indeed smallpox, the number who died would probably have been about 25 percent of those infected as the survival rate from smallpox is often around 75 percent, or three out of four people infected. The traditional view was expressed by Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) who concluded that "as the reign of Marcus Aurelius forms a turning point in so many things, and above all in literature and art, I have no doubt that this crisis was brought about by that plague.... The ancient world never recovered from the blow inflicted on it by the plague which visited it in the reign of Marcus Aurelius." More recently, scholar Kyle Harper said something similar: the pandemic "in any account of Rome's destiny ... merit[s] a place squarely in the forefront." To the contrary, a team of six historians questioned the "extreme" position of Harper and others on this plague "by ignoring scholarship that suggests it had a less than catastrophic outcome," but the historians affirmed that "we do not doubt that disease and climate had some of the impact Harper describes." Some historians have hypothesised that the epidemic resulted in a surge in the popularity of the cult of Asclepius, the god of medicine; epigraphic evidence, however, suggests no such increase of the cult's popularity occurred. Impact on the Roman army The ancient chroniclers portray the plague as a disaster for the Roman army with the army "reduced almost to extinction." This came in 166 at the beginning at the Marcomannic Wars in which Germanic tribes were invading Roman territory south of the middle Danube River in what is now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and south to Italy. The impact of the plague forced Marcus Aurelius to recruit and train additional soldiers from among "gladiators, slaves, and bandits." After a delay of two years, in 169 the emperor launched an attack against the Germanic tribes. By 171 the Roman army had driven the invaders out of Roman territory. The war would continue sporadically until 180 when Marcus Aurelius died, possibly of the plague. The plague may also have impacted the Germanic tribes. Indian Ocean trade and Han China Although Ge Hong was the first writer of traditional Chinese medicine who accurately described the symptoms of smallpox, the historian Rafe de Crespigny mused that the plagues afflicting the Eastern Han Empire during the reigns of Emperor Huan of Han (r. 146–168) and