Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy (49 page)

⁴⁴ Delumeau (1957: i. 220):
Mais si Rome s’accroît entre 1527 et 1600 de quelque 50,000 habitants, ne serait-ce pas aussi aux dépens de la campagne voisine où les moissons diminuent et où la malaria multiplie ses ravages?

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251

subsequent history was rather disjointed.⁴⁵ The failure of repeated attempts to colonize coastal areas can be attributed to malaria.

In the Renaissance period Niccolò Machiavelli claimed that unhealthy areas could be made healthy if they were colonized by a large body of men, but this was wishful thinking on his part.⁴⁶ The healthiness of Venice is to be explained in other ways; in antiquity it was undoubtedly part of the region of anophelism without malaria which also included Ravenna (see Ch. 4. 2 above). Subsequently, however, Venice did not dry up and suffer the same environmental changes as the coast around Ravenna. Pisa’s problems have already been noted. Machiavelli understood the importance of colonization for the success of Roman imperialism in antiquity, but his argument misses the point that short-term colonization cannot ensure long-term population stability in the face of malaria. The Romans in antiquity were unable to populate
in the long run
those areas with the most intense malaria. The rulers of Florence in Machiavelli’s own time were no more successful, since the detailed evidence available to modern historians shows that in the late medieval and Renaissance periods the Maremma only had a population density of about 5–10 people per square kilometre, in contrast to population density levels of about 150 per square kilometre in the immediate vicinity of Florence itself. Many men were driven by dire necessity to seek seasonal employment in agriculture in the Maremma, but the bulk of those people chose not to reside permanently and work and die under the conditions of endemic malaria.⁴⁷

Although slavery had not yet completely disappeared, the economy of Renaissance Florence was not based on mass chattel slavery. The difference in antiquity was that ancient Rome was a society with the potential for massive chattel slavery as the basis of the labour force and the slaves had no choice over where to live and die.

⁴⁵ On Cosa see Celuzza (1993: 227–34); Fentress (1994: 281) concluded that ‘the only “continuity” evident at Cosa is the continual difficulty of keeping its inhabitants for more than a few generations’.

⁴⁶ Niccolò Machiavelli,
Istorie fiorentine
, ii.1 ed. Carli (1927):
I paesi male sani diventano sani per una moltitudine di uomini che ad un tratto gli occupi; i quali con la cultura sanifichino la terra e con i fuochi purghino l’aria; a che la natura non potrebbe mai provedere. Il che dimostra la città di Vinegia, posta in luogo paduloso e infermo: nondimeno i molti abitatori che ad un tratto vi concorsono lo renderono sano. Pisa ancora, per la malignità dell’aria, non fu mai di abitatori ripiena, se non quando Genova e le sue riviere furono dai Saraceni disfatte; il che fece che quelli uomini, cacciati da’ terreni patrii, ad un tratto in tanto numero vi concorsono, che feciono quella popolata e potente
.

⁴⁷ Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber (1985: 35, 49); Pinto (1982: 44, 53–4, 66); Bueti and Corti (1998).

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Roman Campagna

Finley emphasized how rare mass chattel slavery has been in human history: there have only been five major cases in recorded history, namely the United States, the Caribbean islands, and Brazil, after 1492, and ancient Rome and Greece (and a few other minor cases which he did not consider). There was a fundamental difference between the classical Greek city-states and the other four cases in respect of the scale of slavery, as in respect of the scale of everything else, which sets apart classical Athens from the other four. The origins of the slave trade to the western hemisphere are well known and have been described by numerous historians: the European conquerors initially tried to put the indigenous Amerindians to work, but they were decimated by diseases introduced by the colonists, as part of the Columbian exchange which has been so well described by McNeill and Crosby. Subsequently there was a tremendous shortage of labour to work the plantations, a gap which was filled by importations of Negro slaves from Africa, who were more resistant to European diseases than the Amerindians but nevertheless suffered extremely high mortality rates, and who had the virtue (for their buyers) of being cheap and readily available in large numbers. Benjamin Franklin in 1751 concluded that the reason why estate owners in the United States turned to slave labour was simply a question of labour costs: imported slaves were much cheaper than hired labour from the thinly scattered white population.

The reason for the genesis of an economy based on mass chattel slavery in western central Italy (and large parts of the south of Italy) in antiquity is fundamentally exactly the same as the reason why it arose in the western hemisphere after Columbus. A spreading disease (in this case
P. falciparum
malaria) gradually, by a slow process of attrition, either killed or forced to emigrate the bulk of the indigenous farming population in Latium and southern Etruria, thus providing the manpower for Roman colonization elsewhere.

That, in turn, created a vacuum, a massive labour shortage, on fertile agricultural land where free men were reluctant to work because of the disease. That labour shortage could only be filled by importing large numbers of chattel slaves. Even though the later slave revolts in Italy led by Spartacus and in Sicily have attracted much more attention from modern historians, it is very striking that the first attested slave revolt in Roman Italy occurred precisely in the Pontine Marshes, in 198 . Livy records that slaves, acquired Roman Campagna

253

as part of the proceeds of the Second Punic War, in the territories of Setia, Norba, and Circeii conspired with the slaves of Carthaginian hostages who were being held at Setia to attack these towns.

Military action was required to suppress the revolt. Viewed in the light of the analysis given here, the location of this first slave revolt was not an accident. After the Second Punic War and such later acts of Roman aggrandisement as the destruction of Epirus in 167

, slaves were extremely cheap. Their owners need not worry if the gangs of slaves employed on the land, such as those seen by Tiberius Gracchus, suffered extremely high mortality rates from malaria; slaves were very cheap and easy to replace. For as long as the slave trade to the western hemisphere continued, slave owners there took exactly the same attitude, tolerating very high mortality rates among their slave labour forces and assuming that imported slaves would not live more than a few years on average. Yet they were able to make large profits under those circumstances. The slaves who ended up in Setia were brought there because of the manpower shortage noted earlier. The slave revolt there in 198 

shows that the slave economy witnessed by Tiberius Gracchus was already taking root in western central Italy two generations before his excursion through south Etruria which had such catastrophic consequences for the Roman Republic. The demand for labour preceded and called forth supply in Roman Italy, exactly as it did in the United States, according to the arguments of Benjamin Franklin. What happened in Setia was a microcosm of what happened throughout western central Italy and in large parts of southern Italy as well. The slaves who were brought to Latium and Etruria were forced to constitute the labour forces of the Roman villas which came to populate the landscape, villas such as Settefinestre, according to the villa-based slave mode of production characteristic of these regions during the Roman Empire, as described by Carandini.⁴⁸

To replace the concept of the latifundium, which he maintains lacks clarity, Carandini postulated a typology of two types of Roman villas. He distinguished the
villa centrale
from the
villa periferica
. He suggested that the
villa centrale
was characteristic of the suburbana regio Italiae. It was relatively small and practised intensive ⁴⁸ Franklin (1751); Livy 32.26 for the events of 198 ; also 33.36.1–3 for another slave revolt in Etruria a couple of years later; Carandini (1985).

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Roman Campagna

agriculture using mainly slave labour. All this is acceptable. The point at issue here is the assertion that the
villa centrale
was found on fertile lands and in a healthy environment.⁴⁹ In contrast the villa periferica was found mainly in more outlying, isolated regions, located on less fertile land and in less healthy conditions.⁵⁰ Extensive agriculture which required a smaller labour input was the norm. That labour was supplied principally by serfs or tenants rather than slaves. This typology implies that unhealthy conditions were to be found mainly on the fringes of the agricultural landscape of central Italy in Roman times. However, there is plenty of evidence, as this book demonstrates, for malaria right at the heart of the Roman world, even in the city of Rome itself. There were villas in the extremely fertile territory of Setia, which undoubtedly employed the slaves attested during the slave revolt of 198  and later supplied wine for the personal consumption of the Roman emperors. Not a fringe area. Yet the land of Setia was pestilential.

This example alone wrecks Carandini’s typology in so far as it concerns healthy/unhealthy conditions. Moreover, as we have already seen, in general it was fertile lowlands in particular that were likely to be unhealthy, while less fertile mountainous regions were usually healthy. The argument proposed here instead is that it was precisely because much of the best agricultural land of central Italy was unhealthy, owing to malaria, that the Roman élite was forced to import large numbers of slaves in order to get the land worked.

Mass chattel slavery was an adaptation to malaria.

One of the plays of Plautus explicitly mentions the idea of slaves dying rapidly in summer after being forced to perform agricultural labour on pestilential estates. The six months’ life expectancy on farms where malaria was endemic recalls the six months’ life expectancy mentioned in the traditional Italian proverb about the Maremma quoted in Chapter 7 above. Of course Plautus’ comments on a particularly undesirable farm, where everything that could go wrong did go wrong, were intended to be funny, but it was a type of comedy which could only be enjoyed by slave owners.

Nevertheless it shows that the type of analysis advocated here was well within the consciousness of ancient Romans:

moreover none of the Syrian [sc. slaves]- the most enduring of men—who ⁴⁹ Carandini (1995: 33):
Si trova su terreni fertili e in ambiente salubre
.

⁵⁰ Carandini (1995: 34):
È posta su terreni meno fertili e in condizioni meno salubri
.

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255

lived there for six months, is alive: all of them were killed by the disease that strikes at the summer solstice⁵¹

There was an alternative, or at least a possible supplement, to slave labour which deserves some attention, bearing in mind that Mediterranean agriculture requires a lot of labour during harvest-ing, in the summer, which is not required for the rest of the year.

The alternative is the employment of hired labour from seasonal migrant workers. Varro’s recommendation, quoted earlier (Ch. 4.

2 above), that hired labour should be employed in unhealthy regions, rather than slaves, should be recalled. In the early modern period a considerable proportion of the labour input was provided by free labourers who migrated from the uplands of Abruzzo and Marche to gather in the harvest in the Roman Campagna, and from Liguria and Emilia to Tuscany, and also from Abruzzo to the Tavoliere. Bercé described how in 1593, for example, forty thousand labourers arrived in the vicinity of Rome, first to reap wheat and barley, then to thresh it, and afterwards to harvest the grapes.⁵²

Those labourers were prepared to take the risk of catching malaria, sleeping out in the fields in the summer, because it was the only way in which they could make a living. External colonization gave poor Romans alternatives in antiquity during the Republic. The employment of hired labourers inevitably meant that large landowners did not have to bear the costs if the labourers died from malaria. Cipolla described from the reports of the Florentine health magistrates how seasonal workers who had gone from Liguria to work in the Tuscan Maremma had become ill in early autumn at Bibbona in 1614 on their way home and died during the winter months. In this way malaria was able to influence the demography of parts of Italy in which it did not occur. Del Panta attributed the fact that the territory of the Senese had very high mortality levels in the early modern period, even though it was a considerable distance from the coast, to the effects of malaria on labourers who migrated seasonally to the Maremma.⁵³ The ⁵¹ Plautus,
Trinummus
542–4:
tum autem Surorum, genus quod patientisumumst
|
hominum, nemo extat qui ibi sex menses vixerit:
|
ita cuncti solstitiali morbo decidunt
.

⁵² Bercé (1989: 241), citing Paolo Paruta; Delano Smith (1978: 145); Sorcinelli (1977: 95–6) linked malarial fevers in the Marche to seasonal migrations of farm labourers, and also to the construction of the Bologna–Ancona railway line.

⁵³ Cipolla (1992: 51–3); del Panta
et al.
(1996: 193–6); Scheidel (1994
a
: 175, 187–8, 216) discussed wage labour in
gravia loca
.

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Roman Campagna

combination of slaves for the permanent labour forces of villas with seasonal labour for the harvest and associated tasks explains how the Roman élite was able to extract a substantial amount of agricultural production from a land which was shunned by free peasants because of the ‘reckoning with death’,
ratio cum orco
, mentioned by Varro. The reckoning with death from malaria was exactly the same in the Roman Campagna in the early modern period as it was in antiquity: the difference was that early modern Rome was not a slave society:

The workman does not languish voluntarily where the cause of illness and death is close by and powerful.⁵⁴