ANCIENT DISEASE: How Healthy Were the Ancient Romans

How healthy, or rather, how unhealthy, were ancient people? The Roman Empire was famed for its plumbing systems and aqueducts, but what did the nutritional levels of the population look like? These are questions to which new methods, drawn from the hard sciences, are only just starting to give answers to. The data so far suggests that the Roman population during the Pax Romana was far from stellar. The Antonine Plague, which probably ripped through the Roman World around the mid-second century, entered a world that was already physiologically weak, which explains in part why it was so devastating. But, genetic evidence also suggests that it may have been a new type of sickness entirely. Disease would continue to ravage the Roman world, first with the Plage of Cyprian, and then later on in the 500s with the Plague of Justinian, the first recorded instance of the Black Death in Europe and the Middle East.
SOURCES:
The Fate of Rome, Harper
Plagues Upon the Earth, Harper
The Antonines, Grant
The Antonine Plague and the 'Third-Century Crisis', Bruun