Introduction

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.

Imperial Receptions

Chapter 6 explores the appropriation of late Republican and Augustan treatments of pestilence in Imperial literature. Seneca’s version of Oedipus’ tragedy turns to Latin epic, rather than Sophocles, to articulate conditions of pestilence in Thebes. This language reflects upon Oedipus’ traditional role as φαρμακός‎, both infected “carrier” and saviour to the civic body, clarifying how competing claims of individuality and collectivity have determined the pathology of earlier literary treatments of plague. By inscribing plague within a text that questions standards of good government, Seneca secures the role of contagion as a tool for examining the health of the body politic in Neronian Rome. The epics of Silius Italicus and Lucan also invoke the plagues of their predecessors in contexts of Roman civil discord, and use the plague’s power to enact the dissolution of individual identity as a way of indicting competition for political distinction. Lucan relies on the symptomology of his predecessors in his account of pestilence afflicting Pompey’s soldiers, but emphasizes the link between contagion and internal conflict by casting both the disease and the fervour for civil war as rabies. Silius, in the Punica, describes an outbreak of pestilence during the Punic Wars that brings about widespread destruction. But in answer to the status-leveling and dehumanizing effects characterizing preceding plague narratives, he depicts the Roman general Marcellus escaping the plague and recovering distinction or “exemplarity” in a way that does not threaten the health of the body politic.

Plague, Civil War, and Epochal Evolution in Vergil’s Georgics

Vergil’s Noric cattle plague in Georgics 3 develops a more direct correlation between contagious disease and civil discord. In Vergil’s account, the initially conflicting symptoms of the disease (e.g. excessive heat and cold) collapse bodies into liquefied homogeneity, indicating plague’s power to create uniformity among a population and ultimately offer a clean slate upon which to rewrite the body politic. But in that process, the eradication of individual identities—expressed through Vergil’s anthropomorphized cattle—and the open-ended spread of the disease that concludes Book 3 suggest the poet’s ambivalence toward prospects of recovery from contagion as civil war. Through heaps of undistinguishable cadavera and Golden-Age imagery that neutralizes old enmities, as well as through verbal echoes of passages indicting fraternal strife elsewhere in the Georgics, the poet acknowledges the excesses of individual ambition. But he qualifies Lucretian polemic against desire and ambition as markers of personal identity: when pestilence strikes Aristaeus’ beehive in Book 4, its remedy—a violent ritual (the bougonia) that produces homogenous, loyal offspring—fails to offer an adequate model for human existence. The final section of the chapter looks to the failed attempt at settling Crete in the Aeneid as a coda to disease in the Georgics: the episode recalls depictions of epidemic disease in Georgics 3 and 4, clarifying the meaning of Aristaeus’ new hive as a caveat for Aeneas’ attempt to restore the Trojan race.

Human and Civic Corpora in Lucretius’ Athenian Plague

Lucretius’ treatment of the Athenian plague uses imagery of corpora (“bodies”) to close his poem, underscoring the futility of Athenian citizens clinging to the material remnants of personal identity, as they struggle over the corpses of their kin (rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur, 6.1286). At the same time, the poet’s sensitivity to kinship within the community reconstitutes corpora as individuals whose humanity is expressed through their roles and relationships as parents and children (6.1256–8). Despite his general antipathy toward metaphors, the poet transfers the physical suffering brought about by plague not only to the moral condition of its victims, but also to the moral condition of the unenlightened human race. While links between the plague and civil strife are less explicit in Lucretius than in his successors, recent analysis of the language of contemporary political struggles woven throughout the poem has dated its completion to 49 BCE, at the commencement of civil war between Pompey and Caesar. By describing the symptoms of the Athenian plague in language that echoes earlier polemic in De Rerum Natura against desire for honores among Rome’s political elite, the poet primes pestis for further figurative use in addressing destructive competition undertaken to augment individual gloria.

Livy, Pestilentia, and the Pathologies of Class Strife

Accounts of pestilence in the historical record help us understand those assumptions about the effects of disease that inform both the creation of the plague narrative and its reception among Roman audiences. Chapter 2 examines Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita in order to suggest that the historical experience and representation of plague in Rome was infused with resonance of civil strife by the Augustan period. Livy refines his source material to address a body politic in need of healing and thus sharpens the correlation between contagium and civil discord (discordia), especially in early episodes recounting the struggle of the orders. The historian’s narratives of contagion draw partly from the language of medical writers, but equally from a historiographic tradition that correlated a diseased body with a diseased body politic. Accounts of plague allow Livy to reflect on distinctions among members of different orders, especially the patres/patricii (highest class of citizens) and plebs (lowest class of citizens). The remedies enacted to combat plague, in forms of both cultural and political innovations, prove alternatingly salubrious and detrimental to the body politic. Livy recognizes, however, that, as a challenge to the people equivalent to strife within and war abroad, pestilentia could have a positive impact on the development of Roman hegemony and prompt coalescence among a divided citizenry.

Roman Pestilence

This chapter addresses the tradition of plague writing in antiquity and outlines the innovations that Roman epic poets have made within the discourse. It observes a distinction between eyewitness accounts of plague and the relatively fictive representations of epidemic disease in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Vergil’s Georgics, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The plague narrative experiences a revival in the late Roman Republic, prompting an investigation into the ideological work such narratives perform: why did the Romans of this period favor epidemic disease as a way of illustrating the collapse of the social order? How were epic accounts of plague informed not only by political rhetoric tethering the language of pestis (“plague”) to the chaos of the late Republic, but also by epidemic diseases discussed in medical writers, didactic treatises, and historical anecdotes? After identifying characteristics that accompany notices of “real” plague in the late Republic, the chapter examines twentieth-century theorists whose work addresses those characteristics: Artaud (1958), Foucault (2003), Sontag (1988), and Girard (1974). While no single theory explains the features of Latin plague, collectively these thinkers address bodily decay and liquefaction, the opportunities for state intervention in the context of an outbreak, and the friction between individual and collective concerns that define Roman treatments of epidemic disease. Perhaps most significantly, the work of these theorists underscores the alternatingly corrosive and purifying power of plague, which gestures toward a new order, while also dwelling on the aftermaths and remainders of the old.

Relapse

The seventh chapter of this project examines the transmission of Roman plague in literary and visual arts, beginning with the early Christian period and proceeding up through the present day. Such a survey is necessarily selective and meant to indicate the range of interpretive possibilities available for readers who are sensitive to the conventions developed in the hexameter treatments of Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid. The chapter focuses on three areas of reception: early Christian poetry and prose (Endelechius’ Carmen de Mortibus Boum; Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum), visual arts of the Italian Renaissance (e.g. Raphael’s Vergilian Plague of Phrygia [1520’s]) and Anglo-American novels (e.g. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam Trilogy). The visual and literary arts discussed here crystallize the interplay between civil strife, familial discord, and epochal evolution evident in the pestilence narratives examined throughout this project. Roman conventions of representing pestilence help us understand how narratives of contagious disease up to the present day have dramatized a tension between ideals of autonomy and distinction and those that foster group cohesion and collectivity.

Ovid’s Origin of the Myrmidons and the New Augustan Order

We can better understand Vergil’s equivocations toward plague and its remedies as a solution to civil war by turning to Ovid’s account of plague in Metamorphoses 7.490–660: in Ovid’s narrative the citizens of Aegina, nearly eradicated from a pestilence sent by Juno, are replaced by ant-born men, the Myrmidons, characterized in a manner reminiscent of collectively oriented, uniform apian community in the Georgics. I argue that the episode should be read as a reflection of Ovid’s cynical attitude toward Augustus’ attempt to restore a war-depleted population by replacing it with a new generation of loyalists. The ant-born population of Myrmidons, bound to serve as soldiers in the war between Athens and Crete, constitute a new citizenry dreamt into existence by king Aeacus after he receives signs from Jupiter in the form of ants filing up a nearby oak tree. The privileges (grants of land) and functions (serving in war) awarded to this new population effectively sort out the confused heaps of those rotting cadavera of kin and acquaintances left in the wake of contagion. The poet’s narrative of recovery thus broaches the political utility of pestilence, in such a way that not only confronts the open-ended post-apocalyptic visions of his predecessors, but also questions the rigorous mechanisms of recovery, often in the form of population controls, implemented by the Augustan Principate.