I Rule Rome with a God-Tier AI-Chapter 110: The Silent Plague
While the generals and engineers of his new Artisan Legions debated the logistics of moving mountains and draining swamps, Alex found himself confronted with a far more insidious and invisible enemy. It was a threat that could not be met with Ignis Steel or Roman concrete, an enemy that was already inside the gates, seated at the dinner tables of the most powerful families in Rome.
The problem was brought to him by Sabina. In the weeks following their betrothal, she had become his true partner in governance, her sharp, mercantile mind a perfect complement to his own grand, strategic vision. She managed the present while he planned the future. She had been conducting a deep, thorough audit of the Roman state, not just its finances, but its demographics, its human capital. She came to him one evening in the study, her usual brisk confidence replaced by a furrow of deep, analytical concern.
"I have found a disturbing trend, Caesar," she said, unrolling a scroll filled with her neat, precise figures. "I have been reviewing the census data for the last fifty years, focusing on the great patrician houses, the senatorial class." She tapped a column of numbers. "Their birth rates are in a state of steady, alarming decline. For every ten children born to a common plebeian family, a noble family produces perhaps three. Of those three, one rarely survives to adulthood. They are marrying, they are having children, but their lines are... withering. At this rate, half of the ancient families of Rome will be extinct within a century."
She saw it as a matter of state security. "These families form the bedrock of our government. They are our generals, our governors, our priests. If our ruling class is slowly dying out, it creates a vacuum, a source of profound, long-term instability."
Alex listened, a cold, familiar dread trickling into his mind. He knew this problem. He had read about it in history books from his own time. The strange madness of emperors like Caligula and Nero, the bizarre behavior of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the notorious difficulty so many noble families had in producing a male heir. Historians had speculated for centuries, blaming decadence, inbreeding, and divine disfavor. But a popular theory from the 20th and 21st centuries pointed to a more mundane and terrifying culprit.
"Lyra," he whispered, turning to his laptop while Sabina studied her scrolls. "Run a cross-analysis. Correlate Roman aristocratic lifestyle habits—diet, plumbing, food storage, cosmetics—with my contemporary medical database. Specifically, search for chronic heavy metal toxicity."
The result was instantaneous. Analysis complete, Lyra's voice stated in his ear. The data presents a 98.6% probability of systemic, multi-generational lead poisoning across the Roman upper classes.
Lyra began listing the sources, and it was a horrifying catalog of a civilization poisoning itself with its own ingenuity. The lead pipes—the very symbol of Roman plumbing superiority—leached the metal into their drinking water. The pewter dishes and goblets they ate and drank from were a lead-tin alloy. The sweet, syrupy wine preservative called sapa, a favorite of the elite, was made by boiling down grape must in lead pots, creating a beverage thick with highly toxic lead acetate. Even the white, powdered makeup favored by patrician women was a lead-based compound, absorbed directly through the skin.
It was a silent, invisible plague, passed down from parent to child. It caused gout, anemia, and nerve damage. It crippled fertility and dramatically increased the rate of stillbirths and infant mortality. And in high concentrations, it was a potent neurotoxin, causing memory loss, paranoia, and madness.
Alex felt a profound chill. He was looking at the secret, biological reason for the fall of Rome, a slow poisoning of its ruling class that had been happening for centuries. And he was the only person on Earth who knew it.
How could he possibly solve it? He couldn't stand before the Senate and deliver a lecture on toxicology. The very concept of microscopic poisons was utterly alien to their worldview. They would think he was a madman, a practitioner of bizarre magic who had suddenly declared war on their pipes, their wine, and their way of life. They would laugh him out of the Curia before they had him assassinated.
No. He couldn't fight it with science. He had to fight it with culture. He had to make the solution seem Roman.
A few days later, he summoned a council of Rome's most prominent physicians and the high priests of the cult of Aesculapius, the god of medicine. They gathered in a chamber in the palace, a room filled with Greek medical scrolls and anatomical charts, an environment designed to lend his words a scholarly weight.
He did not speak to them of poison. He spoke to them of purity.
"Learned men," he began, his tone sober and deeply concerned. "I have spent many nights in the imperial libraries, studying the ancient medical texts of the great Hippocrates and the physicians of the Ptolemaic court." This was his now-perfected method: framing his future knowledge as rediscovered ancient wisdom. "They speak of a subtle corruption, a miasma, that can enter our bodies through the water we drink and the wine we consume. This miasma, they say, does not come from the air, but from prolonged contact with certain impure metals. They wrote that this metallic impurity weakens the blood, brings a madness to the mind, and curses the family line, making it wither and die."
He had framed the problem in a way their pre-scientific minds could immediately grasp. Not as a chemical reaction, but as a form of spiritual and physical impurity, a curse that afflicted the bloodline. The physicians and priests nodded gravely, whispering to each other, this new theory fitting neatly into their existing understanding of the world.
Having established the "ancient" problem, he now offered the "rediscovered" solutions. He issued a new set of "Purity Edicts," presented as a matter of public health and religious piety.
First, he addressed the aqueducts. "The ancients knew that lead, while useful, was a 'lazy' and impure metal. The purest water, they wrote, must flow only through channels of earth and stone. Therefore, all new aqueducts, starting with the great Aqua Sabina, will be lined not with lead, but with a new, 'pure' form of waterproof ceramic tile, a technique my engineers at the Institute are perfecting."
Next, he turned to wine and oil. "Our second great vulnerability is in how we store our most precious liquids." He raised a beautiful, iridescent vessel. "The master artisans of Syria and Alexandria have rediscovered the ancient art of glassblowing. The Greeks believed glass was a form of solidified air, the purest of all the elements. I therefore decree that glass vessels are the only truly 'pure' way to store wine and olive oil to protect them from corruption." He announced the establishment of a massive, state-subsidized glassworks, which would produce affordable vessels for the noble houses. He declared that the imperial palace itself would be the first to transition entirely to glass, immediately making it the highest standard of fashion and status.
Finally, he commissioned the Institute's potters to create a new line of exquisite, lead-free ceramic dinnerware, glazed in vibrant colors. He called it Terra Commodiana and began gifting sets of it to the most influential noble families, marketing it as a sign of imperial favor and a way to ensure the "purity and continuation of their noble line."
His reforms were met with some grumbling from traditionalists and lead-mine owners, but were largely seen as yet another example of the Emperor's wise, almost obsessive, concern for the health and purity of the Roman people. Sabina, grasping his true purpose immediately, used her commercial genius to create the economic incentives, ensuring the new glass and ceramic wares were not only healthier but also more desirable and fashionable than the old pewter and lead-sealed amphorae.
Alex felt a deep sense of accomplishment. He had, with a series of subtle, culturally-attuned edicts, begun to solve a problem that had invisibly plagued Rome for centuries. He had set in motion a cure for the silent plague.
But a week later, a report arrived from the newly established imperial glassworks near Cumae. It was from the chief artisan, a man Sabina had hired from Alexandria. The news was both good and bad. The demand for their new, beautiful glassware was astronomical; every noble house wanted what the Emperor had. But the artisan had a desperate, urgent problem. "Our furnaces burn day and night to meet the demand, Caesar. We have already clear-cut the surrounding hillsides for firewood to fuel them. The local supply of timber is exhausted."
The report ended with a simple, desperate plea that Alex had never anticipated. "We need a new source of fire, Caesar. A new kind of fuel. Or the furnaces will go cold, and the production of your pure vessels will cease."
Alex stared at the report, the irony hitting him with the force of a physical blow. His brilliant, anachronistic solution to one of Rome's most insidious problems had inadvertently created a brand new, and potentially far larger one. He had just kick-started Rome's first energy crisis.
