Death and Disease in the Ancient City (review)

This volume comprises ten essays that are expanded versions of papers delivered at a University of Exeter conference, "Pollution and the Ancient City," together with the editors' introduction describing the ways in which communities of Greece and Rome confronted deaths and disposed of bodies. The location of necropoleis outside a city's boundaries is a constant theme, yet burials of heroes and benefactors within cities continually provide exceptions to the rule. Fear of religious pollution as the motive for isolating the dead recedes to some degree in Rome of the Empire.

The first four papers concentrate on the polis in the Greek world. Eireann Marshall investigates Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Cyrene and introduces stasis as the urban malady whose cause and cure comes from the gods. Roger Brock, however, continuing the investigation of medical imagery in the dysfunctional city into fourth-century sources, highlights the moral disapprobation that dominates analyses of civil strife in Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes. Jennifer Clarke Kosak juxtaposes medical writers of the Hippocratic Corpus, with their convictions that environmental factors and weather influence the onset and course of disease, to the Athens constructed by Euripides and Thucydides—a city with bright, pure air, the mistress of an empire, and a tradition of openness and mobility, that nonetheless falls victim to literal plague and then to stasis. James Longrigg extends the focus on Athens and the pestilence of 430/29 B.C., arguing that community responses vacillated between attempts to remove religious pollution by purifying Delos in 426 B.C., or by introducing the cult of Asclepius during the Peace of Nicias, and efforts to improve drinking water in the Piraeus by sinking wells.

A middle pair of papers survey the environmental factors thought to make a community healthy. Vivian Nutton stresses that while medical professionals note the harmful effects of city air—variously attributed to effusions from adjacent marshes, open sewers, or dank, narrow streets—physicians concentrate their efforts on keeping each individual patient healthy and lack more general concepts of public health. Federico Borca, although acknowledging that ancients consider marshes and fens insalubrious, charts the fates of ancient communities that do build in the vicinity of pestilential vapors and noxious swamp creatures and notes that many of these cities prosper—such as Alexandria, Ravenna, Aquileia, and Agrigentum.

The last four papers deal with the city of Rome, for which our evidence is fuller. John Patterson conceptualizes the caput mundi as a shifting set of physical, ritual, economic, and juristic boundaries that serve to separate an increasingly monumentalized urban center from a periphery into which inappropriate activities endangering the health or safety of citizens are relegated. These boundaries expand—as, for example, when a threat of foreign invasion prompts Aurelian to replace the earlier Servian walls, and the suburbium is forced to accommodate not only burial of the dead, but also tile and tanning industries producing fumes and hazardous fires, the markets and market-gardens provisioning the capital, and the villas and horti of the wealthy. Squalor and luxury sit cheek by jowl. Valerie Hope argues that although respect for the dead prevails in most circumstances, imperial funerals increase in elaborateness and the abuse of a despised corpse becomes more vicious. John Bodel argues that concerns for hygiene and urban amenities influenced Maecenas to close the potter's field on the Esquiline and build monumental gardens open to the public. Maecenas' actions, in turn, initiated a change from mass burial to mass cremation as the preferred method for disposing of unclaimed bodies among the city's poorest. Roman attitudes toward professionals who deal with the dead—from funeral contractors, or libitinarii, to women singers of dirges, or praeficae—admit of greater ambiguity, for although their activities are increasingly confined to the area outside the Esquiline and Colline Gates, their participation...