Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy (36 page)

²³ Mammucari (1991: 66):
tra la morte certa per inedia e quella probabile a causa della zanzara anofele, quasi sempre veniva preferita quest’ultima…l’uomo sfidava la morte per guadagnarsi la vita
.

²⁴ De Tournon (1831: i. 117) on the territory of ancient Corioli:
Maintenant il est absolument désert . . . deux maisons délabrées que pendant l’été habitent quelques pauvres fiévreux représentent quatre villes puissants remplies d’une population vigoureuse. Ainsi sans cesse nous voyons les effets terribles du climat
,
car ce n’est pas la fertilité qui manque aujourd’hui à ces belles plains, où les blés les plus épais alternent avec les pâturages les plus abondans, et où succèdent le maïs, le riz, l’avoine et les fèves
.

²⁵ De Tournon (1831: i. 320):
Les terres à froment pourraient être semées plusieurs années de suite, tant est grande la fécondité de cette alluvion
.

Pontine Marshes

181

which was intensely infested with malaria at the time. The attractions of marshlands for economic reasons explain why some people would always migrate there in the past in spite of their dreadful reputation for malaria. Migration can explain how areas where death rates persistently exceed birth rates remain populated.²⁶

The upshot of all this is that the fact that the region of the Pontine Marshes apparently had a flourishing agricultural economy in the fifth and early fourth centuries  does not prove that
P. falciparum
malaria was completely absent from the scene, since the area was very attractive for economic reasons. Unfortunately, little is heard thereafter about the
Ager Pomptinus
in literary sources for a period of about two centuries, a period for which detailed information would be extremely useful. Appius Claudius constructed the Via Appia from Rome through the Pontine Marshes to Capua in Campania in
c
.312 . Quilici Gigli observed that certain details of the road’s construction imply that cuniculi over which it passed were still operational, and Nicolai argued that the construction of the road implies that the region through which the road was to run was not already filled with marshes then. Traina’s argument that the region did not receive the name of
Pomptinae paludes
until the first century , having previously been called
ager Pomptinus
, also deserves to be noticed, although there is a shortage of relevant literature antedating the first century . Nevertheless there is no doubt that the construction of the Via Appia altered natural drainage patterns and so created suitable conditions for the spread of the mosquitoes which transmit malaria. The account of the Via Appia given by Diodorus Siculus lays stress on the cuttings and embankments constructed by Appius Claudius, features whose construction is known from modern experience to create mosquito breeding sites.²⁷ Horace observed the abundance of mosquitoes in ²⁶ Dobson (1980), (1994) and (1997); Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber (1985: 112); Sallares (1991: 22–4) on rice in antiquity.

²⁷ Diodorus Siculus 20.36.2: t[ß åf’ ‰autoı klhqe≤shß !pp≤aß Ødoı tÏ ple∏on mvroß l≤qoiß stereo∏ß katvstrwsen åpÏ 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).

182

Pontine Marshes

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

183

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.

184

Pontine Marshes

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.

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.