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Robert Sallares. Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xvi + 341 pp. Ill. $75.00 (0-19-924850-8).
This book deserves to be in every university library collection, not only because the topic is important, but because it includes such impressive scholarship and bibliography. The author's primary aim is to emphasize the critical importance of malaria for understanding the demography of ancient Rome and its immediately adjacent territories. The history and ecology of malaria in the Agro Romano was once an important topic for classicists like W. H. S. Jones (Malaria: A Neglected Factor in the History of Greece and Rome, 1907) as well as scholars like the public health activist and historian Angelo Celli, whose volume The History of Malaria in the Roman Campagna from Ancient Times (1933; English ed. repr. 1977) was the last comprehensive treatment of this subject. Celli's posthumous publication (he died in 1914) argued in grand nomothetic manner that there was an inverse correlation between the malaria rates and the various "highs and lows" of the empire's local economic and political success.
In contrast, the present volume by Robert Sallares is ideographic, providing a wealth of facts, observations, and citations about malaria in the ancient and early modern Italian context, without a wider theoretical synthesis. Sallares first summarizes the kinds of malaria and the evolutionary history...