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

To make his point that malaria had a major impact on the demography of ancient Italy, Sallares uses ancient literary texts in Greek and Latin (quoted and translated) in conjunction with information from early modern Italy through the end of the nineteenth century. By themselves, the ancient literary texts are at best anecdotal, but the comparative approach shows how this evidence fits in a more comprehensive picture, like pieces of a puzzle. Sallares can identify several areas in ancient Italy as having been affected by malaria. In addition, he draws on microbiology and geomorphology to explain regional variation and change over time. Archaeological evidence for disease is not yet of much use.

In recent studies of ancient Roman demography, malaria or disease in general has played only a minor role (notwithstanding Celli, whose pioneer work on malaria in the Roman Campagna was little noticed, although it is mentioned in McNeill's Plagues and Peoples).¹ Sallares is not interested in the size as in the structure of the Roman population. He sides with Walter Scheidel, Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (Boston, 2001), in rejecting model life tables for ancient (or, generally, pretransitional) populations, because they "modernize" the past to fit homogeneous patterns established from the end of the nineteenth century. Before that juncture, there was no stable relationship between infant and adult mortality, at least not in areas affected by malaria; life expectancy at birth was extremely low, and adult mortality high, resulting in death rates that exceeded birth rates. The argument for regional variation is convincing. Areas not affected by malaria had much higher life expectancies at birth and lower adult mortality, resulting in much faster population growth than generally thought possible for antiquity. Sallares rejects extrapolation from one area to Italy as a whole and regards attempts to establish a "national" average meaningless. Migration, seasonal or otherwise, to and from areas affected by malaria would have spread its effects.

Sallares' investigation of change over time seemingly detracts from his use of early modern evidence, since it assumes a certain uniformity across time, but when he acknowledges change, he offers convincing explanations (for example, coastline alterations that produced new breeding grounds for mosquitoes). With regard to changes within antiquity, Sallares argues that Roman attempts to engineer improvements in living conditions may in fact have made them worse. Areas in Latium that witnessed a reduction in population may have done so because of the spread of malaria. It reduced the number of farmers in areas of intensive agriculture and eventually chased others away; these areas then attracted landowners who could afford larger estates and introduce extensive agriculture instead. The imported slaves who did the work, died in large numbers, but could easily be replaced. "Mass chattel slavery was an adaptation to malaria" (254). The mosquitoes may have been attracted by deforestation or hydrological tampering, or they were replaced by varieties vectoring malaria. Sallares is always ready to offer a choice of explanations! He makes sense of changes in settlement patterns over time with the help of demography. His "negative" reading of the large estates (241-256) is required reading for economic historians.

The second half of the book is devoted to a discussion of several areas in central Italy, the Pontine Marshes, Tuscany, the Roman Campagna, and Apulia. Rome itself takes pride of place. As a megalopolis, it had an ecology of its own. The densely inhabited lower-lying districts of the city were unhealthy, especially in the summer and close to the Tiber, which continued to flood despite Roman engineering. The combination of high temperature (summer) and stagnant water (flood) points to malaria as the major problem. Earlier, in The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca, 1991), Sallares had characterized Rome as a "population sink." The implication is that the population...