Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy
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24. View of the southern end of the Pontine plain, looking from San Felice Circeo (80 metres above sea level) in the direction of Terracina and the Monti Ausoni.
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upon farmers in the region by malaria. Long fallow periods were certainly not necessary for arable farming in the very fertile Pontine territory. However, once malaria had a grip on the region, intensive agriculture became exceedingly difficult, as will be seen later (Ch. 9 below). The next major recorded event in the history of the Pontine Marshes was the drainage scheme of M. Cornelius Cethegus in 160 .³⁶
The brief notice of this drainage operation in the summaries of the lost books of Livy presents it in a matter-of-fact way as if it was a routine operation which was completely successful. It has indeed frequently been taken at face value by modern historians. However, a more profound examination of it is essential to determine its role in the historical development of the Pontine Marshes.
Sources dating to the Late Republic and the age of Augustus, such as Vitruvius, state that the Pontine Marshes were pestilential, owing to malaria, at that time. That suffices to make it clear that Cethegus’ operation did not prevent malaria at all. In fact, it is quite conceivable that it had the opposite effect, and that partial drainage might have expanded suitable breeding habitats for Anopheles mosquitoes. Of course eliminating malaria was not necessarily Cethegus’ intention, since the literary sources available for the period before the Late Republic do not furnish any direct information on the chronology of the spread of malaria in the Pontine Marshes; he probably simply wished to make more land available for agriculture. It is difficult to make any further progress using literary sources alone.
However, the Dutch archaeological surveys have provided new and very interesting data. The area has long been occupied by humans. The discovery in 1939 of a Neanderthal skull in the Grotta Guattari at the foot of Monte Circeo extended human occupation of the area back to about 65,000 years ago. After that there is evidence for the activity of early modern humans, followed by Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age activity. However, the evidence of the Amsterdam field survey indicates that there was a considerable increase in the number of sites in the seventh century
in the Pontine territory as elsewhere in western central Italy. Substantial occupation continued during the Volscian period in the ³⁶ Livy, Periochae 46: Pomptinae paludes a Cornelio Cethego cos., cui ea provincia evenerat, siccatae agerque ex his factus (The Pontine Marshes were drained by the consul Cornelius Cathegus, to whom this province had been allotted, and turned into arable land.).
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fifth century (Attema’s ‘Post-Archaic’ period c.500–350 ³⁷) and into the Roman occupation in the fourth and third centuries , to which period belong the largest proportion of the Roman finds, as well as an extensive centuriation scheme. This shows that the Romans did indeed attempt to make intensive use of the territory after gaining control of it, as Livy’s account suggests. There was a lot of human activity there in the fourth century . However, by the first century the Pontine region had become very unhealthy and was thinly populated, as is suggested by the literary sources discussed below. Moreover the data of the Amsterdam field survey indicate that there was a complete collapse of the population.³⁸ It is difficult to date the population decline or describe its progress in detail in view of the scarcity of evidence, but it clearly happened between the fourth and the first century . Given that the land was fertile and the area was firmly under Roman control and not threatened by anyone else, this population decrease surely was the result of the spread of malaria. This provides a context for the drainage scheme of Cornelius Cethegus. It was an attempt to remedy an environmental disaster which had already happened, or which was in progress at the time. It is quite possible, and indeed very likely, that human disturbance of the environment during the phase of intense activity in the fourth century following the Roman conquest actually made the situation worse rather than better and created more breeding sites for Anopheles mosquitoes.
The Pontine Marshes were a remarkable assignment as a consular province, at a time when Rome was well on the way to conquering ³⁷ Attema (1993: 25).
³⁸ The second Dutch archaeological team from Groningen wish to minimize the amount of demographic change in the Pontine region and are reluctant to interpret in purely demographic terms (a common tendency among classical archaeologists without any foundation in population studies) the shift in settlement patterns which they discerned in northeastern sectors of the Pontine region from a large number of small farmsteads to a smaller number of larger sites. However, there is no problem in relating the shift from peasant smallholdings in the proto-historic period to the Roman imperial economy of large villas based on slave labour to the spread of malaria, as will be seen later (Ch. 9 below). The Groningen archaeologists acknowledge that in some of their survey zones pottery sherds later than the Roman Republic do not occur in the sediments (Attema (1993: 103) ). The prosperity of the Roman colonies at Cori, Norba, and Setia (upon whose hinterlands the Groningen surveys concentrated), as well as Terracina, is not surprising, since they were all situated at altitude (e.g.
Attema (1993: 82–3) noted that Cori is 405 metres above sea level, a geographical position which reduced or eliminated malaria). However, the fact that hilltop settlements prospered does not in any way exclude the possibility of intense malaria in the Pontine plain below the hills, a phenomenon explicitly attested by ancient sources such as Vitruvius and Strabo.
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most of the then known world, probably the nastiest job ever assigned to a Roman consul.
It is impossible to quantify the collapse of the free population (the significance of slavery in this region will be discussed in Chapter 9
below), but later parallels offer stark illustrations of malaria’s capabilities in that part of the world. A misguided drainage scheme in the late eighteenth century, which blocked a river and in so doing created a large marsh right underneath the town, introduced malaria to Sermoneta (257 metres above sea level), which had previously been free of it. That brought about a substantial reduction of 50% or more in the population of the town, which fluctuated considerably over the decades. That is the likely scale of the collapse of the free population in the Pontine region after the fourth century . The Amsterdam field survey suggested that there was no subsequent general recovery in Roman times, even if Cethegus was responsible for the handful of settlements which sprung up sometime along the Via Appia: namely ad Medias, Tres Tabernae, Tres Pontium, and Forum Appii.³⁹ Consequently our conclusion must be that Cethegus’ operations were a complete failure, like numerous other ancient (and more recent) drainage schemes. In fact North made the correct interpretation of the value of Cethegus’
work as long ago as 1896, without the benefit of the archaeological data which have only become available in the last few years. He made the acute observation that if Cethegus’ work was completed in such a short space of time as a single year, during his consulship in 160 , it could not have been serious. Drainage is not a trivial business. In fact this interpretation had already been debated by the eighteenth-century historians. Nicolai discussed Corradini’s theory that Cethegus carried out his drainage works not in his official capacity as consul, but as a private individual (as Decius did in late antiquity—see below). He proposed this hypothesis, which requires an unnatural, metaphorical interpretation of the text of the summary of Livy, in order to free Cethegus from the temporal constraints of a consulship lasting a single year. Since the objective of Corradini’s line of argument was to reach a conclusion, namely that Cethegus’ works were a great success, for which there is no evidence nor any probability, his argument is unnecessary.⁴⁰
³⁹ C. W. Koot in Voorips et al. (1991: 125–30); Nicola
i (1800: 38–44) on the settlements along the Via Appia. North (1896: 24) gave data for birth–death ratios in Sermoneta for the crucial period from 1779 to 1869.
⁴⁰ North (1896: 79, 124); Nicolai (1800: 74–9).
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The Pontine region undoubtedly suffered severely during the civil war between Marius and Sulla, described by Appian, when Norba, Setia, and many other towns in Latium and Etruria were sacked by one side or the other.Nevertheless the devastation caused by the war does not explain why there was no subsequent recovery in an extremely fertile land. For that, a different sort of explanation is required. Archaeological and literary evidence combine to suggest that the Pontine Marshes remained a very large expanse of marshland which was intensely infested with malaria for the rest of antiquity, and indeed thereafter until Mussolini, despite the attention of numerous statesmen over the intervening two thousand years. Julius Caesar presumably gained first-hand experience of the region’s problems in about 67 , while curator of the Via Appia.⁴¹
Nothing came of Caesar’s subsequent plan, noted earlier (Ch. 1
above), to drain the Pontine Marshes. Anthony tried to revive it after his death.⁴² A scholiast on a corrupt line of Horace claims that Augustus also drained the Pontine Marshes and made them productive for agriculture.⁴³ The evidence for this particular attempt at drainage operations is very thin, but if it did take place it was certainly not fruitful, since contemporary sources leave no doubt that malaria was endemic at that time. Strabo’s testimony confirms the evidence of Vitruvius on the Pontine Marshes quoted earlier: The whole of [Latium] is prosperous and produces everything apart from a few districts along the coast, the marshy and unhealthy areas, such as the territory of Ardea⁴⁴ and the land between Antium and Lanuvium⁴⁵ as far ⁴¹ Plutarch, Julius Caesar 5.9, ed. Ziegler (1971): Ødoı t[ß !pp≤aß åpodeicqe≥ß ƒpimelht¶ß p3mpolla cr&mata prosan3lwse t0n ‰autoı (After being appointed curator of the Appian Way he spent a lot of his own money on it.).
⁴² Cassius Dio 45.9.1: c*ran £llhn te poll¶n ka≥ t¶n ƒn to∏ß 1lesi to∏ß Pompt≤noiß, „ß kecwsmvnoiß ‡dh ka≥ gewrge∏sqai dunamvnoiß, klhroucq[nai di¤ Louk≤ou !ntwn≤ou ådelfoı dhmarcoıntoß ƒshg&sato (Through his brother Lucius Antonius, a tribune, he proposed a law to divide and allot a lot of other land as well as the Pontine Marshes, since they had already been filled in and cultivation was possible.).
⁴³ Horace, de arte poetica 65–6, ed. Brink (1971), with his commentary ad loc; Nicolai (1800: 81–9) and de la Blanchère (1884: 102–3) on the Pontine region in the time of Augustus .
⁴⁴ Blewitt (1843: 531) described Ardea in the nineteenth century as follows: ‘the malaria is so severe in summer that the village is almost deserted’, cf. Hare (1884: ii. 278): ‘desolate and forlorn as it is now, and almost totally deserted by its plague-stricken inhabitants during the summer months, Ardea was once one of the most important as well as one of the wealthiest cities of Latium’ (according to Dionyisius Hal. AR 4.64.1 and Virgil, Aeneid 7.411–13), cf.
Tomassetti (1910: ii, 446–61, esp. 447). Seneca, Epist. Mor. 105.1 hinted at the unhealthiness of Ardea during the Roman Empire, cf. Martial 4.60.
⁴⁵ Blewitt (1843: 531) described Pratica di Mare as follows: ‘the place is heavily afflicted Pontine Marshes
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as the Pontine region and some parts of the territory of Setia as well as the area around Terracina and Circeii.⁴⁶
Next are the plains, some of which adjoin Rome and its suburbs, while others lie towards the sea. Those which face the sea are less healthy, but the others are easily cultivated and decked out in the same way [sc. as the foothills of Mt. Albanus and Tusculum].⁴⁷
In interpreting these two texts, it is very important to realize that the coastal districts of Latium listed by Strabo, such as the Pontine Marshes, were not the only places where malaria occurred; they were simply the areas with the greatest intensity of malarial transmission and infection. This point becomes clear when the evidence of the medical writers, from Asclepiades to Galen, is considered (see Ch. 8 below). The medical writers show that P. falciparum malaria was common in at least some districts of the city of Rome itself even though Strabo does not mention the city of Rome as one of the unhealthy areas. The districts listed by Strabo correspond to the areas of Latium which were the most severely affected by malaria in 1782, but Bonelli’s map shows that malaria was not confined to those coastal areas but occurred all over Lazio at that time, except at high altitude. Similarly the reports of the Florentine health magistrates in the first half of the seventeenth century show that malaria (especially P. vivax) occurred in many inland parts of Tuscany, besides the Maremma where P. falciparum malaria was intense.⁴⁸
Cicero described the Pontine region as ‘neither pleasant nor healthy’ and did not show any appreciation whatsoever of this with malaria, of whose fatal influence the countenances of the inhabitants bear a melancholy proof’.
⁴⁶ Strabo 5.3.5.231C: ‹pasa d’ ƒst≥n eÛda≤mwn ka≥ pamfÎroß pl¶n øl≤gwn cwr≤wn t0n kat¤ t¶n paral≤an, Òsa ‰l*dh ka≥ noser3, oÍa t¤ t0n !rdeat0n ka≥ t¤ metaxŸ !nt≤ou ka≥
Lanou≤ou mvcri Pwment≤nou ka≤ tinwn t[ß Sht≤nhß cwr≤wn ka≥ t[ß per≥ Tarrak≤nan ka≥ tÏ
Kirka∏on.
⁴⁷ Strabo 5.3.12.239C: ƒfex[ß d’ ƒst≥ ped≤a, t¤ m†n prÏß t¶n
pro3steia aÛt[ß, t¤ d† prÏß t¶n q3lattan: t¤ m†n oˆn prÏß t¶n q3lattan ¬ttÎn ƒstin Ëgiein3, t¤ d† £lla eÛ3gwg3 te ka≥ paraplhs≤wß ƒxhskhmvna. One possible example of a healthy inland plain was that occupied by the Roman town of Privernum, constructed on the plain of the upper Amaseno river valley, separated from the Pontine plain by hills (Cancellieri (1997) ). The modern town of Priverno lies on the slope of a hill adjoining the plain.
A canalized, covered waterway ran right through the centre of the Roman city, which was clearly subject to flooding. The ground level has risen by 2.5 metres since antiquity. The construction of the town on a plain may imply that the plain was thought to be healthy then.
⁴⁸ Cipolla (1992: 49–51, 68–70, 79–80).
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fascinating environment.⁴⁹ Silius Italicus also described the Pontine Marshes as pestilential, and mentioned the huge amount of allu-vium which was being brought down by the river Ufente.⁵⁰ Virgil also described the river Ufente.⁵¹ Nero had the idea of driving a canal through to lake Avernus from the Tiber delta, connecting all the lakes along the coast of Latium. Of course it was a complete failure.⁵² Quintilian, as part of his advice on oratory, described the question of whether the Pontine Marshes could be drained as a matter of conjecture. He was not sure that it could be done.⁵³ Pliny the Elder, in the course of a wild attack on Asclepiades for his handling of herbal remedies, described the Pontine Marshes as land that was lost to Rome.⁵⁴ Juvenal shows that by the first century the thinly populated Pontine Marshes already had the reputation as a haven for brigands and highwaymen which it possessed in the early modern period.⁵⁵ Nevertheless the Romans never gave up. Even in the twilight of late antiquity they still kept on trying to drain the Pontine Marshes, an enormous task which was often reduced in practice to the more restricted aim of keeping open the Via Appia, upon which the marshes continuously encroached. Cassiodorus records one final attempt by the patrician Decius on behalf of king Theodoric in 507/11.⁵⁶
⁴⁹ Cicero, de oratore 2.290: Pomptinum . . . neque amoenum neque salubrem locum.
⁵⁰ Silius Italicus, Punica 8.379–82: et quos pestifera Pomptini uligine campi, | qua Saturae nebulosa palus restagnat, et atro | liventes coeno per squalida turbidus arva | cogit aquas Ufens atque inficit aequora limo (and the Pontine Marshes which emit pestilential vapours, where the misty swamp of Satura inundates the land, and the Ufens forces its waters, discoloured by dark mud, over neglected fields, and dyes the sea wit
h mud).
⁵¹ Virgil, Aeneid 7.801–2: qua Saturae iacet atra palus gelidusque per imas | quaerit iter vallis atque in mare conditur Ufens (where the black marsh of Satura is situated and the cold Ufens makes its way through the bottoms of the valleys and reaches the sea).
⁵² Tacitus, Annals 15.42; Le Gall (1953: 125–6); Quilici (1979: 66).
⁵³ Quintilian 3.8.16: cum autem de hoc quaeritur, coniectura est . . . an siccari palus Pomptina.
⁵⁴ Pliny, NH 26.9.19: siccentur hodie meroide Pomptinae paludes tantumque agri suburbanae reddatur Italiae (Let the Pontine Marshes be drained today by the plant merois and so much land near the city be recovered for Italy.) Merois is an unidentified plant that was supposed to have magical properties from the Kingdom of Meroe in Sudan.
⁵⁵ Juvenal, Sat. 3.305–8. There is even a museum in the area today devoted to this subject, the Museo del Brigante at Fienili di Sonnino, cf. Staccioli (1996).
⁵⁶ The inscriptions CIL X.6850–1 provide further evidence for this attempt to drain the Pontine Marshes, giving the usual misleading impression that it was a complete success; cf. Cassiodorus, Variae 2.21 for similar activity at Spoleto. Nicolai (1800: 101–4) discussed Theodoric’s bonifications. Marshes in general were regarded as suitable places for rubbish disposal (see e.g. Tacitus, Histories 4.53 for disposing of the ruins of an old temple, and Annals 15.43 for disposing of rubbish from the great fire of Rome in 64, in the marshes around Ostia.