The Introduction offers an overview of the book’s contents as well as a statement of the book’s general thesis: representations of plague in Latin epic play critical roles in diagnosing and rehabilitating a civic body wracked by discordia. They do so partly by staging a conflict between the concerns of the individual and the interests of the collective res publica. Lucretius, Ovid, and Vergil innovate within the tradition of plague writing by introducing new symptoms and social effects of contagious disease, and by emphasizing the expurgating properties of plague. Such properties allow these poets to weigh the possibility of an entirely new order against the likelihood that any civic body will bear traces of old pathologies.
