Resisting speculation, remaining committed to rational thought, and keeping in mind in inevitability of disasters helped Marcus Aurelius through the Antonine Plague. Could the same principles guide us through the Covid-19 crisis? 

Symptoms were first reported in the East, possibly as far away as China.  Soon it was spreading throughout the West carried home by soldiers and merchants returning from their travels.  Before long, outbreaks of the deadly virus were reported in one European city after another.  The Antonine Plague is believed to have killed up to five million people throughout the Roman Empire.  It turned into a pandemic lasting from 166 AD until at least 180 AD, when it claimed the life of its most famous victim, Marcus Aurelius, after whose dynasty, the Antonines, it was named. 

It was almost as though the universe had chosen to put to the test the Stoicism for which Marcus Aurelius was famed.  Indeed, a generation later, historian Cassius Dio, wrote:

[Marcus Aurelius] did not meet with the good fortune that he deserved, for he was not strong in body and was involved in a multitude of troubles throughout practically his entire reign. But for my part, I admire him all the more for this very reason, that amid unusual and extraordinary difficulties he both survived himself and preserved the empire. – Cassius Dio

The plague was clearly one of the major challenges of Marcus’ reign.  Moreover, he probably began writing The Meditations not long after it began sweeping through the legionary camps, where he stationed himself throughout the war.  However, Marcus only refers to the plague once in his writings, noting moral corruption of the mind is a far more serious pestilence than the physical one that corrupts the body by, as the Romans realised, somehow contaminating the very air they were breathing (Meditations, 9.2). 

The plague, he says, merely attacks us physically whereas these vices attack our inner nature destroying that which is essential to our very humanity.