Roman Pestilence

Abstract

Abstract 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.