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

Pontine Marshes

the Selva di Circeo.

Domitian’s villa is

located on the eastern

shore of the lake.

Hare (1884: ii. 275)

made the following

observations on these

lakes: ‘they are much

frequented by the

peasants for the

fishing they afford,

but few strangers

will venture into

this plague-stricken

region’.

171

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Pontine Marshes

22. The interior of the ilex-oak ( Quercus ilex) forest on the relatively cool northern slopes (the Quarto Freddo) of Monte Circeo. Another species of oak tree ( Quercus cerris) predominates in the Selva di Circeo further north in the plain.

individual plants, animals, and minerals which were of use or interest to man. However, he had no conception whatsoever of a biological environment as a community of living organisms, even though Theophrastus had already shown some insights in that direction. Moreover Pliny the Elder had less talent than his nephew, the younger Pliny, for writing about the natural landscape. Pliny the Younger described beautifully the marshes around the Lago di Bassano ( lacus Vadimonis), but it is clear that his visit there was brief; he did not live in such environments himself.⁷ The Natural History would have been a much better work if it had been written by Pliny the Younger instead of by his uncle. Pliny the Elder had great opportunities to provide posterity with detailed accounts of very interesting ancient ecosystems like the Pontine Marshes, which he completely squandered. The question arises of why he and most other ancient writers showed so little interest. A lot of recent scholarship on Roman attitudes to marshes and other hydraulic phenomena has attempted to extract positive attitudes ⁷ Pliny, Ep. 8.20.

Pontine Marshes

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towards marshes from the ancient sources and, furthermore, to outline an ancient ideology of hydraulic management as a source of power. It is essential to ask the question of who created this ideology. It is suggested here that in so far as any positive attitudes towards marshes did exist in ancient mentalities, they were created by outsiders, people who did not live in the marshes themselves, had no first-hand experience of the extreme environmental conditions of marshlands, and consequently did not suffer from the endemic malaria whose enormous demographic impact on human populations living in marshland environments is now well known to specialists in historical demography (Ch. 5. 4 above). It is because the ideology of the management of wetlands was created by outsiders that we cannot hope to find in ancient sources the level of detail, found in more recent descriptions such as Berti’s, which would suggest anything much in the way of personal acquaintance with life and environmental conditions in marshlands. At least the description of a painting of a marsh given by Philostratus may have some literary merit, even though its failure to allude in any way to ‘bad air’ demonstrates its fundamental lack of realism. The writing about marshes of the late Roman author Vibius Sequester is so impoverished that it hardly merits quotation.⁸

The extreme poverty of his text, a brief list of names and locations with a handful of extremely short notes of mythological interest, scarcely needs any commentary. Let us return to the early modern descriptions. Different visitors arrived at different times of the year and saw different parts of the Pontine region. Thus it is possible to find quite different accounts of the area. Gregorovius provides an interesting contrast to the already quoted passage from Berti:

He who has traversed the Pontine Marshes as far as Terracina by the Via Appia will have a most mistaken idea of them if he imagines that they are loathsome swamps. Morasses and ponds do exist, but they lie hidden away in the woods, where the hedgehog, the stag, the wild boar, the ⁸ Vibius Sequester, de fluminibus fontibus lacubus nemora paludes, etc., ed. Parroni (1965): 5.

PALUDES, 1 Ambracia Achaiae. 2 Asia Asiae, cui Caystros prope est. 3 Camerina nunc, ante Hyperie dicta, Syracusis. 4 Lerna Arcadiae, unde hydra centum capitum, quam Hercules occidit. 5 Maeotis Scythiae.

6 Pomptinae Tarracinae, Foro Appi. 7 Padu〈 s〉 ae Galliae a Pado dictae. 8 Styx inferorum a Styge Oceani filia. 9 Satura inter Antium et Cerce〈 i〉 os, eadem Stura. 10 Strymon Thraciae. 11 Salpina in Hadriatico. 12

Triton Thraciae, in quo se novies merserit in avem convertitur. 13 Tyraca Syracusis. Traina (1986) and (1988: 107, 112) on Vibius Sequester; Leveau (1993) and Purcell (1996) for the ideology; Philostratus, imagines 1.9, ed. Kayser (1871).

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Pontine Marshes

buffalo, and the half-wild cattle may still be found. In May and June this Pontine territory is a sea of flowers, poured out, as far as the eye can reach, over this whole land. In the heat of summer, it is true, it becomes a Tartarus, where pale fever creeps around to torture the poor herdsman or labourer, who must earn his bread in suffering, and cannot fly from its pestilential air.⁹

Tartarus! A far cry from the idyllic view of Mediterranean wetlands found in the writings of some modern historians. Gregorovius, unlike Berti, does not describe the Pontine forest. He also travelled around 1860 in summer (at a time when most travellers to Rome went there between November and April¹⁰) and saw the region at the time of year when large areas, which were flooded in winter, had dried out for summer. Nevertheless Gregorovius was right that the areas which dried out seasonally were the ones which were most dangerous with regard to malaria. They were the breeding sites of the mosquito species Anopheles labranchiae, which was extremely common in this area, while the forested areas and the brackish lakes along the coast were the domain of A. sacharovi, another very dangerous vector of malaria. A third mosquito species, the zoophilic A. messeae, also occurred in some of the same localities as A. labranchiae, but in much smaller populations. Doni also regarded coastal forests as unhealthy in the seventeenth century.¹¹

Hans Christian Andersen described the Pontine Marshes as follows:

Many people imagine that the Pontine Marshes are only marshy ground,