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

9.29.6, Lucan, de bello civili 3.85: et qua Pomptinas via dividit uda paludes (and where a wet road divides the Pontine Marshes); G. Radke in Pauly-Wissowa, RE

suppl. xiii (1973: cols. 1494 ff.); Nicolai (1800: 67–74); Quilici Gigli (1997: 197); Traina (1988: 113).

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the Pontine Marshes during his famous trip along the Via Appia in 36 , heading for Brundisium.²⁸

The Via Appia was subsequently rebuilt by Nerva and Trajan.

Procopius was impressed by the state of the Via Appia as late as the sixth century  and described the road as one of the wonders of the world, although it is striking that Justinian’s general Belisarius chose not to march along it during the Gothic Wars. Both Strabo and Procopius mentioned the Decemnovium, a canal that ran alongside the Via Appia for nineteen miles through the Pontine Marshes, usurping the function of the road.²⁹ The construction of the canal is surely an admission that by the first century  the Pontine territory was permanently marshy. It was not normal Roman practice to build a canal alongside a road. The Pontine territory probably required little encouragement to become marshy. It is a very lowlying land which receives up to about 900 mm of rainfall annually. In addition, it received water from a number of rivers: De Tournon listed eight in the nineteenth century: from north to south, the Tepia, Ninfa, Cavatella, Cavata, Ufente, Amazena, Scaravazza, and Pedicata.³⁰ Of course the river system has changed since antiquity in the Pontine region as elsewhere in western central Italy. Nevertheless the Ufente and the Amazena were probably particularly important with respect to the amount of water brought in. Since these rivers originated in the hills of Latium, breaking up by deforestation of the upland forests described by Theophrastus (Ch. 4. 6 above) would have increased the flow of water to the Pontine territory. Nicolai argued that as late as the time of Strabo only the rivers Ufente and Amazena (or Amaseno) contributed water to the region of the marshes proper.

He suggested that the other rivers only started to drain into the marshes during the time of the Roman Empire.³¹ This question requires more research by geologists. Similarly de la Blanchère argued that the marshes occupied a smaller area in the archaic ²⁸ Horace, Sat. 5.14–15: Mali culices ranaeque palustres avertunt somnos.

²⁹ Procopius, BG 1.14.6–11; 1.11.2; Strabo 5.3.6.233C; di Vita Evrard (1990) studied the inscriptions recording the work of Nerva and Trajan on the Via Appia, also recorded by Cassius Dio 68.15, (t3 te 1lh t¤ Pompt∏na „dopo≤hse l≤q8 (and he built a stone road across the Pontine Marshes), cf. Galen 10.633K; Nicolai (1800: 93–101) on the activities of Nerva and Trajan in the Pontine Marshes.

³⁰ De Tournon (1831: ii. 221); Cancellieri (1986); Festus, p. 212L, noted that the tribus Ufentina was named after the River Ufente.

³¹ Nicolai (1800: 101), cf. Quilici (1979: 65).

Pontine Marshes

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period. He maintained that they only expanded after the extermination of the Volscian population by the Romans.³²

Nevertheless there had probably always been some marshes.

Livy described Terracina (the former Volscian city of Anxur) as surrounded by marshes in 406 . This was probably true, even though Terracina was able to flourish later in Roman times because the ancient settlement lay on the side of a hill, a reasonably healthy location, above the modern town.³³ However, human activity of all sorts in the surrounding region gave the marshes and mosquitoes all the encouragement they needed to spread. Besides road building and deforestation in neighbouring areas, it is conceivable that farmers deliberately attempted to fill in some low lying parts of the Pontine Marshes by diverting rivers or streams to bring in alluvial sediments and so silt up the land. This interpretation, as colmatage deposits, of some of the alluvial sediments in the Pontine territory was given by the team of Dutch archaeologists from Amsterdam who carried out the Agro Pontino survey.³⁴ The consequence is that some land, which was previously permanently flooded, might subsequently have only been flooded seasonally, principally in winter, making it more useful for the mosquitoes.

Livy records that a plague of locusts occurred in the Ager Pomptinus in 173 . Similar events frequently occurred in Latium in the early modern period, for example in 1758, 1807/8, 1810/12, and almost continuously for a dreadful eighteen-year period from 1767 to 1784.

The build up of locust populations was favoured by a system of extensive cultivation with long fallow periods, which encouraged locusts to lay eggs.³⁵ This extensive pattern of land use was imposed ³² de la Blanchère (1884: 48–50). He attempted to explain the origin of the marshes in the Maremma in the same way, by the destruction of the Etruscans by the Romans.

³³ Livy 4.59.4: Anxur fuit, quae nunc Tarracinae sunt, urbs prona in paludes; Nicolai (1800: 52–4) on Terracina; De La Blanchère (1884) catalogued all the documentary evidence for the history of Terracina in antiquity.

³⁴ J. Sevink et al. in Voorips et al. (1991: 41). Attema (1993: 106) observed that there is no evidence that colmatage/sedimentation in the Pontine plain was ever deliberately provoked by man in antiquity. However, Alexander (1984) emphasized the importance of colmatage in the early modern drainage of the Val di Chiana. It is not clear when the technique originated.

³⁵ Livy 42.2.5: Pomptinum omne velut nubibus lucustarum coopertum esse (it is said that the whole Pontine plain was covered by clouds, as it were, of locusts); De Felice (1965: 36 n. 14) on locusts in Lazio. Cassius Dio 56.24.3 mentioned locusts in Rome in  9. Paulus Diaconus, Historia Langobardorum, iv.2, ed. G. Waitz (1878), Monumenta Germaniae Historica, xlviii ( Scriptores 7) described a plague of locusts in  591–2: Davis (1995: 299, 307) mentions plagues of locusts during the reign of Pope Hadrian III in the 880s . See also Sallares (1991: 27–8) on locusts in antiquity.

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24. View of the southern end of the Pontine