Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature

Hunter H. Gardner. (2019). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gardner traces links instances of diseases in Latin literature with contemporary political and civil unrest, looking at how Roman authors used epidemics as metaphors for larger problems endemic in their society. There is particular focus on late Republican and Augustan epic poets’ (namely Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid) use of plague narratives to discuss the civil discord of the final years of the Roman Republic. The book is divided into three parts, leading the reader from a general overview of how Latin authors constructed their discussions of disease, weighing historical evidence of disease with literary representations, (“Part I – Tabula Rasa: A New Kind of Plague Narrative”) to how plague became a trope of epic poetry that allowed poets to explore civil corruption and moral decline (“Part II – Experiments in Apocalyptic Thinking”). In this section, emphasis is placed on how society is reorganised during and in the aftermath of an epidemic in line with the emergence of a new form of government under Augustus (cf. especially chapters 4 & 5 about Vergil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses respectively). The discussion then moves to how these plague narrative tropes were used and developed by later Latin authors like Seneca and Silius Italicus, as well as early Christian authors (“Part III: Transmitting Roman Plague”).

Example quotation

I argue that Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid, relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, use representations of epidemics to address the collapse of the social order due to recurrent episodes of civil discord and to evaluate various remedies for recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective.

(p.4)