Reviewed by: Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature by Hunter H. Gardner Rebecca Moorman Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature. By Hunter H. Gardner. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 303. Hardback, $98.00. ISBN: 978-0198796428. This timely book explores two paradoxically unified narratives of plague in Latin literature: dissolution and reconstitution. Gardner analyzes Roman approaches to “zombie-esque” plague narratives not merely as ruinous episodes of death but, more broadly, as apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narratives, asking what comes after destruction. Beginning with the simple notion that disease affecting individual corpora offers a convenient metaphor for the political corpus, Gardner draws out a range of complex nuances latent in the multivalent nature of Roman contagion. Plague erases individual bodies and familial ties through liquefaction, dissolution and decay; this destruction of the individual creates a tabula rasa on which a new socio-political collective can be written. Gardner moves chronologically through historical and literary accounts of plague to trace Roman responses to social and political upheaval: Livy on the early Republic; Lucretius on its end; Vergil on the emerging principate; and Ovid on post-civil war Rome. Part I of III (“Tabula Rasa: A New Kind of Plague Narrative”) explores literary representations of pestilence together with the lived realities of disease in late Republican and early Imperial Rome. Gardner presents ancient medical accounts of contagion alongside modern aesthetic theories from Artaud, Foucault, Girard and Sontag to develop a uniquely medical-critical approach to Roman plague discourse. Gardner’s modern theoretical approach, while welcome, curiously omits foundational ancient literary-critical approaches. Aristotle, for instance, receives no mention despite extensive discussion of Artaud’s idea that theatre is a cathartic experience, like “draining a giant abscess” (30). Applying her approach to Livy’s accounts of disease in early Rome, Gardner develops a generalized model of plague as a formative event which “culls” Rome’s people and government, creating newer, stronger institutions by breaking down weaker ones (74). In Part II (“Experiments in Apocalyptic Thinking”), Gardner interweaves historical, political and literary developments of plague from Lucretius to Vergil and Ovid. Chapter 3 offers a political explanation of the oft-debated final lines of De [End Page 118] Rerum Natura, extending Clay’s view of the plague as a “final test.”1 Gardner highlights DRN’s opposition to closure by untangling the simultaneous homogeneity and division of plague victims, which foreshadows the ambiguity of the post-pestilence state. Does plague’s erosion of barriers produce a new, unified society? Or is the chaotic brawling that famously concludes the poem symbolic of the “frailty of any bond” (107)? Gardner’s political reading recovers readers’ material experience of plague, as earlier instruction in Lucretian atomism prepares them for the concluding narrative of disintegration, but does not address the problem of Epicurean pleasure at the end of the poem. How might the paradoxical productivity of plague’s work in building community through erosion support the poem’s commitment to pleasurable material experience?2 Chapters 4 and 5 explore Vergilian and Ovidian developments of the post-apocalyptic state teased in Lucretius. Gardner’s elucidation of pestilence in Vergil’s Noric and Cretan plagues together with Ovid’s narrative of plague on Aegina offers a fresh perspective on the tired debate of Augustan pessimism and optimism, as she employs the ambiguity of pestilential dissolution and reconstitution to “juxtapose the possibilities and limitations of the new order” (145). The liquefying effects of disease among cows and bees in Vergil’s bougonia model an Augustan return to a boundary-less Golden Age whose utopian and dystopian qualities eerily overlap. In turn, the complicated past rivalries among Ovid’s ant-born race signal the impossibility of the “thoughtless homogeneity” of Vergil’s newborn bees as a long-term model for Augustus’ state (149). Gardner’s rich analysis in these chapters prompts valuable questions for future study: Is the productivity of plague limited to optimistic readings of the body politic? Or are there ways in which the plague can have a positive outcome that also subverts the body politic? How can pestilence narratives inversely comment on the health of the state? A final, wide...
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Nov 2, 2023
Robin John Shattock + 11
Open Access
