The impact of the plague on the society of the sixth-century Roman Empire remains a subject of controversy. At the heart of the debate lies the question of the size and extent of the mortality. Was it such that it resulted in a significant and lasting demographic decline, or have we been overly impressed by the lurid accounts in the literary sources and imagined a crisis that never really existed? Was this a pandemic on the scale of the Black Death and subsequent visitations? Finding a check on the literary sources is very difficult. Clearly, there are few if any documentary sources to help us out. The only possible moderator for the written accounts would seem to be the archaeological evidence.

In recent years, a number of commentators have pointed out that the archaeological evidence suggests that the literary accounts of mass mortality are greatly exaggerated or, perhaps, that they related to only one small locality and that such evidence should not be extrapolated to include the entire Mediterranean world, or even just the territories under the control of the eastern Roman Empire. Jean Durliat, for example, accuses us of privileging the written accounts and disregarding archaeological material. Discussing the modern literature on the plague, he argues, “All of these studies have in common their privileging of literary sources, and among these, descriptions of the epidemic, whereas specialists in other kinds of documents accord it [the plague] only minor importance. It is from this insufficiently underscored contradiction that indecisive and divergent interpretations stem.”