Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy by Robert Sallares (beach read .TXT) 📕

plain, looking from San Felice Circeo (80 metres above sea level) in the direction of Terracina and the Monti Ausoni.

Pontine Marshes

185

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.).

186

Pontine Marshes

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.

Pontine Marshes

187

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