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

quas premit aestivae saepe paludis odor; | Sed nemorosa viret densis vicinia lucis | pineaque extremis fluctuat umbra fretis. | Cernimus antiquas nullo custode ruinas | et desolatae moenia foeda Cosae. | Ridiculam cladis pudet inter seria causam | promere, sed risum dissim-ulare piget. | Dicuntur cives quondam migrare coacti | muribus infestos deseruisse lares.

¹¹ Celli (1933: 48–9), contrast Scullard (1967: 61); Sallares (1991: 263–71) and the papers in the forthcoming publication of the conference on the plague of Justinian at the American Academy in Rome (2001) on true plague; Dennis (1878: 194–211) described the condition of the Maremma in the nineteenth century.

¹² Dante Alighieri, La Commedìa: Inferno. Canto .1–9, ed. Lanza (1996): Non era ancor di là Nesso arrivato, | quando noi ci mettemo per un bosco | che da neun sentiero era segnato. | Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco; | non rami schietti, ma nodrosi e ’nvolti; | non pomi v’eran, ma stecchi con tòsco. | Non han sì aspri sterpi né sì folti | quelle fiere selvagge che ’n odio hanno | tra Cecina e Corneto i luoghi cólti.

¹³ Ciuffoletti and Guerrini (1989: 86) quoted the following traditional Italian song: Tutti mi dicon Maremma Maremma | E a me mi pare una Maremma amara | L’uccello che ci va perde la penna |

Io ci ho perduto una persona cara | Sia maledetta Maremma Maremma | Sia maledetta Maremma e chi l’ama | Sempre mi trema il cor quando ci vai | perché ho paura che non torni mai.

Tuscany

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27. The maintained wetland which is displayed to visitors to the Parco Naturale della Maremma, photographed at the end of July in an extremely hot summer (daytime temperature approaching 40oC). Parched vegetation is visible in the foreground, as the wetland desiccates during the summer. The national park guide told the author that the water in these wetlands is not completely fresh but brackish, although the salt content is very low. These conditions favoured those species of Anopheles mosquito which were important vectors of malaria in Italy in the past. The cattle in the background belong to the breed indigenous to the Maremma.

who survived childhood in the Maremma just as it did in the region of Ravenna (see Ch. 4. 2 above). Consequently it was possible for the local inhabitants to deny that malaria was a serious problem, as those questioned by the English novelist D. H. Lawrence at Montalto di Castro, near Vulci, did during his visit to Tuscany in April 1927, the healthiest time of the year. However, Lawrence was perceptive enough to understand the reality of the situation. He also noted that malaria was a severe problem for early modern archaeologists attempting to explore ancient Etruscan sites.¹⁴ One of the disease’s victims was Alessandro François, discoverer of the famous François tomb at Vulci.

As a postscript, it should not be forgotten that malaria is spreading again in developing countries, following the evolution of ¹⁴ Lawrence (1986: 121–3, 129, 132).

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Tuscany

resistance to antimalarial drugs by the parasites and resistance to insecticides by the mosquitoes.¹⁵ In spite of all the bonifications of the twentieth century, the potential for malaria to return to western central Italy in the future still exists. This potential does not reside so much in modern tropical strains of P. falciparum, to which Italian mosquitoes are refractory, as Coluzzi has argued, as in P. vivax.¹⁶ In August 1997 an Indian girl, who had moved to the Maremma from the Punjab and was infected with P. vivax malaria, was bitten by an Italian mosquito (probably A. labranchiae), which then transmitted the disease to an Italian woman resident in a sparsely populated area of the Maremma.¹⁷ This case shows how easily a single infected individual can spread malaria over large geographical distances. There were close political relations and commercial links between the Etruscan city-states and Carthage (i.e. North Africa) in the middle of the first millennium . This is shown by the Phoenician–Etruscan bilingual texts excavated at Pyrgi, the port of Caere (modern Cerveteri), and Aristotle’s comments on the close political relations between Carthage and the Etruscan city-states.¹⁸

Later on in Roman times North Africa was an important source of grain and other commodities for the city of Rome. Consequently it was inevitable that malaria would be introduced to central Italy in antiquity directly from Africa, as well as from southern Italy, Sardinia, Sicily, Greece, and the Near East. It became endemic in central Italy as soon as localized (and frequently anthropogenic) environmental change created suitable breeding sites for the mosquito vectors.

¹⁵ Krogstad (1996); Marsh (1998) on the recent upsurge of mortality directly caused by P.

falciparum malaria in Africa following the development of resistance to the drug chloroquine.

¹⁶ Coluzzi (1999).

¹⁷ Baldari et al. (1998), cf. Castelli et al. (1993); Sabatinelli et al. (1994); Romi et al. (1997).

¹⁸ Aristotle, Politics 1280a35–7.

8

The city of Rome

The city of Rome itself is obviously of particular interest. It requires discussion on its own, since it constituted a distinctive environment, as far as malaria is concerned, which must be considered separately from the Campagna Romana, the Pontine Marshes, and the Tuscan Maremma. Cicero gave credit to the legendary Romulus for choosing a healthy spot in a pestilential region for the site of the city:

He chose a site which both has abundant sources of water and is healthy, in a pestilential region, for there are hills¹

Similarly Livy spoke of the ‘very healthy hills’ of Rome.² He put these words into the mouth of Furius Camillus in a speech supposedly delivered c.386 , following the siege of Rome by the Gauls, in the context of a proposal to move the entire population of Rome to the healthier site of Veii. The statements of Cicero and Livy are admissions that