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The panic that was thereby created must have been accentuated by the
recurrence of plague, the greatest outbreak that Dio—too young at the
time to remember the great plague of 166–7—ever experienced: ‘2000
people often died at Rome in a single day’. He added a curious story. ‘Also
at this time, many others, not only in the city but throughout most of the
empire, died at the hands of criminals who smeared deadly drugs on tiny
needles and were hired to infect people with them.’ Whatever the facts,
this peculiar anecdote reveals a great deal about the climate of the time.