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Il volume esplora il tema delle malattie e pandemie dal punto di vista degli autori dell'antichità classica. La selezione di citazioni riguardanti questa tematica, soddisfa la curiosità di tutti coloro che intendano approfondire l'inesauribile storia del nostro passato e costituisce uno strumento estremamente utile per gli storici della medicina. Una preziosa raccolta che consentirà di integrare tra loro informazioni provenienti da fonti diverse: documenti scritti, opere d'arte e reperti archeologici, inclusi i resti organici, oggetto di studio della paleopatologia. Particolare attenzione viene data alla vasta varietà di'febbri'e alle misure di contenimento delle malattie epidemiche. This volume explores the theme of diseases and pandemics from the perspective of the authors from classical antiquity. The broad selection of quotations on this theme satisfies the curiosity of all those who wish to explore the inexhaustible history of our past and is an extremely useful tool for historians of medicine. A precious collection that allows for the integration of information from different sources: written documents, works of art and archaeological finds, including organic remains, which are object of study in paleopathology. Particular attention is given to the wide variety of'fevers'and measures to contain epidemic diseases.

Scientists, journalists, novelists, and filmmakers continue to generate narratives of contagion, stories shaped by a tradition of disease discourse that extends to early Greco-Roman literature. Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE-14 CE): relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors used largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Theorists such as Susan Sontag and René Girard have observed how the rhetoric of disease frequently signals social, psychological, or political pathologies, but their observations have rarely been applied to Latin literary practices. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature explores how the origins and spread of outbreaks described by Roman writers enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective, staged in an environment signalling both reversion to a pre-historic Golden Age and the devastation characteristic of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Such innovations in Latin literature have impacted representations as diverse as Carlo Coppola's paintings of a seventeenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague in Naples and Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy. Understanding why Latin writers developed these tropes for articulating contagious disease and imbuing them with meaning for the collapse of the Roman body politic allows us to clarify what more recent disease discourses mean both for their creators and for the populations they afflict in contemporary media.