Memento Mori
Be good to each other, that was the prevailing belief of Marcus’s life. A disease like the plague, “can only threaten your life,” he said in Meditations, but evil, selfishness, pride, hypocrisy, fear—these things “attack our humanity.”
Capital Thinking • Issue #571 • View online
It began in the East.
At least, that’s what the experts think. Maybe it came from animals. Maybe it was the Chinese.
Maybe it was a curse from the gods.
-Ryan Holiday
When the System Breaks Down, Leaders Stand Up
Ryan Holiday | The Daily Stoic:
One thing is certain: it radiated out east, west, north, and south, crossing borders, then oceans, as it overwhelmed the world.
The only thing that spread faster than the contagion was the fear and the rumors.
People panicked. Doctors were baffled. Government officials dawdled and failed.
Travel was delayed or rerouted or aborted altogether. Festivals, gatherings, sporting events—all cancelled.
The economy plunged. Bodies piled up.
The institutions of government proved very fragile indeed.
We’re talking, of course, about the Antonine Plague of 165 CE, a global pandemic with a mortality rate of between 2-3%, which began with flu-like symptoms until it escalated and became gruesome and painfully fatal.
Millions were infected. Between 10 and 18 million people eventually died.
It shouldn’t surprise us that an ancient pestilence—one that spanned the entire reign of Marcus Aurelius—feels so, well, modern.
As Marcus would write in his diary at some point during this horrible plague, history has a way of repeating itself.
“To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before,” he said in Meditations. “And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experience or from history: the court of Hadrian, of Antoninus. The courts of Philip, Alexander, Croesus. All just the same. Only the people different.”
This pattern of disease is nauseatingly familiar.
It’s a pattern that has repeated itself like a fractal across history. Indeed, we could be talking about the Bubonic Plague (aka the Black Death), the Spanish Flu of 1918, or the cholera pandemics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, just as easily as we are talking about the Antonine Plague and thinking about the coronavirus pandemic that is spreading across the globe.
As Marcus would say, all we’d have to do is change a few dates and names.
It can be a very jarring mental exercise for some—thinking about the way the history of disease repeats itself—because we like to view the evolution of human civilization as moving inevitably in some new, unique direction.
We like to see history as steady progress. Then when bad things happen, when catastrophe strikes, we feel like the world is coming apart.
We suffocate ourselves with breathless shouting about the sky falling and give ourselves heart attacks over not being prepared for what is to come.
It’s the same story, unfolded as if from an ancient script, written on the double helix of human DNA.
We make the same mistakes. Succumb to the same fears. Endure the same grief and pain…
Be good to each other, that was the prevailing belief of Marcus’s life.
A disease like the plague, “can only threaten your life,” he said in Meditations, but evil, selfishness, pride, hypocrisy, fear—these things “attack our humanity.”
Which is why we must use this terrible crisis as an opportunity to learn, to remember the core virtues that Marcus Aurelius tried to live by: Humility. Kindness. Service. Wisdom.
We can’t waste time. We can’t take people or things or our health for granted.
*Featured post photo by Nathan Lemon on Unsplash