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

In the fifth century  Empedocles is said to have blocked up a mountain gorge in order to prevent a pestilential south wind from bringing problems in pregnancy to women (placental malaria) and disease on to the plain surrounding his own city of Akragas in Sicily.⁷⁵ Horace also mentioned the pestilential south wind in his odes.⁷⁶ Similar ideas recurred throughout later history. The doctor Perinto Collodi at Bibbona gave a detailed description of the ⁷⁴ Theophrastus, de ventibus 57, ed. Coutant and Eichenlaub (1975): ka≥ p3lin xhro≥ ka≥ m¶

Ëdat*deiß Ônteß oÈ nÎtoi puret*deiß.

⁷⁵ Plutarch, Moralia 515c: Ø d† fusikÏß ∞Empedokl[ß Ôrouß tin¤ diasf3ga barŸn ka≥

nos*dh kat¤ t0n ped≤wn tÏn nÎton ƒmpnvousan ƒmfr3xaß, loimÏn πdoxen ƒkkle∏sai t[ß c*raß (It was thought that the natural philospher Empedocles shut pestilence out of his country by blocking a gorge, which allowed an oppressive and unhealthy south wind to blow on to the plains.). See also Plutarch, Moralia 1126b and the other sources cited by Diels-Kranz 31 A1, A2, A14.

⁷⁶ Horace, Carmina 23.1–8.

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Ecology of malaria

association of the sirocco wind with disease among seasonal migrant workers returning from the Tuscan Maremma to Liguria in 1614. Domenico Panarolo (1587–1657) described the austral wind as a ‘deadly enemy of health’. Elsewhere in his works on winds and airs he noted the idea prevalent in Rome at the time that the sirocco wind brought ‘bad air’ to Rome from the Pontine Marshes. Not everyone accepted such ideas. The anonymous author of a tract on mal’aria written in the late eighteenth century perceptively argued that ‘bad air’ was generated regardless of which wind was blowing and that in fact it was most abundant if there was no wind at all (mosquitoes don’t like strong winds). Baccelli maintained that the sirocco wind was unhealthy in Rome in the nineteenth century, particularly if it was humid.⁷⁷ However, a very long period of continuous dry heat during the summer tended to reduce the frequency of cases of malaria, since the mosquitoes eventually began to run out of breeding sites. Consequently the frequency of malaria increased after occasional summer showers, and particularly after the first autumn rains.⁷⁸ This combination of circumstances again illustrates the complexity of the phenomena in question.

Anopheles larvae generally prefer stagnant water. Lancisi noted that running waters were healthy.⁷⁹ Nevertheless they can also thrive in water that is moving very slowly. A. labranchiae and A.

sacharovi are happy to breed in ditches or canals so long as the water is not moving faster than about two kilometres per hour. Consequently the construction of canals to drain marshes frequently made the situation with regard to malaria worse rather than better in central Italy in the past. This happened, for example, during the project to reclaim the Tiber delta region around Ostia in 1885–9, since the new drainage channels proved to be even better breeding habitats for Anopheles mosquitoes than the marshes that they drained. Around Ostia Anopheles larvae were found in most of the drainage canals, which were stagnant and overgrown with aquatic vegetation, by the time of Sambon’s field observations in the ⁷⁷ For south winds as ‘bringers of fever’ (puret*deiß) see also [Aristotle,] Problems 1.23.862a, Pliny, NH 2.48.127, Celsus, de medicina 1.10.4 and 2.1.3–4; Sidonius Apollinaris 1.5.8

associated the Atabulus wind from Calabria with malaria; Doni (1667: 79–84); Lancisi (1717: 49); Cipolla (1992: 52) on Bibbona; Panarolo (1642 a) and (1642 b): inimico mortale della salubrità; Lapi (1749: 64–5); Anon. (1793: 24); Baccelli (1881: 161–3); North (1896: 138).

⁷⁸ Hirsch (1883: 258) noted that an epidemic started in Rome in October 1795 after the first autumn rains, following a long dry summer.

⁷⁹ Lancisi (1717: 30–2).

Ecology of malaria

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summer of 1900.⁸⁰ This is likely to be one reason why the reported drainage of the Pontine Marshes in 160  by Cornelius Cethegus failed to make any impact on malaria and probably even intensified it, since malaria was certainly endemic in this region in the Late Republic, as will be seen in Chapter 6 below. The gradient of the land in the Pontine Marshes was too low for canals to carry water away rapidly. Drainage is a complicated business. Many, perhaps even most, drainage schemes in antiquity were probably failures.

There are numerous examples of early modern drainage schemes that were spectacular failures with regard to malaria, besides the Ostia project already mentioned. Doni noted that the bonifications (the reclamation by drainage of marshlands) of Pope Sixtus V

(1585–90) did not make the Pontine region any healthier. Sixtus V

was brave enough or foolish enough to visit his own bonifications while they were in progress, and his death was attributed by some contemporary authors to tertian fever contracted during his visit.⁸¹

There is some detailed information available for the demography of the human population of the Pontine Marshes at the time of the last major attempt at drainage before Mussolini finally succeeded, namely the attempt by Pope Pius VI in the late eighteenth century.

These records show that mortality significantly increased following the drainage operations.⁸² Almost certainly the operations in 160

 produced the same result. Even the reassessments by Traina and Leveau of ancient attitudes towards marshes, which attempt to put them in the most favourable light possible (and in doing so fail to comprehend that many Mediterranean wetlands were rendered almost uninhabitable by malaria in the past), are forced in the end to admit that drainage schemes in antiquity produced limited results.⁸³ Herlihy, discussing the problems of Pisa in the face of malaria during the Renaissance, observed acutely that ‘of course the expenditure of much wealth and energy upon public works does not prove that conditions are salubrious but only that the ⁸⁰ Hackett (1937: 18); Sambon (1901 a: 198).

⁸¹ Doni (1667: 139–40); Nicolai (1800: 138).

⁸² Corti (1989) for modern demographic research; Nicolai (1800: bks iii and iv) gave a contemporary view of Pius’ bonifications.

⁸³ Hackett (1937: 17). Traina (1986: 712) concluded