A new study by Sebastian Kheml, Tomáš Glomb and Aleš Chalupa from the Centre for the Digital Research of Religion (CEDRR) at the MU Faculty of Arts has focused on the previously unexplored relationship between healing cults dedicated to the gods Asclepius and Apollo, and the risk of malaria in present-day Italy, Sicily and Sardinia.
“We are studying the period of the Roman Empire, but we must bear in mind that the largest body of Latin inscriptions, which represent the spatial distribution of the cults of these deities in our analysis, dates from the first three centuries AD. The results therefore tell us the most about this period of the Roman Empire’s history, which was plagued by malaria for a long time,” says Tomáš Glomb.
Ancient healing cults were fundamental to ancient Roman culture, offering spiritual support and, in the case of the cult of Asclepius, “practical” medical assistance. “People would come to his temple intending to spend the night, in the hope of having a prophetic dream that would guide them towards the right treatment. Apollo, although not solely a healer like Asclepius, was the patron of medicine and medical practice. Both cults thus represented an alternative to ancient medicine, without necessarily standing in opposition to it; on the contrary, they often functioned complementarily,” explains Sebastian Kheml.
“We have very little information about the actual relationship between the two deities and malaria, and what has survived is largely anecdotal in nature. This is the case, for example, with the Roman orator Aelius Aristides, who in his youth contracted an illness often interpreted as malaria, the intensity and duration of which led him to become a fervent devotee of Asclepius,” adds Kheml.
Epigraphic inscriptions in Latin were used to indicate the spatial presence of religious cults, while the level of malaria risk was derived from the Torelli map. The map was created in 1882, before malaria had been successfully eradicated from Italy. Based on a combination of archaeological, literary and scientific evidence, it can be concluded that the spread of malaria remained relatively stable for many centuries.
“Malaria is widely considered to be one of the most dangerous diseases facing humanity, and this naturally applied to the Roman Empire as well. This is partly because it occurred very frequently in extremely fertile lowland areas – historically, people were willing to risk contracting the disease themselves or allowing their subjects and slaves to contract it. The Romans had never invented an effective treatment (which, after all, remains a problem to this day), nor did they find out how it was transmitted, namely via the infected female mosquito of the Anopheles genus,” notes Kheml.
Preserved sources mention a number of regions in what is now Italy that were affected by malaria, with the island of Sardinia and the Pontine Marshes, located approximately seventy kilometres south of Rome, considered the most dangerous. “Sardinia even had such a bad reputation that Martial, in one of his poems, likened it to death itself. Finally, it should be noted that Rome was also severely affected by this disease and this was a key reason why wealthy senators spent the summer in the countryside, away from the ‘corrupt air’ that was thought to cause malaria,” adds Kheml.
The article Impact of Malaria on the Spatial Distribution of Healing Cults in Roman Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia: A GIS Approach, published in Open Archaeology, offers several insights. “First and foremost, it highlights how significantly ecological factors can influence human living standards and, in turn, influence the spread of a particular type of cultural behaviour. In the context of climate change, this may lead us to consider the possibility that we may witness an intensification of cultural responses to this change in the future,” says Aleš Chalupa.
The authors decided to investigate the issue using a digital geographic information system and spatial analysis. “Because the occurrence of malaria in historical Italy, Sicily and Sardinia is mapped in the form of geocoded zones, and also because online databases of Latin inscriptions mentioning Roman gods provide the coordinates for each inscription, we can plot them on a map in a geographic information system (GIS) and examine their relationships,” explains Tomáš Glomb.
The examination of spatial relationships took place on two levels. “In the first, we calculated what area in square metres of each region under study could be considered a zone with a high probability of malaria. Then we looked at the number of inscriptions mentioning individual gods in that region and calculated whether the frequency of inscriptions featuring gods associated with medicine increases in regions with a higher burden of malaria. On the second level, for sites with Latin inscriptions, we measured the distance in metres to the nearest malaria-affected zone and statistically assessed whether inscriptions mentioning medical deities generally lie closer to these zones than other deities. “In both cases, it was shown that inscriptions of Asclepius and Apollo are indeed more concentrated in areas that were very highly likely at risk of malaria,” explains Glomb.
Although the Romans had a fairly extensive understanding of malaria, which remains one of the world’s most dangerous diseases, it remains difficult to reconstruct how they responded to this threat from a cultural perspective. “There were a whole range of ways in which people in the Roman Empire tried to protect themselves from malaria. However, none of them was truly effective, except perhaps when people left dangerous areas, as was the case with wealthy senators. Although ancient medicine offered many opinions and recommendations regarding malaria, which was recognised by its most typical symptoms – tertian and quartan fevers – only a tiny minority of these recommendations had a positive effect,” says Kheml.
People also turned to various religious practices, such as protective amulets and spells. “For example, the famous magic word ‘abracadabra’ was originally an incantation meant to protect against tertian fever. Last but not least, there were also several healing deities: from specialists focused directly on malaria, such as the goddess Febris (Latin for ‘fever’), to the universally revered healers Asclepius and Apollo,” adds Kheml.
The study by Sebastian Kheml, Tomáš Glomb and Aleš Chalupa is an example of interdisciplinary research, combining classical historiographical approaches with computational methods and geographical and statistical tools. It thus offers a new perspective on how fundamental environmental factors, such as disease, have historically influenced human cultures, the nature of their manifestations and the emergence of their institutions.
“New findings confirm that dealing with environmental phenomena and epidemic risks with the help of religion is firmly linked to human civilisation throughout history. Research into cultural responses to Covid-19 also demonstrates that spirituality and religious practices have become more intense during the pandemic,” says Tomáš Glomb about the impact of pandemics on human behaviour.
Glomb also cites an interesting example from a recent situation. “In her study, titled ‘In Crisis, We Pray: Religiosity and the Covid-19 Pandemic’, researcher Jeanet Sinding Bentzen found that, in the first months of the pandemic, people from 107 countries searched Google for results using the keyword “prayer” at a rate 30 per cent higher than before. In other words, it seems that humanity has always responded to the spread of disease and environmental threats with religion, from the Roman Empire of the antiquity to the present day.”
The study from the Centre for the Digital Research of Religion was supported by the project “Beyond Security: The Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building (CoRe)”, reg. no.: CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004595, funded by the European Regional Development Fund.