Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy, Robert Sallares [reading a book TXT] 📗

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It was always possible to find localities which were free from malaria, especially on raised land. Just to give one small example here, a nineteenth-century travel handbook noted that on the Via Cassia leading north from Rome the first inn after Veii, Baccano near the Lago di Bracciano, was situated in an unhealthy area, but the next inn along the road, Monterosi, was healthy because of its higher altitude (276 metres above sea level).³¹ Sometimes modern historians use the localized distribution of malaria to argue that because it did not occur everywhere it was not very important.

Brunt, for example, advocated this view, while accepting that malaria had probably always been present in Italy. The error in this view is that it overlooks the fact that the localities where malaria occurred were the localities with the best agricultural land, i.e.

valleys and well-watered lowlands. Consequently malaria had a much greater impact on the economy than its localized distribution might suggest. In the early modern period about one-sixth of the area of the Roman Campagna was regarded as being good, fertile farmland. It was naturally located in the lowlands. That means that malaria only had to cover that same sixth of the Roman Campagna to devastate the agricultural economy. Under those circumstances the type of animal husbandry described by Pliny the Younger along the road from Rome to Laurentum was logically the best way of exploiting the land.

It is impossible to consider here in detail the question of latifundia in relation to the results of archaeological field surveys in Italy, beyond recalling briefly the well known results of the surveys conducted by the British School at Rome which revealed a decline in the number of occupied sites of about 80% from the first to the fifth century  in southern Etruria.³² Field surveys in various other parts of Italy have shown that the countryside was certainly not deserted in the last two centuries , following the devastation which it is frequently assumed that Hannibal caused during the Second Punic War. However, the archaeological evidence on its own has and always will have, two fundamental weaknesses. First, it cannot tell us anything about the nature of land ownership, for example about the possibility of multiple sites being owned by a single owner. Secondly, the field surveys cannot tell us anything about the composition of the labour force (i.e. whether farms were ³¹ Blewitt (1843: 246).

³² Potter (1979: 138–46), cf. Liverani (1984).

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worked by owner-occupiers, tenants, or slaves). For that we need documentary evidence.

Consequently it is still worth paying attention to Brunt’s treatment of the problem of ‘the desolation of Italy’ ( Italiae solitudo) as it appears in literary sources for the Republican period, even though it was written before archaeological field surveys became fashion-able. He concluded that ‘the existence of so many small towns in south Etruria is a strong indication that the free agricultural population held out better there than in some other parts of Italy’.³³

Even if this is true for the Republic, the field surveys suggest a steady decline in south Etruria during the Empire. Most of the major towns of the region in antiquity were eventually either abandoned or moved to new sites. With respect to Latium Brunt’s conclusion was rather different: the population was mainly composed of slaves on ‘a land of estates owned by the few’.³⁴ If Brunt’s conclusion about Latium is correct, it shows that the system of land ownership characteristically associated with malaria in recent periods of history was already in place in Latium by the end of the Republic. It also raises another fundamental question about the agricultural system in Latium in the later stages of the Republic, namely the question of the nature of the agricultural labour force.

The population of the city of Rome, perhaps 750,000–1,000,000

people by the end of the first century , required very large quantities of food to sustain itself. Latium was renowned in particular for its wines, especially Caecuban wine, the product of a variety of vine which was very well adapted to the wet environmental conditions of the coastal region in the vicinity of modern Fondi.³⁵ The existence of such varieties of domesticated vine is not at all surprising when one recalls, from the descriptions of the Pontine forest quoted earlier (Ch. 6 above), that wild vines flourished in the Pontine Marshes. Setian wine, the favourite of the emperor Augustus, was also very highly rated. The example of Setian wine is particularly ³³ Brunt (1987: 353).

³⁴ Brunt (1987: 50).

³⁵ The Caecuban vine was actually cultivated in marshes: Pliny, NH 14.8.61: in palustribus populetis sinu Amyclano (in marshy poplar woods on the bay of Amyclae), cf. Theophrastus HP

4.1.1 for poplars liking marshy ground; Martial, Epig. 13.115: Caecuba Fundanis generosa cocuntur Amyclis, vitis et in media nata palude viret (The generous Caecuban vine is ripened at Amyclae near Fondi, and the green vine is born in the middle of the swamp.). Columella, RR 3.8.5 also mentions the Caecuban vine. Strabo 5.1.7.214C noted that vines grew very rapidly (with the inevitable corollary of a short life span) in the marshes of Ravenna. See Fregoni (1991: 33–5, 88–144) on the wild vine in Italy and on ancient Roman viticulture.

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striking because Strabo singled out Setia as a pestilential district, a reputation that it retained until very recently, when Celli considered its problems at the end of the last century. Strabo described Setian wine as expensive. The price reflected the cost of producing it in the presence of endemic malaria as much as its intrinsic value.³⁶ Similarly viticulture was a major component of the agricultural system in Lazio in the early modern period, principally on the hills above the altitude reached by malaria. It was more important than olive cultivation, which was also confined to the hills but was frequently badly affected by severe frosts during the climatic conditions of the ‘Little Ice Age’. Early modern Rome was not self-sufficient in