Plagues, climate change, and the end of an empire. <scp>A</scp> response to <scp> Kyle Harper's <i>The Fate of Rome</i> (2) </scp> : <scp>P</scp> lagues and a crisis of empire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This is the second of a three‐section review of Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome in which we examine in detail Harper's treatment of two allegedly widespread and mortal Roman outbreaks of disease. In the case of the second‐century Antonine plague, we demonstrate that Harper overlooked a major controversy and instead portrayed an oversimplified narrative of a catastrophic event. In the case of the third‐century Cyprianic plague, we call attention to several glaring methodological issues in Harper's treatment of the episode, point out the absence of corresponding evidence in the papyri, and cast doubt on the linkage previously drawn between the plague and archaeology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".