The goal of this paper was to examine whether we can refer to the Antonine Plague, a pestilence which ravaged the Roman Empire between 165. and approximately 190. AD as the first pandemic in European history. The methodology which was employed to analyze the pandemic character of the aforementioned pestilence was borrowed from the epidemiological criteria which were set up to differentiate epidemics from pandemics. Criteria for determining whether a disease outbreak can be labelled as a pandemic are as follows: wide geographic extension, disease movement, high attack rates and explosiveness, minimal population immunity and novelty, contagiousness and finally, severity. Next, all of these criteria were tested by analyzing ancient sources, as well as the results of historiographic and scientific research in order to ascertain if any of them might be used as evidence for the verification of every separate criterion. Except the Antonine plague, this analysis was also employed on two historical outbreaks of disease which might be viewed as pandemics as well. These were: the possibility of a Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age pandemic of the bubonic plague, and the Plague of Athens. A brief survery of all currently known diseases which struck the Roman world was also presented. The conclusion which emerges, based on the evaluation of the aforementioned criteria with the ancient sources and the results of modern biological sciences, is that the Antonine Plague can be, with reasonable confidence, dubbed the first clearly attested pandemic in European history, while all the earlier analyzed examples were probably semi-connected epidemic outbreaks. This characterization has been chosen because of two reasons. The first one regards the fact that we are faced with a substantial lack of sources for earlier examples, and therefore cannot properly conclude if these occurrences really were pandemics.Second reason why these disease outbreaks can't, to the best of our current knowledge, be specified as pandemics is linked to the criterion of wide geographic extension, but also to the lack of human-built infrastructure which could help the spread of highly virulent pathogens.