Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature

Abstract

Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE–14 CE). Relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors use largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective. In order to understand the figurative potential of plague, this book evaluates the reality of epidemic disease in Rome, in light of twentieth-century theories of plague discourse, those of Artaud, Foucault, Sontag, and Girard, in particular. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature identifies consistent features of the outbreaks described by Roman epic poets, charting the emergence of Golden-Age imagery, emphasis on bodily dissolution, and poignant accounts of broken familial bonds. Such features are expressed through Roman idioms that provocatively recall the discourse of civil strife that characterized the last century of the Roman Republic. The final chapters examine key moments in the resurgence of Roman plague topoi, beginning with early imperial poets (Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus), and concluding with discussion of late antique Christian poetry, paintings of the late Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-American novels and films.

Climate change, society, and pandemic disease in Roman Italy between 200 BCE and 600 CE

“…Hence, the ancient terminology for disease outbreaks was highly generic; in Latin, the most common terms were pestis, lues, pestilentia, mortalitas, morbus, and clades (103). Moreover, ancient reports of epidemics were often highly rhetorical, their interpretation colored by political and social concerns (104). The catalog of epidemic events offered below can be no better than the underlying record, imperfect as it is, allows.…”

Mahamari Plague: Rats, Colonial Medicine and Indigenous Knowledge in Kumaon and Garhwal, India

“…Renny’s concern over the “epidemic corpse” (Lynteris and Evans 2018 ) forms part of a complex epidemiological anxiety over human cadavers, which defies dichotomous histories of miasmatic/germ-theory etiologies of disease. The epidemic corpse has been both an object of and an agent for epidemiological thinking at least since classical times, with narratives of corpse disposal inherited from Thucydides, Lucian, and Ovid becoming entangled with shifting etiological and public health frameworks for centuries in Europe and the Middle East (Gardner 2019 ). For mid-nineteenth century British doctors, the association of the London Plague of 1665 with the supposed opening of earlier plague pits formed a common reference that was further enhanced by what Faye Mary Getz ( 1991 ) has called the “gothic epidemiology” of the time.…”

“…For a discussion of Ranken, Forbes and anticontagionism, see Harrison ( 1999 :197–98, 202–203). Forbes ( 1849 :34) also mentioned ratfalls in the village of Tai’wali, during the latter half of April, and “just before its first appearance,” but attributed no significance to this datum, which simply rhymed with observations of broader epizootics among cattle and poultry; a leitmotif of European descriptions of epidemics since Ovid (Gardner 2019 ).…”

Lucretius’ Didactics of Disgust

“…For major treatments, see Bright (1971); Clay (1983), 257–66; Segal (1990), esp. 228–337; Gale (1994), 223–8; Penwill (1996); Fowler (1997); Finnegan (1999); Stover (1999); Fratantuono (2015), 459–73; Gardner (2019), 79–112; and Kazantzidis (2021), 60–75 and 122–74. For a good overview of scholarly views (at least up to the mid-1990s), see Gale (1994), 223–8.…”