Marcus Aurelius responded to the plague with the kind of calm collection I think all of us should strive for while, say, on the phone with Time Warner Cable. He immediately busied himself signing new laws to keep the city livable. For instance, he forbade people from turning their villas into giant tombs. He excused anyone from a court summons who had a funeral to attend, and common people who died of the plague were given burials at the public’s expense. A law was passed that you could not dig up bodies to use their graves for your own dead, which was apparently common enough to require
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