The Cyprian Plage

By the year two 50, long before christianity's official legal acceptance, the church in rome was doing best to support an extraordinary number of impoverished people on a daily food roster. Around same time, middle of the third century, a pandemic hit the mediterranean world that ravaged cities for a decade. Historians call it the cyprian plague, named after the christian bishop of carthage in north africa whose writings provide our clearest first hand evidence of the nature of the disease. Often families abandoned their loved ones at the first sign of sickness. They might not have understood infection control, but they certainly knew that contact with the sick meant almost certain death.