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

there for six months, is alive: all of them were killed by the disease that strikes at the summer solstice⁵¹

There was an alternative, or at least a possible supplement, to slave labour which deserves some attention, bearing in mind that Mediterranean agriculture requires a lot of labour during harvest-ing, in the summer, which is not required for the rest of the year.

The alternative is the employment of hired labour from seasonal migrant workers. Varro’s recommendation, quoted earlier (Ch. 4.

2 above), that hired labour should be employed in unhealthy regions, rather than slaves, should be recalled. In the early modern period a considerable proportion of the labour input was provided by free labourers who migrated from the uplands of Abruzzo and Marche to gather in the harvest in the Roman Campagna, and from Liguria and Emilia to Tuscany, and also from Abruzzo to the Tavoliere. Bercé described how in 1593, for example, forty thousand labourers arrived in the vicinity of Rome, first to reap wheat and barley, then to thresh it, and afterwards to harvest the grapes.⁵²

Those labourers were prepared to take the risk of catching malaria, sleeping out in the fields in the summer, because it was the only way in which they could make a living. External colonization gave poor Romans alternatives in antiquity during the Republic. The employment of hired labourers inevitably meant that large landowners did not have to bear the costs if the labourers died from malaria. Cipolla described from the reports of the Florentine health magistrates how seasonal workers who had gone from Liguria to work in the Tuscan Maremma had become ill in early autumn at Bibbona in 1614 on their way home and died during the winter months. In this way malaria was able to influence the demography of parts of Italy in which it did not occur. Del Panta attributed the fact that the territory of the Senese had very high mortality levels in the early modern period, even though it was a considerable distance from the coast, to the effects of malaria on labourers who migrated seasonally to the Maremma.⁵³ The ⁵¹ Plautus, Trinummus 542–4: tum autem Surorum, genus quod patientisumumst | hominum, nemo extat qui ibi sex menses vixerit: | ita cuncti solstitiali morbo decidunt.

⁵² Bercé (1989: 241), citing Paolo Paruta; Delano Smith (1978: 145); Sorcinelli (1977: 95–6) linked malarial fevers in the Marche to seasonal migrations of farm labourers, and also to the construction of the Bologna–Ancona railway line.

⁵³ Cipolla (1992: 51–3); del Panta et al. (1996: 193–6); Scheidel (1994 a: 175, 187–8, 216) discussed wage labour in gravia loca.

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Roman Campagna

combination of slaves for the permanent labour forces of villas with seasonal labour for the harvest and associated tasks explains how the Roman élite was able to extract a substantial amount of agricultural production from a land which was shunned by free peasants because of the ‘reckoning with death’, ratio cum orco, mentioned by Varro. The reckoning with death from malaria was exactly the same in the Roman Campagna in the early modern period as it was in antiquity: the difference was that early modern Rome was not a slave society:

The workman does not languish voluntarily where the cause of illness and death is close by and powerful.⁵⁴

As was noted earlier, Celli advocated ‘the theory that . . . periods of prosperity coincided with periods of attenuation in the severity of the malarial fever’.⁵⁵ He knew that many Roman villas were constructed in the Roman Campagna, above all in the period from Augustus to the Antonines, and thought that the economic prosperity indicated by these villas could only be explained on the assumption that malaria, which was certainly present, was less virulent at that time. Celli proposed a cycle of fluctuations of virulence of P. falciparum malaria in the Roman Campagna throughout history. The idea was accepted by other leading Italian malariologists, such as Missiroli for example, and by medical historians like Bercé and North. It has in fact never been subsequently seriously re-examined.⁵⁶ Yet the whole theory is quite weak. Of course Celli, writing at the end of the last century, had no direct scientific evidence for fluctuations in the virulence of P. falciparum, and there is little available today; as was observed in Chapter 3 above, current scientific research into parasite evolution and epidemiology suggests that extreme virulence is adaptive for P. falciparum. Moreover the modern populations of regions with endemic malaria in the past tend to have high frequencies of human genetic mutations which give some resistance to malaria (see Ch. 5. 3 above, and the discussion of Ravenna in Ch. 4. 2 above). This implies intense pressure by severe malaria as an agent of natural selection on ⁵⁴ F. Giordano, Condizione topografiche e fisice . . ., in Monografia (1881: lxiii): dove è prossima e forte la causa di malattia e di morte, non si perita volentieri il lavoratore.

⁵⁵ Celli (1933: 109).

⁵⁶ North (1896: 86); Missiroli (1938: 5–6); Bercé (1989); Hofmann (1956: cols. 1203–6) on Celli’s theory of cycles of malaria as applied to antiquity.

Roman Campagna

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human populations in Italy in the past and contradicts Celli’s theory of mild malaria.⁵⁷

Celli’s evidence was entirely indirect, basically the remains of villas in the Early Empire (and churches in the Late Empire) as signs of prosperity. A typical example is Cicero’s villa at Astura on the coast of southern Latium, a beautiful location. However, it must be noted that Virgil hinted that the marshes of Astura were unhealthy.⁵⁸ Moreover, according to his letters, Cicero stayed in his villa at Astura principally in the spring—the season of the year when transmission of malaria ceased or was very low. After the end of the Republic most of the villas on the coasts of Etruria and Latium eventually became the emperor’s property and probably rarely saw their owner. Domitian’s villa by the side of the Lago di Paola in the Pontine Marshes has left very imposing archaeological