria in the light of ancient sources and the results of modern biological sciences is that the Antonine Plague can be dubbed the first clearly attested pandemic in European history with reasonable confidence, while all of the earlier analysed examples were probably semi-connected epidemic outbreaks. This characterization has been chosen for two reasons. The first pertains to the fact that we are faced with a substantial lack of sources for earlier examples, and therefore cannot properly ascertain whether these occurrences truly were pandemics. The second reason why these disease outbreaks cannot, to the best of our current knowledge, be defined as pandemics is linked to the criterion of wide geographic extent, but also to the lack of human-built infrastructure which abets with the spread of highly virulent pathogens