From 165 to 180 AD, Rome was hit by a plague. The “Antonine Plague,” also known as the Plague of Galen, would kill literally millions of people during Marcus Aurelius’s reign. It was horrible and terrifying. No one knew what caused this awful disease, or what had brought it on. Had the gods cursed the empire? Was it punishment for their sins? How could they stop the contagion, which could kill a person in two miserable weeks?
In his book, How To Think Like a Roman Emperor, Donald Robertson tells us that the Romans believed that the burning of incense might protect a family from falling ill. Marcus Aurelius, who bravely refused to flee Rome as other leaders had, would wake up each day to a surreal smelling city—a mixture of the putrid smell of dead bodies and the sweet aroma of incense. As Donald writes, “for over a decade the scent of smoke of incense [was] a reminder to Marcus that he was living under the shadow of death and that survival from one day to the next should never be taken for granted.”
Until very recently, most of us in the First World had no sense of what that horrible smell might be like. Almost no one alive remembers the Spanish Flu, which killed something like 50 million people between 1918 and 1920. The AIDS epidemic, which was a horrible, terrifying medical crisis, has receded into the distance. Ebola and SARS and swine flu and Zika were, mercifully, less awful than predicted. Then, suddenly, COVID-19 changed everything. We were reminded immediately and unceremoniously that we remain beneath the same shadow of death, that life should never be taken for granted.
Life is short. Nature is brutal. Epidemics are unsparing. We are still—for all our medical advancements—just pagans hoping, praying with our silly devices, that we will be skipped. And maybe we will. But maybe we won’t.
Which is why we have to live now. Which is why we must seize today while we still can.
P.S. This was originally sent on July 28, 2020. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.
