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

it on the avarice of the rich, was inadequate. The undesirable state of coastal and southern Etruria had much deeper causes than that. It is not surprising that neither the colony of 181  nor the colony or individual allotments of land subsequently made by Augustus at Graviscae prospered.⁶

The coast of Etruria continued to be severely afflicted with malaria for the rest of antiquity. There are fewer texts that refer to the state of the coastal region north of the Tiber than to the coastal areas south of the Tiber. It is well known that much of the coastal some of the archaeology of the Etruscan coast; Cristofani (1983: 122–4). In a related context Varro, de lingua latina 5.26 gave a false etymology of the word palus, marsh, cf. Traina (1988: 62–3, 73). See also Shuey (1981).

⁴ Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 8.9, ed. Ziegler: Ø d’ ådelfÏß aÛtoı G3ioß [HRR I2 119]πn tini bibl≤8 gvgrafen, ejß Nomant≤an poreuÎmenon di¤ t[ß Turrhn≤aß tÏn Tibvrion ka≥ t¶n ƒrhm≤an t[ß c*raß Ør0nta ka≥ toŸß gewrgoıntaß ∂ ƒpeis3ktouß ka≥ barb3rouß, tÎte pr0ton ƒp≥ noın balvsqai t¶n mur≤wn kak0n £rxasan aÛto∏ß polite≤an.

⁵ 5 Appian, Civil Wars 1.7–11; Barker and Rasmussen (1998: 272–3) on T. Gracchus’ journey in 135 .

⁶ Liber coloniarum i, 220, ed. Lachmann (1967), in Die Schriften der Römischen Feldmesser: colonia Graviscos ab Augusto deduci iussa est. Harris (1971: 308) regarded this entry in the Liber Coloniarum as a mistake, but he did not consider all the evidence for the state of Graviscae in antiquity.

As a result of depopulation by malaria, Graviscae may well have been regarded in the time of Augustus as a locality that had room for fresh colonists. Virgil, Aeneid 10.184 also described Graviscae as unhealthy ( intempestaeque Graviscae).

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region north of the Tiber, especially the once great Etruscan city of Vulci, failed to make any significant contribution to the Roman war effort against Carthage in 205 , and was presumably incapable of being taxed.⁷ In spite of the scarcity of references, the evidence provided by Pliny the Younger is explicit enough. He reassured his friend Domitius Apollinaris that he did not intend to spend the summer at his villa at Laurentum, close to the vicus Augustanus Laurentium (a small seaside town which belonged to the emperor) and modern Castel Fusano in Latium, by the unhealthy and pestilential Tuscan coast. Instead he intended to spend the summer at another villa far inland at Tifernum in Umbria, about eight kilometres north of Tifernum Tiberinum (modern Città di Castello), in the vicinity of the very healthy Appennine mountains.⁸

The stretch of coast that Pliny regarded as unhealthy presumably included Graviscae, but it is not clear how much further north it stretched. Nevertheless Pliny’s descriptions, to which several references are made in the course of this book (especially in Ch. 11

below), of his two villas, are very important evidence for the contrasting state of the geography, hydrology, and climate of two localities in central Italy with completely different pathocoenoses and mortality regimes. The former was an example of a place in a region where malaria was endemic, while the latter was a locality where there was no malaria at all. The demographic consequences of these differences in the physical environment will be highlighted later on (see Ch. 11 below). Pliny’s response to malaria was the standard response of members of élites to pestilence throughout history: flight from the pestilential area, leaving those who had to work there for a living to their fate. Similarly in early modern England the aristocracy and the clergy took care to avoid the regions dominated by P. vivax malaria.⁹

The poet Rutilius Claudius Namatianus described the desolation of the coast of Etruria, including Graviscae, in  416: Next we see the scattered roofs of Graviscae,

Which are often oppressed by the stench of the marsh in summer; But the neighbourhood, full of woods, is verdant with dense groves And the shade of the pines wavers at the edge of the sea.

⁷ Livy 28.45.

⁸ Pliny, Epist. 5.6.2: [Laurentum] gravis et pestilens ora Tuscorum, quae per litus extenditur . . .

[Tifernum] hi procul a mari recesserunt, quin etiam Appennino, saluberrimo montium.

⁹ Dobson (1997: 298–9); Leach (2001).

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We see the old ruins, guarded by no one,

And the disintegrating walls of abandoned Cosa.

The ridiculous reason for its abandonment should not be recorded in serious

Accounts, but it would be undesirable to conceal a funny story.

The citizens are said to have been forced to move away, Abandoning their homes infested with rodents.¹⁰

Again, the observation of desolation is more convincing than the explanation of the population explosion of mice or rats offered for it in the case of the abandoned town of Cosa. True plague ( Yersinia pestis), which is transmitted principally by rat fleas, did not appear on the scene until the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century . Celli argued that there was no endemic malaria on the Tuscan coast in the early fifth century  because Rutilius does not mention it. Celli’s ‘argument from silence’ is untenable because the reference in line 282 to the smell of the marshes of Graviscae in summer is a very explicit reference to ‘bad air’, (i.e. mal’aria). Consequently it is extremely probable that the depopulated condition of Graviscae in the early fifth century 

was caused by malaria.¹¹ Rutilius’ words can be compared to the famous invocation of the same stretch of coast by Dante in the Divine Comedy.¹² Dante himself died of fever at Ravenna in 1321.

Again, as has already been seen in the case of Pliny the Elder, Rutilius showed no interest whatsoever in describing the natural, as opposed to the human, environment for its own sake.

The Maremma continued to be infested with malaria until modern times.¹³ Malaria generated acquired immunity in those ¹⁰ Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, de reditu suo sive Iter Gallicum, ed. Doblhofer (1972), ll.

281–90: Inde Graviscarum fastigia rara videmus, |