Yet - Speaking Of Malaria In General - A Good Deal Of Evidence Has Been
Brought Together To Show That The Disease
Has been endemic in Magna
Grsecia for two thousand years, and the customs of the Sybarites seem to
prove that
They had some acquaintance with marsh fever, and tried to
guard against it. "Whoever would live long," so ran their proverb, "must
see neither the rising nor the setting sun." A queer piece of advice,
intelligible only if the land was infested with malaria. Many of their
luxurious habits assume another import, on this hypothesis. Like the
inhabitants of the malarious Etruscan region, they were adepts at
draining, and their river is described, in one of the minor works
attributed to Galen, as "rendering men infertile" - a characteristic
result of malaria. What is still more significant is that their new town
Thurii, built on the heights, was soon infected, and though twice
repeopled, decayed away. And that they had chosen the heights for their
relative healthfulness we can infer from Strabo, who says that Paestum,
a colony from Sybaris, was removed further inland from the shore, on
account of the pestilential climate of the lowlands.
But the Ionian shores cannot have been as deadly as they now are. We
calculate, for example, that the town walls of Croton measured eighteen
kilometres in circumference, a figure which the modern visitor to
Cotrone only brings himself to believe when he remembers what can be
actually proved of other Hellenic colonies, such as Syracuse. Well, the
populace of so large a city requires a surrounding district to supply it
with agricultural produce. The Marchesato, the vast tract bordering on
Cotrone, is now practically uninhabitable; the population (including the
town) has sunk to 45 to the square kilometre. That is malaria.
Or rather, only one side of the evil. For these coastlands attract rural
labourers who descend from the mountains during the season of hay-making
or fruit-harvest, and then return infected to their homes. One single
malarious patient may inoculate an entire village, hitherto immune,
granted the anophelines are there to propagate the mischief. By means of
these annual migrations the scourge has spread, in the past. And so it
spreads to-day, whenever possible. Of forty labourers that left Caulonia
for Cotrone in 1908 all returned infected save two, who had made liberal
use of quinine as a prophylactic. Fortunately, there are no anophelines
at Caulonia.
Greatly, indeed, must this country have changed since olden days; and
gleaning here and there among the ancients, Dr. Genovese has garnered
some interesting facts on this head. The coast-line, now unbroken sand,
is called rocky, in several regions, by Strabo, Virgil and Persius
Flaccus; of the two harbours, of Locri, of that of Metapontum, Caulonia
and other cities, nothing remains; the promontory of Cocynthum
(Stilo) - described as the longest promontory in Italy - together with
other capes, has been washed away by the waves or submerged under silt
carried down from the hills; islands, like that of Calypso which is
described in Vincenzo Pascale's book (1796), and mentioned by G.
Castaidi (1842), have clean vanished from the map.
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