This book is, to my knowledge, the first monograph-length study of plague discourse in Latin literature. G. examines how a number of Latin sources (especially Lucretius, Livy, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Seneca the Younger and Silius Italicus) use plague as a metaphor for socio-political unrest and dissolution, often in the context of the demise of the Roman Republic. She also considers how these plague narratives may invite possibilities for collective healing and socio-political restoration. Her analysis incorporates a vibrant array of theoretical perspectives, building especially upon Antonin Artaud, Michel Foucault, René Girard and Susan Sontag. The reception of plague tropes is another major topic, both among the ancient sources and in later sources spanning from early medieval literature and art to twenty-first-century television and film. She also touches upon plague discourse from recent historical epidemics, such as the 1980s AIDS crisis and the Ebola outbreaks of the 2010s. Though completed before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book now takes on a more topical significance, not only for scholars but also for the public at large.
Scholars working in reception and several other areas should find this book highly useful. Its attention to metaphors of disease transmission and the effects of plague on communities and societies should make it of great interest to medical humanities scholars, especially in this time of a world pandemic. The latter topics should also appeal to historians interested in Rome's transition from Republic to Empire as well as scholars of Latin literature from those time periods. Furthermore, G.'s focus on literary reverberations between the various plague narratives should be valuable to those interested in intertextuality and allusion. This aspect of her study includes earlier Greek sources, especially Sophocles’ Oedipus and Thucydides’ account of the Athenian plague. At the same time, she highlights facets of the Latin narratives that are markedly Roman, such as their recurring interest in plague's effects on familial institutions and their related use of the family as a metaphor for the Roman state.
As her title implies, G. concentrates on the effects of pestilence on a macrocosmic scale; it is not a study of medical language, nosological categories or the lived realities of symptoms and treatments. While not a work of medical history in the narrow sense, it nonetheless offers profound insight into some of the most influential narratives of disease transmission from the ancient world. It should be an asset to anyone who seeks to broaden their perspectives on discourses of disease in antiquity – and their long and continuing impact on nosographical traditions.
The book's largely chronological organisation facilitates its close attention to literary influence and intertextuality. Following an introduction that provides a synopsis of her study, G. presents seven chapters in a tripartite structure. Beginning Part 1, ‘Tabula Rasa: a New Kind of Plague Narrative’, Chapter 1 traces the medical ideologies, observational habits and narratological practices that shaped representations of plague in Latin literature. Here, G. delineates the theoretical models (Artaud, Foucault, Girard, Sontag) that colour her interpretations throughout the book.
Chapters 2–6 each focus on a specific author or an interrelated group of authors or texts. Chapter 2 concentrates on three separate instances of plague in Livy's Ab urbe condita, correlating each outbreak with the emergence of significant political or ideological change in Roman history. Reading the human body as an index of the body politic, she convincingly argues that Livian plagues variously exacerbate or erode class distinctions among individuals, thus presenting opportunities for societal redefinition.
Part 2, ‘Experiments in Apocalyptic Thinking’, begins with Chapter 3, which pursues the implications of pestilence for individual human bodies and collective social entities in the context of Lucretius’ Epicurean materialism. G. perceptively detects in Lucretius’ De rerum natura a bleak commentary on the discord of the late Roman Republic as well as a poignant affirmation of the resiliency of familial bonds. These discussions frequently note how Lucretius both draws upon and departs from Thucydides’ plague narrative as informed by their historical contexts.
Chapter 4 focuses on Virgil, beginning with the Noric cattle plague in Book 3 of the Georgics. This proves an effective transition from Chapter 3, as G. identifies allusions to Lucretius, along with language evocative of internecine strife, civil war and perversions of a ‘Golden Age’. She then turns to the disease that afflicts Aristaeus’ bees in Georgics 4, in which she observes allegories of pestilential contagion, societal crisis and potential for recovery and reinvention. The chapter concludes with a short discussion of the Cretan plague of Aeneid 3 and its resonances with each episode from the Georgics.
Chapter 5 looks at the Aeginetan plague in Book 7 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. While noting Lucretian and Virgilian echoes, G. argues that Ovid goes further than those authors by emphasising plague's potential to disintegrate established societal structures. She insightfully interprets the new ‘militant and exploitable’ (p. 148) generation of ant-men born in the wake of plague as an analogue of the transformed civic roles and political realities initiated by the Principate.
Part 3, ‘Transmitting Roman Plague’, investigates why politicised plague discourse remains prominent after the resolution of the civil strife that brought down the Roman Republic. In Chapter 6 G. contends that the persistent plague motifs in Lucan's Bellum civile convey a sense of restlessness continuing well after the end of the Republic. Moving then to Seneca's Oedipus, she argues that Oedipus’ fraught attempts to manage the Theban plague raise questions about the relationship between leader and governed in an imperial system. The final part of the chapter considers Silius Italicus’ Punica, finding that the Syracusan plague in Book 14 generates opportunities for social cohesion and individual heroism (namely that of Marcellus).
Chapter 7 surveys thematic, discursive and allusive connections between Latin plague literature and post-antique literature, art and film. The receptions (some of which are shown in black-and-white images) are too numerous to list here, but include early Christian sources (e.g. Endelichius’ Carmen de mortibus and Paul the Deacon's Historia Langobardorum), Renaissance art (e.g. Marcantonio Raimondi's Il Morbetto and Carlo Coppola's The Pestilence of 1656 in Naples), eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature (e.g. Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Mary Shelley's The Last Man) and twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, films and television series in the genres of dystopian science fiction (e.g. Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy) and zombie horror (e.g. Fear the Walking Dead). This eclectic assortment of receptions drives home the extensive influence of the Latin plague narratives and the sustained relevance of their tropes.
G.'s work is impressive in scope, and she skilfully weaves together these various plague narratives with a focus on close reading and intertextual analysis. Among the book's many unique contributions are the thought-provoking parallels it draws between Latin literature and later receptions. Some of these parallels are discussed with tantalising succinctness (the final chapter, for instance, moves through certain receptions quite rapidly), and it is sometimes unclear whether they reveal the influence of Latin sources or whether the parallels are more coincidental (perhaps pointing to common or even universal responses to mass illness). Nonetheless, she powerfully demonstrates the prominent place contagion and mass illness have continued to occupy in the popular consciousness of the twenty-first-century (even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic), which suggests an area of reception with rich potential for further research and public outreach.
Although this is not a book on ancient medicine per se, at times it seems that additional attention to plague discourse in Latin medical prose (e.g. Celsus and Pliny) might throw into even sharper relief the rhetoric and tropes in the historiographical and poetic sources at the heart of this study. There are passing references to Celsus and Galen, who are described as ‘medical writers’ (p. 23) without comment on why that label applies to them, but not sources like Lucretius and Seneca who are also preoccupied with disease. In a work that tackles representations of pestilence in such a wide variety of genres and media, the cursory treatment of medical prose struck me as curious.
These observations do not detract from the persuasiveness and overall quality of the book. It offers a new and unique perspective on Latin plague narratives, their reception and the body politic in Latin literature, all of which have interdisciplinary appeal. It is engagingly written and well edited (I noticed a mere four typos).
As noted above, the publication of this book suddenly assumes a heightened timeliness. I write this review at a time when the COVID-19 crisis is escalating on a daily basis, and the related anxieties and societal tensions are often reminiscent of the ancient plague narratives G. unpacks. Under these disquieting circumstances her insights into these human response patterns – particularly the opportunities for collective healing and societal reinvention – are all the more salutary.
