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When you think about how small the population of the Earth was back then, you get a sense of just how devastating this was as a % of population killed off.
Right? Just the number of deaths doesn't give the full picture. Covid probably shouldn't be so high up. I mean, yes, by raw numbers of people killed, sure; but when you look at the percentage of the population, either globally, or for the regions affected, you're going to get a vastly different picture, I'm sure. That's why we list Covid numbers as "per 10,000 people." But even that can skew the numbers in a small enough population. A percentage, of the regional/area, and (estimated) global population, would give a much more accurate picture. Is a hundred deaths a large number? In a city of 50,000, not really. In a village of 230 people, god, yes! Something to consider for next time, Simon, please! :)
@@KryssLaBryn yeah not even close. additionally globalization makes it almost impossible for a pandemic to be rather regional. but lets wait a bit, covid evolves fast af, maybe we ll get there...
@@maxmustermann369 by definition it can't be regional. thats the whole world. pan-demic, from greek pan (all) demos (people, crowd). a widespread epidemic, often on a worldwide Greek. if it were regional, it wouldn't be a pandemic.
@@HappyBeezerStudios the key word here is "rather". and no, not the whole world has to be effected for a sickness to be called a pandemic, quite the opposite if you look up which ones are classified as one. so if you try to be a smartass, do your homework...
“The plague decimated the army”, brilliant quote! I love the pun with it, and how the word decimated came from the most cruel of Roman military punishments
Pro tip, if you want to skip the ad reads, the light behind Simon turns green when the ad starts and back to red or blue when it's back to the video, depending which channel you're watching. It's not always consistent, color wise, but the ad read segment will be a different color than the actual video. I'm onto you Whistler. Edit* please do support the sponsors though.
Correct! I'm not sure if it is intentional though. Simon records the AD part by itself. 1 so it can be used in multiple videos. 2 it can be used as a stand alone ad by the advertiser. I've seen Simon advertise for Magellan on the History Channel.
I often use green when its adverts (green for MONAYYY). But yeah, it's a little thing I do when I remember. But please support the sponsors, they keep the lights on. (That's a lie, the lights stay on either way, but I can buy fancier lights).
My parents never read me bedtime stories. But ever since lockdown I have Simon's dulcet tones lulling me to sleep. Causing fantastical dreams of bygone eras.
Anthropological comment: Any time you're looking at "average life expectancy" keep in mind that that includes child and infant mortality. It's touched on in this video when it says "less than half of children made it to adulthood" but it's not quite made clear that that means if you *did* make it to adulthood you were likely to reach 50 or 60 years old, if not more.
>Simon on every other channel "I hate ancient Rome and Greece, never making another video of them" >UA-cam metrics showing engagement "You sure about that factboy?!"
"Of course quarantines, isolating, and working from home were neither possible nor even considered..." "...the best they could do... prayers..." Me: laughs in Texan.
He's always contradicting himself and such , he'll say anything for money. I actually used to kinda look up to him , lost a lot of respect for him slowly but surely over the last years.
If Mother Nature were a living being, we should really be in awe of her breathtaking capacity for ironic (albeit somewhat sadistic) humour. First, she creates the most sophisticated species by orders of magnitude, then she instills within each and every of them an almost god-like sense of entitlement, and finally when these creatures believe without question that they are superior even to her ... she creates a 'tiny tiny insignificant little bitty bug', which ravages the entire population, from the smallest of babes, to the mightiest of emperors, and brings it in its entirety, along with all its wondrous edifices ... crashing to the ground. I imagine Mother Nature in some great garden somewhere, hand over mouth, barely able to restrain her delight and chortled laughter. Were it not so painful, surely we'd all be having a great laugh as well.
Not sure why, but I really like the dramatic walk off camera. Also, I've been watching all your content for years now. I'd like to see you make a video showing the writers and all the other staff behind the channels. Maybe even a biographic of yourself Simon.
For whatever reason, I had not heard of this pandemic,even though I'm quite a history buff of both Roman history and early Christianity. Thanks Simon for being a main source of my continuing education!❤️
To think in thousands of years of human history that getting sick almost meant certain death i find myself extremely greatful to live in an age of antibiotics and modern healthcare. Were lucky
What killed me is that the women's breasts are blurred, but their vaginas are not. I can't help but wonder if that was intentional as a bit of fun at UA-cam's expense? Or if the editor(s) forgot that vaginas are a thing? Either way it's funny.
@@kyleanuar9090 Yeah that's not really the issue. The picture they used was already censored anyway, I've seen them use plenty of uncensored art on here. But I don't think anybody is out there "putting men down" through nude art censoring lol
So the Uber rich and political class fled cities to their private estates to escape whilst left the plebeians to die in cramped cities… Nice to see some things never change
@@victoriandino yea really adds credibility ... Maybe that's why I didn't finish university none of my professors wore animals ears to accent their arguments. I mean what's the point of a master's or PhD if you don't carry yourself like your in the verge of a serious mental break with reality
@@operator.k exactly. If I had professors who were extremely condescending and insulted and swore at anyone who disagreed with them I would have understood the courses so much better.
It is notable that Marcus Aurelius and his wife chose to stay in the city and do what they could to help rather than fleeing like other nobility. When the emperor succumbed to an undisclosed illness he was in the field with his troops.
That last part makes you wonder if the Romans really did find and open pandora's box? Entertain my spectulation for a few moments, at the beginning you spoke of the legend that the plague was started by (6:23) a roman solider opening a golden casket in babylon, what if this actually happened and what the solider opened was something left behind by hancock and carlson's advanced pre-flood civilization? What if the golden casket was a biological storage device or an biological warhead? I only suggest this after hearing the part at (16:15-16:16) that plagues seemed to have gotten worse after the Antonin Plague. We speculated in one of my history classes that the Antonin Plague is also responsible for later asian xenophobia. Before this early asian civilization were pretty open, and afterwards trade only happened at selected cities and ports which were walled away from the rest of the country. Sure this could all be about taxes and customs, but what if it is about quarantining instead? Good Listen as always, thanks Simon and Crew
Simon sitting at his desk ***hmmmmm time to do some Christmas shopping. I need some money!*** *cranks out a few videos on Ancient Rome and Nazi Germany 😂😂😂 Cheers, Simon, keep it up!!!! 🍻🍻🍻
while technically true, the fact about average lifespan is incredibly misleading. This is because the mortality rate for children under five years old was 50%. So instead of stating that the average lifespan in antiquity was around 30, it is much more helpful to say that the average adult lifespan was between 50 and 60.
Ah yes the famous time travelling Pax Romana from 27BC all the way back to 180BC! Sorry, don't usually nitpick, just thought that flub was pretty amusing...
Great Video! A polishing move for the finishing touch ?: The plague destruction, as this video shows, is about how it damages a society/empire. So the number of deaths in ratio to the affected population is more telling. Earlier plagues affected smaller populations, and regional confinement might have made the Xian plague, for instance more less notable. The Cyprian plague killed more of a population that was reduced by the Antonine plague.... terrifying. Granted, it takes some research to find/compute the numbers.
With these youtube videos now a days who needs subscriptions ='D You telling me the Roman Empire at its biggest was the size of half of Canada just blew my mind
Suggestion: How the United States government forced Native Americans onto reservations, and how the consequences still are in place today. Substandard living conditions, high rates of poverty and unemployment and substance abuse.
forcing Native children into boarding schools in what for some is still a recent memory and then sending them "home" to a place and a people group they no longer could relate to heavily increased the more recent alcohol and substance abuse problems on the reservations as well. Having spent a good chunk of my formative years just outside of one really makes me absolutely agree that Whistler should definitely touch on this dark section of American history.
native americans have allot of things to help them get ahead in life. i don’t really see how free healthcare/ cheap housing/ and free education would do anything but give them an advantage
The Roman road system is to blame, people started moving around much more and where people go disease goes as well, while previously only coastal port citys had some big outbreaks.
what a fascinating history thanks for this report. it could be interpreted that 70 years after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem the judgment came down the silk road from the east and this prospered Christianity which would have otherwise been increasingly prosecuted. The plagues are a powerful way of changing the balance of power.
Simon and his crew need to do deeper investigation into many things covered in this video. First of all, it leaves the impression that Rome went steadily downhill from Antonine. While it certainly did contribute to the Crisis of the Third Century; the reforms brought about by Diocletian, the subsequent Tetrarchy, and the glory of Constantine the Great brought Rome to a significant high-water mark. If there are cause-and-effect relationships between Antonine and 476 CE, they were certainly not pointed out in this video. Secondly, Simon's coverage of Christianity is abysmal to say the least. The gap between Antonine and the ascendancy of Christianity under Constantine is over a century. While adherents of that faith certainly grew over the century, there is no historical evidence that Antonine significantly bolstered this growth. Indeed, one has to at least consider the setbacks suffered by the faith during the reigns of Decius and Valerian. The trope that Christians were thrown to the lions is also misinformed. Although Ignatius of Antioch spoke of such a demise, his arrest was several decades prior to Antonine, not to mention that as a Roman citizen, if his sentence was indeed carried out, it would have been done by beheading. There are no accounts at all in the city of Rome of Christians being given over to "damnatio ad bestias" (being thrown to the lion). Eusebius records this as being a punishment meted out in Palestine in the time of Diocletian, again, over a century after Antonine. The one significant pogrom against Christians due to Anotnine was totally missed: the Gallic Martyrs of Lugdunum. This horrific and illegal blood bath has a very high likelihood of being at least partially due to polytheistic Romans trying to pin the blame on Christians. However, even the worst punishment here did not include damnatio ad bestias, for although beasts were supposedly loosed on Blandina, they had no appetite for her, forcing her death to come at the horns of a bull. Finally, it is a sentiment widely beloved of modern Christians that it was they, compelled by adherence to their faith, that led them to stay and minister to the dying. While there is documentation of medical personnel behaving with such charitable abandon during the Black Death, there is no such documentation for Antonine. Indeed, was it not the self-same Christians who fled to the hills leaving their priesthood to care for the sick and dying during the Black Death? It is an anachronistic projection that makes us suppose Christians during Antonine acted any differently than Christians of the fourteenth century.
The fish can't see the water. We all just had thirty years of perpetual war. Every historical epidemic follows a long period of War, a Siege, death of a Terrible king. It's the human response to a long fight. When a group stops fighting outsiders, some of the group has nothing else to live for. One reason is that they shrivel up and die without an enemy giving them purpose. You can blame soldiers, zealots, witches, fleas, cooties, or virii, but the roots of what we call diseases are emotional exhaustion. Right now, you'd like to consider that I'm right, but you're scared to leave the war cult.
“Eastern half staggered on”. Eastern Rome lasted another 900 years after the plague of Justinian and was the premier power in Europe during the medieval period.
1 remark and 1 question: I'll start with the latter: average life expectancy between 20s and 30s is very, very low, for such a stable and economicly vibrant entity as was Rome during Pax Romana. Even the poorest countries now have much higher life expectancy rates. I take it that these numbers are correct. If so, how come? Is it due to an extremely high infant mortality rate, or? Then the remark: Rotterdam on the silk road map is way off (looks more like Hamburg). Never seen such a weird map.
@@dahken417 yeah, I think so too. A bit later on Simon mentions that about half of the Roman children don't reach adulthood. That has quite a huge impact on life expectancy. If half the population reaches only the age of 2, the other half could live into old age to reach so a low life expectancy rate.
Ok, how did the plague get into the tomb in the first place without causing an outbreak prior to or related to sealing the tomb? Yes, some diseases can survive in these conditions, smallpox being a notable one-- but how did it get to the tomb without causing problem until the tomb was opened?
I'm going to go out on a very short, stout limb and say the tomb story is more valuable as an indicator of how the Romans saw the plague, rather than as a genuine account of its origin. Seleucia's location probably meant that the people in the empire who had heard of it associated it with Persia, which had long been a boogeyman in the Roman imagination (although Rome did finally manage to conclusively defeat the Parthians, that victory came at the end of a parade of horrendous failures). Seleucia was also Greek - it was the capital of the Seleucid Empire, a successor state to Alexander the Great's Macedonian empire. This might have played a role in the story, although Roman culture and religion was so similar to its Greek forebear that the similarity to the story of Pandora's box may well have come about organically.
There were those that felt the Roman Empire would never end and then there were people that thought something apocalyptic and would end the city all at once. But if they had known how the Roman Empire decay and fall in on itself I wonder what they would have thought. But then you could say the Roman Empire stayed alive through the Roman Church
Amazing, but also not, that Covid-19 is already on the list of most deadly plagues. I mean, you add Rome's reach, trade routes, and roads it's not surprising that the Antonine Plague had such a wide reaching affect
I almost choked on food laughing when you said came from china. Can we consider the possibility that something in china, perhaps hidden geographically; is creating new bugs? Like maybe some kind of cave with a set of conditions that harbors a base form?
Overcrowding and poor sanitation combined are the #1 cause of serious illness; this has been true throughout history. The #1 contributing factor to serious illness in the modern day is a sedentary lifestyle - but we're not allowed to talk about that
Dearest Simon (if that is your real name/allegedly), I just watched a video where you were raging about nerds correcting stupid/inconsequential facts in the comments. As a Rome-ologist, I can't wait to post a comment showing how super smart I am. Oh man...I missed half the video while typing. First correction: Pax is pronounced more like Pahx or 'Pox'. As an Englishness-man, I'm surprised your pronunciation is so American....as an American, I'd say 'welcome to the winning team'....Xoxo.
@Ethan White Given that Newcastle was the site of a hugely important fort for protecting Hadrian's wall, I'd question your assertion that the Romans never conquered the Toon. Besides military importance, Roman civilian settlements in Newcastle and Gateshead suggest a sizable presence.
@@sket4ket47 I blame Ant and Dec! Not only do they have to show up everywhere on my TV, now they're going back in time and moving Wallsend into the West End! Is nothing sacred? 🤪
The irony of misusing the word “decimate” when talking about the Romans! Great video as always, but decimation means to reduce by 10%. Tell me you’ve seen Spartacus?!
Sorry, but modern parlance often abandons the technically correct origns of a term, especially in the US. I actually agree with you, but one just gets accused of petty pedantry by idiots.
Hi Simon The lead water pipes didn't help the Romans to much. In fact the word plumber means 'worker of lead' in Latin. Kind of like the low levels of ........ in the water reticulation systems of Tokyo........ Well apparently we don't talk of such things these days it's not good for a certain enterprise Now let's mix say a gain of function virus with radioactive contaminated people. I wonder what type of variant ..... Ops
The Antonine Plaugue killed 25% of the population, according to this video. I'll take Simon's word for it. But his word just before that was 'decimated'. Normally I would restrain my nerdnazi tendencies but in this case the word "decimation" actually began in ancient Rome. Had a very specific meaning: killing 1/10th of a given population (their own soldiers, afaik), neither more nor less. And certainly not 2.5 times the actual decimation number. That's not decimation, that's dequartrification or something. Otherwise, as usual, an interesting and engaging show.
The word "decimate" also means "to reduce drastically especially in number, e.g., cholera decimated the population." He uses it appropriately to describe the effects of the plague on the Roman population.
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Has anyone got Magellan? I’m hearing mixed reviews. I’d like to get it but not if it’s crap
love your work simon. so glad to know you see all this praise of your outstanding work.
When you think about how small the population of the Earth was back then, you get a sense of just how devastating this was as a % of population killed off.
Right? Just the number of deaths doesn't give the full picture. Covid probably shouldn't be so high up. I mean, yes, by raw numbers of people killed, sure; but when you look at the percentage of the population, either globally, or for the regions affected, you're going to get a vastly different picture, I'm sure.
That's why we list Covid numbers as "per 10,000 people."
But even that can skew the numbers in a small enough population. A percentage, of the regional/area, and (estimated) global population, would give a much more accurate picture.
Is a hundred deaths a large number? In a city of 50,000, not really. In a village of 230 people, god, yes!
Something to consider for next time, Simon, please! :)
I was thinking about the same thing.
@@KryssLaBryn yeah not even close. additionally globalization makes it almost impossible for a pandemic to be rather regional. but lets wait a bit, covid evolves fast af, maybe we ll get there...
@@maxmustermann369 by definition it can't be regional. thats the whole world. pan-demic, from greek pan (all) demos (people, crowd).
a widespread epidemic, often on a worldwide Greek.
if it were regional, it wouldn't be a pandemic.
@@HappyBeezerStudios the key word here is "rather". and no, not the whole world has to be effected for a sickness to be called a pandemic, quite the opposite if you look up which ones are classified as one. so if you try to be a smartass, do your homework...
“The plague decimated the army”, brilliant quote! I love the pun with it, and how the word decimated came from the most cruel of Roman military punishments
Pro tip, if you want to skip the ad reads, the light behind Simon turns green when the ad starts and back to red or blue when it's back to the video, depending which channel you're watching. It's not always consistent, color wise, but the ad read segment will be a different color than the actual video.
I'm onto you Whistler.
Edit* please do support the sponsors though.
green for that youtube monaaaay
Holy shit! I never noticed the color change before, but then again, today’s video was quite obvious about it, lol!
@@susanrobinson910 his megaprojects video earlier today did the same thing, I'm detecting a pattern.
Correct! I'm not sure if it is intentional though. Simon records the AD part by itself. 1 so it can be used in multiple videos. 2 it can be used as a stand alone ad by the advertiser. I've seen Simon advertise for Magellan on the History Channel.
I often use green when its adverts (green for MONAYYY). But yeah, it's a little thing I do when I remember.
But please support the sponsors, they keep the lights on.
(That's a lie, the lights stay on either way, but I can buy fancier lights).
3:10 - Chapter 1 - Pax romana
5:20 - Chapter 2 - Outbreak
7:30 - Chapter 3 - Arrival in rome
10:35 - Chapter 4 - The spread
12:30 - Chapter 5 - Religion
13:55 - Chapter 6 - The empire emerges & falls
This pandemic was literally the Pox Romana
Thanks you. I dropped my phone and this helped me get back to where I was before.
My parents never read me bedtime stories. But ever since lockdown I have Simon's dulcet tones lulling me to sleep. Causing fantastical dreams of bygone eras.
Anthropological comment: Any time you're looking at "average life expectancy" keep in mind that that includes child and infant mortality. It's touched on in this video when it says "less than half of children made it to adulthood" but it's not quite made clear that that means if you *did* make it to adulthood you were likely to reach 50 or 60 years old, if not more.
Yes, several notable philosophers of the era died in their 70s and 80s.
Yes, rather than one average it would be more accurate to have a bimodal average life expectancy. One for childhood and one for adulthood.
>Simon on every other channel
"I hate ancient Rome and Greece, never making another video of them"
>UA-cam metrics showing engagement
"You sure about that factboy?!"
I'm sure about the views ;)
It's crazy, but I just learned of this ancient plague yesterday from another video about Marcus Aurelius.
"Of course quarantines, isolating, and working from home were neither possible nor even considered..."
"...the best they could do... prayers..."
Me: laughs in Texan.
I feel like I just watched a video on brain blaze of you begging for no more roman history videos lol.
Yes I recently watched one too lol 🤣 keep blazing simon
Yeah, but videos about Rome get more views, and Simon loves money.
Shhhh don’t up brain blaze on the normie channels 😂
He's always contradicting himself and such , he'll say anything for money. I actually used to kinda look up to him , lost a lot of respect for him slowly but surely over the last years.
Doomed for as long as UA-cam lives. 😆
So informational. Love the vids, your copious amount of channels and content along with them. Keep it up Simon, you're doing great as always!
Thank you.
If Mother Nature were a living being, we should really be in awe of her breathtaking capacity for ironic (albeit somewhat sadistic) humour.
First, she creates the most sophisticated species by orders of magnitude, then she instills within each and every of them an almost god-like sense of entitlement, and finally when these creatures believe without question that they are superior even to her ... she creates a 'tiny tiny insignificant little bitty bug', which ravages the entire population, from the smallest of babes, to the mightiest of emperors, and brings it in its entirety, along with all its wondrous edifices ... crashing to the ground.
I imagine Mother Nature in some great garden somewhere, hand over mouth, barely able to restrain her delight and chortled laughter. Were it not so painful, surely we'd all be having a great laugh as well.
Ah. Great comment.
Ah we have a cynic here bois
So you're saying Mother Nature is basically a more prettier version of Nurgle?
Into the shadows is by far the best of Simon's channels! All your channels and videos are so informative and interesting though!
I was given Magellan as a prior year gift excellent channel.
You know you've been watching too many Simon Whistler videos when you think he was going to say that the Roman army "smashed that dislike button."
What dislike button 🙃
Not sure why, but I really like the dramatic walk off camera.
Also, I've been watching all your content for years now. I'd like to see you make a video showing the writers and all the other staff behind the channels. Maybe even a biographic of yourself Simon.
Here here!!!!! 🍻 So I’m not the only one!!!!!!!
Because I watch fact boi, I noticed two of the pictures depicting the fascist bundle of tree limbs with their axes. The things I learn watching Simon.
Legend.
I lol’d at your enthusiasm when you exclaimed “prayers!” 😂😂
Always a good day for more Simon
For whatever reason, I had not heard of this pandemic,even though I'm quite a history buff of both Roman history and early Christianity. Thanks Simon for being a main source of my continuing education!❤️
To think in thousands of years of human history that getting sick almost meant certain death i find myself extremely greatful to live in an age of antibiotics and modern healthcare. Were lucky
Simon could talk about anything and it would be interesting. That British accent is what the Brits might say, brilliant!
Blurring out "naughty bits" in classical art? Damn, YT are really getting precious, prissy and censorious.
you only just realising this?
What killed me is that the women's breasts are blurred, but their vaginas are not. I can't help but wonder if that was intentional as a bit of fun at UA-cam's expense? Or if the editor(s) forgot that vaginas are a thing? Either way it's funny.
Yet there's a thumbnail of big cocks on video about male nude art. Hypocrisy as long as it's to put men down.
@@kyleanuar9090 Yeah that's not really the issue. The picture they used was already censored anyway, I've seen them use plenty of uncensored art on here. But I don't think anybody is out there "putting men down" through nude art censoring lol
@@semaj_5022 you probably meant vulva, not vagina.
Visitong Spain, I saw the elevated aquaducts running through the modern city humming beneath the aquaducts. Huge and fascinating, and still operable.
This was an eye opener. Thank you for this horrifying and informative presentation.
So the Uber rich and political class fled cities to their private estates to escape whilst left the plebeians to die in cramped cities…
Nice to see some things never change
Brilliant video 📹 Simon.
Thank you for sharing. 😊
Note that the name of the Roman emperor who died in 166 CE is Lucius VERUS, not Lucius Versius (as Simon pronounced it).
Do you mean AD166 . . . ?
He butchers ALL names.
I really like the art in this vid .
The more I learn about the fall of Rome, the more parallels I'm able to draw with the state of the US...terrifies the hell out of me
Good news for Simon and his love of Roman content according to some insane tiktoker the Roman Empire never existed
Ajhh you beat me to it
@Tom Foster can't remember the name but it was some crazy woman half the videos I saw she had some animal filter bs on
@@operator.k yep some bear ears
@@victoriandino yea really adds credibility ... Maybe that's why I didn't finish university none of my professors wore animals ears to accent their arguments. I mean what's the point of a master's or PhD if you don't carry yourself like your in the verge of a serious mental break with reality
@@operator.k exactly. If I had professors who were extremely condescending and insulted and swore at anyone who disagreed with them I would have understood the courses so much better.
Thank you
🐺
It is notable that Marcus Aurelius and his wife chose to stay in the city and do what they could to help rather than fleeing like other nobility. When the emperor succumbed to an undisclosed illness he was in the field with his troops.
That last part makes you wonder if the Romans really did find and open pandora's box? Entertain my spectulation for a few moments, at the beginning you spoke of the legend that the plague was started by (6:23) a roman solider opening a golden casket in babylon, what if this actually happened and what the solider opened was something left behind by hancock and carlson's advanced pre-flood civilization? What if the golden casket was a biological storage device or an biological warhead? I only suggest this after hearing the part at (16:15-16:16) that plagues seemed to have gotten worse after the Antonin Plague. We speculated in one of my history classes that the Antonin Plague is also responsible for later asian xenophobia. Before this early asian civilization were pretty open, and afterwards trade only happened at selected cities and ports which were walled away from the rest of the country. Sure this could all be about taxes and customs, but what if it is about quarantining instead? Good Listen as always, thanks Simon and Crew
@Tom Foster interesting take on Rome. I don’t agree at all, but you do you
Simon sitting at his desk
***hmmmmm time to do some Christmas shopping. I need some money!***
*cranks out a few videos on Ancient Rome and Nazi Germany
😂😂😂
Cheers, Simon, keep it up!!!! 🍻🍻🍻
while technically true, the fact about average lifespan is incredibly misleading. This is because the mortality rate for children under five years old was 50%. So instead of stating that the average lifespan in antiquity was around 30, it is much more helpful to say that the average adult lifespan was between 50 and 60.
Ah yes the famous time travelling Pax Romana from 27BC all the way back to 180BC! Sorry, don't usually nitpick, just thought that flub was pretty amusing...
It’s not a flub. It’s based on Roman calendars
If they base the calendar after christ from bc means before christ wixh means 27 after 180
Great Video!
A polishing move for the finishing touch ?:
The plague destruction, as this video shows, is about how it damages a society/empire. So the number of deaths in ratio to the affected population is more telling.
Earlier plagues affected smaller populations, and regional confinement might have made the Xian plague, for instance more less notable.
The Cyprian plague killed more of a population that was reduced by the Antonine plague.... terrifying.
Granted, it takes some research to find/compute the numbers.
Where are those illustrations from? I kinda like it.
They really look like the cambridge Latin course book illustrations but I'm not 100% sure
I've been facing the arctic Montana air to encourage my beard to start growing like Simons
Great video!
Bravo sir! Very good video.... subscription added 🙃
Love your videos!
Speaking of Smyrna, have you done one of the great fire or the Armenian genocide in general?
Good video 👍
With these youtube videos now a days who needs subscriptions ='D
You telling me the Roman Empire at its biggest was the size of half of Canada just blew my mind
I appreciate the bold choice to use AD and BC dates. The PC police will be coming to cancel you soon enough for this.
Ahh, poor Simon, forced to do yet ANOTHER Rome video. I feel you my dude.
Suggestion: How the United States government forced Native Americans onto reservations, and how the consequences still are in place today. Substandard living conditions, high rates of poverty and unemployment and substance abuse.
Oh yeah, Simon and his team should Love this one!
forcing Native children into boarding schools in what for some is still a recent memory and then sending them "home" to a place and a people group they no longer could relate to heavily increased the more recent alcohol and substance abuse problems on the reservations as well. Having spent a good chunk of my formative years just outside of one really makes me absolutely agree that Whistler should definitely touch on this dark section of American history.
native americans have allot of things to help them get ahead in life. i don’t really see how free healthcare/ cheap housing/ and free education would do anything but give them an advantage
@@xxx-ff9gw some good doesn't cancel out all bad you weirdo
I don’t know u just sound mad about it and it’s not really history if it’s on going
The Roman road system is to blame, people started moving around much more and where people go disease goes as well, while previously only coastal port citys had some big outbreaks.
Disease is spread through gossip.
Does anyone know the two paintings names at 12:48 & 12:50?
'Unshorn Phoebus, keep away the cloud of plague' was a prayer to Apollo, the god of healing and disease.
4th min - Marc Aurelius lived in AD not BC as voiced.
My favorite part of this channel is Simons mic drop at the end lol
Yes because that is so difficult to do. Very skillful to get up and walk off.
@@MrTexasDan Who hurt you?
I can't quite put my finger on it, but this story sounds familiar...
what a fascinating history thanks for this report. it could be interpreted that 70 years after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem the judgment came down the silk road from the east and this prospered Christianity which would have otherwise been increasingly prosecuted. The plagues are a powerful way of changing the balance of power.
Some things never change.
In the top 10 👍
Free and robust trade almost always leads to great human prosperity, unfortunately it is a lesson that we have to relearn every few decades
Simon and his crew need to do deeper investigation into many things covered in this video.
First of all, it leaves the impression that Rome went steadily downhill from Antonine. While it certainly did contribute to the Crisis of the Third Century; the reforms brought about by Diocletian, the subsequent Tetrarchy, and the glory of Constantine the Great brought Rome to a significant high-water mark. If there are cause-and-effect relationships between Antonine and 476 CE, they were certainly not pointed out in this video.
Secondly, Simon's coverage of Christianity is abysmal to say the least.
The gap between Antonine and the ascendancy of Christianity under Constantine is over a century. While adherents of that faith certainly grew over the century, there is no historical evidence that Antonine significantly bolstered this growth. Indeed, one has to at least consider the setbacks suffered by the faith during the reigns of Decius and Valerian.
The trope that Christians were thrown to the lions is also misinformed. Although Ignatius of Antioch spoke of such a demise, his arrest was several decades prior to Antonine, not to mention that as a Roman citizen, if his sentence was indeed carried out, it would have been done by beheading. There are no accounts at all in the city of Rome of Christians being given over to "damnatio ad bestias" (being thrown to the lion). Eusebius records this as being a punishment meted out in Palestine in the time of Diocletian, again, over a century after Antonine.
The one significant pogrom against Christians due to Anotnine was totally missed: the Gallic Martyrs of Lugdunum. This horrific and illegal blood bath has a very high likelihood of being at least partially due to polytheistic Romans trying to pin the blame on Christians. However, even the worst punishment here did not include damnatio ad bestias, for although beasts were supposedly loosed on Blandina, they had no appetite for her, forcing her death to come at the horns of a bull.
Finally, it is a sentiment widely beloved of modern Christians that it was they, compelled by adherence to their faith, that led them to stay and minister to the dying. While there is documentation of medical personnel behaving with such charitable abandon during the Black Death, there is no such documentation for Antonine. Indeed, was it not the self-same Christians who fled to the hills leaving their priesthood to care for the sick and dying during the Black Death? It is an anachronistic projection that makes us suppose Christians during Antonine acted any differently than Christians of the fourteenth century.
you expect a doctoral thesis in 15 minutes? on you tube? you are quite delusional.
1:20 you forgot to include Illyria at the shown map
This guy is everywhere
but where does simon go at the end of the videos
And what did he look at just before rising in this one?
How many channels do you have? I swear I’ve seen more Roman videos with you than Mary Beard
I would very much like to see a video about Rome before they conquered Greece.
Would love some resources in the description box.
"The Sorrows of Empires" - Chalmers Johnsons. Many more sorrows to come...
"Home remedies, amulets and prayers"
Sooooo 2021 america? 😂
The fish can't see the water. We all just had thirty years of perpetual war. Every historical epidemic follows a long period of War, a Siege, death of a Terrible king. It's the human response to a long fight. When a group stops fighting outsiders, some of the group has nothing else to live for. One reason is that they shrivel up and die without an enemy giving them purpose. You can blame soldiers, zealots, witches, fleas, cooties, or virii, but the roots of what we call diseases are emotional exhaustion. Right now, you'd like to consider that I'm right, but you're scared to leave the war cult.
Jeez! How many chanels do you have?
“Eastern half staggered on”.
Eastern Rome lasted another 900 years after the plague of Justinian and was the premier power in Europe during the medieval period.
Doubt lasting another millennia is staggering on.
@@silverhawkscape2677 I certainly don't consider another millennium to be staggering.
That map at 4:14 WTF?
I can never unhear the words "or less than half of canada" ....
1 remark and 1 question:
I'll start with the latter: average life expectancy between 20s and 30s is very, very low, for such a stable and economicly vibrant entity as was Rome during Pax Romana. Even the poorest countries now have much higher life expectancy rates. I take it that these numbers are correct. If so, how come? Is it due to an extremely high infant mortality rate, or?
Then the remark: Rotterdam on the silk road map is way off (looks more like Hamburg). Never seen such a weird map.
I've always been taught that the mortality rate was skewed by infants. Not sure about the map though.
@@dahken417 yeah, I think so too. A bit later on Simon mentions that about half of the Roman children don't reach adulthood. That has quite a huge impact on life expectancy. If half the population reaches only the age of 2, the other half could live into old age to reach so a low life expectancy rate.
Ok, how did the plague get into the tomb in the first place without causing an outbreak prior to or related to sealing the tomb?
Yes, some diseases can survive in these conditions, smallpox being a notable one-- but how did it get to the tomb without causing problem until the tomb was opened?
I'm going to go out on a very short, stout limb and say the tomb story is more valuable as an indicator of how the Romans saw the plague, rather than as a genuine account of its origin.
Seleucia's location probably meant that the people in the empire who had heard of it associated it with Persia, which had long been a boogeyman in the Roman imagination (although Rome did finally manage to conclusively defeat the Parthians, that victory came at the end of a parade of horrendous failures). Seleucia was also Greek - it was the capital of the Seleucid Empire, a successor state to Alexander the Great's Macedonian empire. This might have played a role in the story, although Roman culture and religion was so similar to its Greek forebear that the similarity to the story of Pandora's box may well have come about organically.
You're right, MagellanTV just pollutes everywhere else with ads.
I wish we had a death per capita stat to compare
Right On
9:28 Sounds familiar.
Another one! Sup ppl
@15:13-15:18, it’s none of those, it’s COVID-249…AD or CE whatever you prefer
There were those that felt the Roman Empire would never end and then there were people that thought something apocalyptic and would end the city all at once. But if they had known how the Roman Empire decay and fall in on itself I wonder what they would have thought. But then you could say the Roman Empire stayed alive through the Roman Church
they may have shaped a glorious building but not as glorious as that shaped beard
Amazing, but also not, that Covid-19 is already on the list of most deadly plagues.
I mean, you add Rome's reach, trade routes, and roads it's not surprising that the Antonine Plague had such a wide reaching affect
I almost choked on food laughing when you said came from china.
Can we consider the possibility that something in china, perhaps hidden geographically; is creating new bugs? Like maybe some kind of cave with a set of conditions that harbors a base form?
It does seem like that. Even the Black Death started in China…West Taiwan, the Han Empire, whatever you want to call it.
@@jaybee9269 how about a lab with shit loads of those historical viruses being worked on in awful conditions?
Sounds like the plot of some horror movie. People discover cave in China, get trapped, and proceed to get annihilated by countless ancient pathogens
Overcrowding and poor sanitation combined are the #1 cause of serious illness; this has been true throughout history. The #1 contributing factor to serious illness in the modern day is a sedentary lifestyle - but we're not allowed to talk about that
Dearest Simon (if that is your real name/allegedly), I just watched a video where you were raging about nerds correcting stupid/inconsequential facts in the comments. As a Rome-ologist, I can't wait to post a comment showing how super smart I am.
Oh man...I missed half the video while typing. First correction: Pax is pronounced more like Pahx or 'Pox'. As an Englishness-man, I'm surprised your pronunciation is so American....as an American, I'd say 'welcome to the winning team'....Xoxo.
Scotland in the North? The Romans never conquered Newcastle. UP THE TOON
Not even the Romans wanted to go to Newcastle
@Ethan White Given that Newcastle was the site of a hugely important fort for protecting Hadrian's wall, I'd question your assertion that the Romans never conquered the Toon. Besides military importance, Roman civilian settlements in Newcastle and Gateshead suggest a sizable presence.
@@PaulsScene Romans only conquered the West End. The boys from Byker threw on their tracksuits and 110s and clarted the Romans all over
@@sket4ket47 I blame Ant and Dec! Not only do they have to show up everywhere on my TV, now they're going back in time and moving Wallsend into the West End! Is nothing sacred? 🤪
I've just seen a video on a conspiracy theory that ancient Rome didn't exist. Simon would be so happy!
Simon on Brain Blaze: ENOUGH OF ROMEEEE
Simon that wants money on every other channel: Let's talk about Rome
Why has Utube discontinued displaying the number of 'dislikes'?
The irony of misusing the word “decimate” when talking about the Romans!
Great video as always, but decimation means to reduce by 10%. Tell me you’ve seen Spartacus?!
TIL a correct definition, and I never noticed the "deci" in the word before. Thank you, kind commenter!
Sorry, but modern parlance often abandons the technically correct origns of a term, especially in the US. I actually agree with you, but one just gets accused of petty pedantry by idiots.
I think you meant “27 BC - 180 AD”.
3:44/16:43 dude you said Marcus Aurelius died in 180BC… You mean AD. Whoops
It seems the people of the ancient were far more versed on the placebo effect
The hunt for santa..
Antonine Plauge > Covid-19
🧐
Hi Simon
The lead water pipes didn't help the Romans to much. In fact the word plumber means 'worker of lead' in Latin.
Kind of like the low levels of ........ in the water reticulation systems of Tokyo........
Well apparently we don't talk of such things these days it's not good for a certain enterprise
Now let's mix say a gain of function virus with radioactive contaminated people. I wonder what type of variant .....
Ops
The Antonine Plaugue killed 25% of the population, according to this video. I'll take Simon's word for it. But his word just before that was 'decimated'. Normally I would restrain my nerdnazi tendencies but in this case the word "decimation" actually began in ancient Rome. Had a very specific meaning: killing 1/10th of a given population (their own soldiers, afaik), neither more nor less. And certainly not 2.5 times the actual decimation number. That's not decimation, that's dequartrification or something.
Otherwise, as usual, an interesting and engaging show.
The word "decimate" also means "to reduce drastically especially in number, e.g., cholera decimated the population." He uses it appropriately to describe the effects of the plague on the Roman population.
The Pax Romana ended in 180AD not BC :)
Goasts. Goat's. Beards. Goats...