I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 116: The Gospel of Health

A month later, Alex returned to a city perched on the knife's edge of anxiety. Sabina, with her characteristic ruthless efficiency, had carried out his orders to the letter. The flow of trade and travel from the East had slowed to a mere trickle, choked off by the sanitary cordon he had established in Syria. The economic disruption was significant, and the merchant guilds were beginning to grumble, but Sabina's iron grip on the city's finances—and her pointed reminders of their profitable contracts with the state—kept their complaints to a low murmur.

The news from Seleucia was more troubling. Pertinax, in his dispatches, reported that the quarantine of the Legio V Macedonica was holding, but he chafed under the order. The 'fever,' he wrote, had passed its peak. Many of the afflicted soldiers were now recovering, and he argued forcefully that the continued isolation of a veteran legion was a waste of military resources and a blow to the men's morale. Alex knew better. He knew, from his 21st-century understanding, that this was the dangerous remission phase of the disease, a period when the infected felt better but were still highly contagious. Pertinax's Roman pragmatism was now a direct threat to the health of the entire Empire.

Alex realized he could not win this war from a distance. The physical wall he had built in the East was only a temporary measure. The true battle had to be fought here, in the crowded, filthy, and superstitious heart of Rome itself. He had to change the habits and beliefs of a million people. He couldn't do it by force; he had to do it through persuasion, by wrapping his modern medical knowledge in the familiar language of Roman religion and civic duty.

He began not with an edict, but with a sermon. He convened the priests of the cult of Aesculapius, the god of healing, and a hand-picked group of the city's most respected physicians. He announced to them a great, divinely inspired public health campaign. He was creating a new Imperial Cult, one that would work alongside the established priesthoods, dedicated to the promotion of a "lost" gospel: the Gospel of Salus, the ancient goddess of health and purity.

"For too long, we have prayed to Salus for her favor," Alex announced, his voice filled with the fervor of a true believer. "But the ancient texts I have studied teach us that Salus does not grant her protection to the idle. She demands that we become active partners in our own health! She demands that we purify our bodies and our city to make them worthy of her blessings!"

He announced the formation of the "Collegia Salutis"—the Colleges of Health. These would be new institutions, funded by the imperial treasury, led by a new order of 'Health Priests' (drawn from the ranks of physicians and acolytes), and dedicated to spreading this new gospel to every corner of the city.

The 'gospel' itself was a brilliant and subtle translation of basic public health principles into Roman social and religious terms.

First, he preached the "Purification of the Body." "The ancient priests taught that a man's hands are the conduit through which the impurities of the world enter his body," he explained. He launched a massive, city-wide campaign for public hand-washing. It was not framed as a way to remove germs, but as a necessary ritual ablution, a way to cleanse oneself of spiritual miasma before eating or entering a home. To facilitate this, he used state funds to construct hundreds of new public fountains and marble basins throughout the city, each one inscribed with a dedication to Salus. Hand-washing became not just a hygienic practice, but a visible act of public piety.

Next, he addressed the "Sanctity of the Air." "The ghost sickness from the East travels on the wind, on the very breath of men," he warned. He preached the danger of what he called "crowd miasma," the concentration of spiritual impurity in large, dense, indoor gatherings. He couldn't ban the games or close the bathhouses—that would cause a riot—but he strongly "encouraged" citizens to spend more time in the open air of the city's parks and gardens. It was a primitive but effective form of promoting social distancing.

His most radical and controversial doctrine was "Respect for the Sanctity of the Sick." He introduced the entirely alien concept of isolating the ill from their families. In Rome, the sick were tended to by their relatives at home, a practice that turned every household into a potential incubator for disease. Alex decreed the establishment of the first Roman "hospices." These were not hospitals for healing, but quiet, isolated buildings on the edge of the city where the afflicted could be taken. He framed this not as imprisonment, but as a supreme act of piety. "To be touched by a divine sickness is a sacred, and dangerous, state," his Health Priests preached. "The afflicted must be given a quiet, consecrated place to face their gods, and their families must be protected from the intensity of their spiritual struggle." It was quarantine, disguised as a religious duty.

Finally, he held his most dangerous and potent weapon in reserve: variolation. He let it be known through his Health Priests that he was studying a "divine secret" from the mystical priests of India, a sacred rite that could grant a person the goddess's permanent protection from the ghost sickness by marking them with a "divine scar." It was a terrifying, brilliant idea, but he knew the city was not yet desperate enough to accept it. He needed a test case.

The campaign was met with a predictably mixed reaction. Senator Rufus and the more civic-minded nobles championed the construction of new fountains and the general cleanliness of the city. But many traditionalists, particularly in the poorer, more superstitious quarters, saw it as yet another example of the Emperor's strange, foreign magic. The new Health Priests, with their strange doctrines and obsessive focus on purity, were viewed with suspicion.

The ultimate test came, as Alex knew it must, when the first case of the plague inevitably slipped through the cordon. A merchant, traveling with a false manifest, had made his way from Antioch to Rome. He collapsed with a raging fever and the tell-tale pustules of the disease in a crowded, squalid tenement building in the heart of the Subura. Within a week, the entire five-story insula was a death house.

This was the moment. Alex acted immediately. He dispatched his new Health Priests, their faces now covered with linen masks soaked in wine—a terrifying and alien sight for the Romans—to oversee the situation. They were accompanied by a full cohort of the City Watch, who, under Sabina's orders, established a hard quarantine, sealing the entire building. No one was allowed in or out.

The reaction from the neighborhood was immediate and violent. The people of the Subura were poor, suspicious, and fiercely protective of their own. They did not see a life-saving public health measure. They saw the Emperor's strange priests, their faces hidden like executioners, sealing their friends and relatives in a tomb. They believed it was a dark ritual, a human sacrifice to appease the Emperor's foreign gods.

Fear turned to rage. The neighborhood erupted into a riot. Men and women poured into the narrow street, screaming curses, pelting the soldiers with stones, roof tiles, and anything else they could find. They surged forward, a desperate, terrified mob, trying to break the quarantine line and "free" their relatives from the clutches of the masked priests.

Alex received the news in the palace. He had come to a terrible crossroads. He could order the soldiers to use lethal force, to cut down his own citizens in the streets to enforce the quarantine. It would be effective, but it would brand him as a butcher, confirming their worst fears and turning the entire city against him. Or he could order a retreat, let the mob have its way, and in doing so, allow the Antonine Plague to be unleashed upon the million souls of Rome. He had to choose between being a tyrant and being the man who allowed his city to die.