Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece: Revisitingthe Jones Hypothesis in an Era of Interdisciplinarity

Christopher Baron1 • Christopher Hamlin1

Published online: 15 September 2015

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract Between 1906 and 1909 the biologist Ronald Ross and the classicist

W.H.S. Jones pioneered interdisciplinary research in biology and history in

advancing the claim that malaria had been crucial in the decline of golden-age

Greece (fourth century BCE). The idea had originated with Ross, winner of the

Nobel Prize for demonstrating the importance of mosquitoes in the spread of the

disease. Jones assembled what, today, we would call an interdisciplinary network of

collaborators in the sciences and humanities. But early negative reviews of Jones’s

Malaria and Greek History (1909) by classicists and historians ended the project,

despite a positive reception among malariologists. Today, the ‘‘Jones hypothesis’’ is

often used to exemplify the naıvete of past scholarship, and few examine Jones’s

evidence and reasoning. In this age of renewed interdisciplinarity, a review of what

went wrong is timely. Jones and Ross knew they were opening new methodological

territory and struggled with the challenges of multiple ways of knowing. Over 100

years later, malaria remains an important site of historical-biological research, yet

integration is elusive. After reviewing the Jones-Ross relationship, Jones’s inter-

disciplinary campaign, and the reception of the hypothesis among classicists/ancient

historians and in malariology, we conclude by highlighting some of the specific

challenges faced by those exploring the interface of biology and history.

Keywords Malaria � Disease � Interdisciplinarity � Ancient Greece �History � Decline

& Christopher Hamlin

chamlin@nd.edu

Christopher Baron

christopher.a.baron.14@nd.edu

1 University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

123

Minerva (2015) 53:327–358

DOI 10.1007/s11024-015-9280-7

For much of his long and distinguished career at St. Catharine’s College,

Cambridge, William Henry Samuel Jones (1876–1963) bore the nickname

‘‘Malaria’’ Jones for a series of 1907–1909 publications in which he had argued

that malaria had been a significant factor in the decline of golden age Greece. Its

effects, he argued, had not been merely economic and demographic, they had been

existential and cultural.

What is usually known as the Jones hypothesis was actually the idea of the most

prominent malaria biologist of the day, Ronald Ross. Ross’s 1897 experiments (for

which he received a 1902 Nobel Prize) had demonstrated that a mosquito

transmitted malaria. He had gone on to work out the compound population

equations of malaria endemicity. As a result, a disease long seen as intrinsic to place

became an historical entity; malaria was contingent on human movement and

changed land use.

Ross first presented the malaria-and-Greek-decline thesis on November 15, 1906

in an address to the Oxford Medical Society. The young Jones was a classicist

recruited to test the hypothesis. The two worked closely for two years. Though they

differed as to what malaria explained, how it explained it, and how scholars should

reason in such matters, it is better to recognize a Ross-Jones hypothesis. What are

commonly seen as its two chief tenets are actually closer to Ross’s view:

• that malaria arrived relatively late in Greece (mid-to-late fifth century BCE)

• that it was the main cause of an unambiguous if gradual historical event known

as the decline of Greece, which began around 430 BCE.

A ‘‘slashing’’ review of Jones’s Malaria and Greek History (1909) effectively

ended the active phase of inquiry. Embittered, Jones turned to pedagogy,

translations, and projects more traditionally within the domain of classics, though

he never lost interest in question.1 Yet the nickname stuck. A century later, Jones’s

reputation remains linked to what has been called ‘‘the malaria hypothesis of

history’’ (Burke 1996: 2253), which has in turn been seen as ‘‘paradigmatic for

biological explanations of historical change’’ (Rosen 1957: 155–156).

The thesis still elicits strong and divided reactions. Having asserted in 2002 that

the Jones hypothesis might ‘‘be safely dismissed now without further discussion,’’

Robert Sallares was still discussing it (and more sympathetically) two years later

(Sallares 2002: 23; Sallares et al. 2004). The late Mirko Grmek was more positive

(Grmek 1989: 279–283). But unlike Sallares and Grmek, few commentators have

been expert in both classics and biomedicine.

Instead, the history of the idea has been the history of arriving at a satisfactory

interdisciplinary epistemology. Most have approached it from one discipline or

another. Malariologists have generally been intrigued; classicists dismissive. That

disciplinization has affected how the Jones hypothesis has been construed and thus

what evidence might bear on it and how. Simpler but soluble disciplinary questions

1 For biographical information, see Nutton (2004); The Times, 6 February 1963. Jones’s later projects

include a history of the Hippocratic oath, Loeb editions of several Hippocratic texts, translations of Pliny

the Elder, and an edition of a remarkable text known as Anonymous Londinensis. For ‘‘slashing,’’ see

Jones to Ross, 10 April 1909, Ross Papers, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine [hereafter

LSHTM] 89/12/52.

328 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

have driven out the more complicated and grander question Jones wanted to ask.

How chronic debilitating disease had contributed to profound cultural and political

change in classical Greece could not be definitively determined; whether malaria

had been present in the ancient Mediterranean world, could be. Some have sought

refuge in the oversimplification of the binary, the better to refute: if malaria cannot

explain everything, it explains nothing. There is evidence of disciplinary disciplin-

ing. Jones, the single-factor advocate who would ‘‘explain all of Classical history in

terms of … malaria’’ (Burke 1996: 2253) has been seen as the rogue scholar, who,

defying the domain of his discipline (which omits chronic disease) and its

conventions of inference and explanation, suffers appropriate ignominy. He has

sometimes been saddled with positions he rejected.2 Or the thesis has been

dismissed on red-herring technicalities. That the changes Jones described are no

longer unambiguously seen as decline has been grounds for dismissal. Many recoil

from his ‘‘moral’’ reading of ancient history and his focus on manly ‘‘character.’’

Jones (and more so, Ross) certainly expressed contemporary imperialist values, but

that hardly negates the importance of inquiry into changing cultural norms – one

might explore the domain of the moral without moralizing.

Malaria remains an important site of historical-biological research in this age of

renewed interdisciplinarity, as historians extend their gazes into the Anthropocene

and seek in multiple ways to draw on biology in rethinking the human past.3 While

its presence in ancient Greece is now admitted, malaria remains geographic

background more than historical foreground, holding the curious status of a cause to

which no effects are assigned. A review of the Jones episode has sobering

implications for that interdisciplinarity. Conscious that they were opening up new

historical territory, Ross and Jones were pioneer interdisciplinarians. Jones labored

to assemble an international network of scholars in many fields who would study the

comparative effects of endemic disease; he and Ross discussed at length the

convergent methodologies on which their case was based – what the philosopher

William Whewell had called a ‘‘consilience of induction.’’ Lines of reasoning

which, individually, were insufficient to compel a conclusion were amplified

through such convergence (Whewell 1840: 230–239).

The trouble with such undertakings is that epistemic assessment is disciplinary.

Disciplines house ways of knowing, enforce rigor. Even within the traditional

framework of classics, the sources support diametrically opposite readings of health

in antiquity, the historian of classical medicine Helen King has noted; the

complexity of reciprocal cause and effect of many types of social, cultural, and

biological factors warrants even more caution in making ‘‘broad generalisations’’

2 Thus Burke: the ‘‘insidious, debilitating and demoralizing effects of malaria, acting as they tend to over

long periods of time, argue strongly against theories attributing sudden calamitous effect on ancient

society’’ (Burke 1996: 2255). Jones emphasizes precisely such ‘‘insidious, debilitating and demoralizing

effects’’ over time. Our impression is that the Jones thesis is often addressed as a familiar idea, not

through any close reading of Jones’s texts. What one referee calls ‘‘equivocation’’ may reflect

expectations that Jones should be making a single and precise claim. Rather, he is inviting attention to a

factor whose effects will have been both profound and complex, direct and indirect. Misunderstandings

may also reflect conflation of Ross’s version (relatively rapid spread over the whole of Greece) with

Jones’s emphasis on local emergence from changed land use.3 For the state of the art, see ‘‘AHR Roundtable’’ (2014). See especially Thomas (2014).

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 329

123

(King 2005: 8). That disciplines sometimes mesh seamlessly in interdisciplinary

undertakings – including, to some degree, in the contemporary practice of ancient

history – should not suggest that they do so necessarily, nor disguise the enormity of

the problem of interdisciplinary epistemology. Skepticism toward interdisciplinarity

is hardly unreasonable—where, and in whom, will accountability inhere (Hamlin

2012)? What implicit or explicit criteria will constitute it? How are we to answer the

charge that was made against Jones, that he tendentiously assembled suggestive bits

of information, using each to bootstrap the others in pursuit of an idee fixe? One

might say that this is precisely what interdisciplinary inquiries often do.

The long and frustrating contest over the Jones hypothesis has been mainly about

epistemology. Few disputed the facts; at issue was what conclusions they warranted.

Usually those taking positions were brandishing their own epistemic colors,

consolidating disciplinary authority rather than extending it (and perhaps in the

process, exposing it). While many acknowledged that the effects-of-malaria-in-

antiquity problem required a composite approach, there was and is no discipline to

make clear which epistemic conventions to apply. Often the differences have been

fundamental, and on several dimensions. Partisans disagree about:

• What defaults to adopt? Is the absence of (textual) evidence, evidence of

(malarial) absence?

• If malaria was pervasive, what sort of textual evidence should we expect to find?

How many texts are enough?

• Do we reason deductively from general laws of malaria to particulars or rely on

particulars alone?

• What shall be the levels and units of inquiry – centuries, decades, or seasons;

regions, localities, lives, or texts?

The Jones-Ross collaboration was a unique personal relationship – of depen-

dence, respect, trust, openness. Given the wide disparity of skill sets and

orientations between classicists and malariologists, it may be naıve to think that

something like it could or can be readily reproduced, translated into disciplinary

communities, or even made the basis of some new metadiscipline. And yet that may

be what the problem requires.

We first review the Jones-Ross relationship and Jones’s interdisciplinary

campaign. The following two sections ‘‘The Historians’ Response: Explanans and

Explanandum’’ and ‘‘The Malariological Response’’ explore the reception of the

Ross-Jones hypothesis in classical historiography and in malariology, respectively.

The final section ‘‘The Movement to Connect History with Biology’’ considers

implications of the episode for work at the history-biology interface. We first

highlight two factors in the abandonment of Jones’s ideas and approach: the

inability of historians to assess the effects of invisible, endemic disease on the lives

of those they study, and the challenges disease poses to conventions of explaining

historical change. We then consider contemporary interdisciplinarity – the synthetic

genomic-anthropological-archaeological approach to the study of ancient diseases –

and ask whether this resolves (and could resolve) the sorts of epistemic quandaries

that have perpetuated the debate on the Ross-Jones hypothesis for more than a

century.

330 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

The Biologist and the Classicist

While Ross and a young medic George Grigson Ellett collaborated in some of the

publications, we speak of a ‘‘Jones’’ thesis because Jones was the main and often

sole author of the malarial decline publications. But the idea was clearly Ross’s

(Ross 1910: 3). Their correspondence (only Jones’s side has survived) has many

dimensions. Jones began as research assistant; later Ross became patron, mentor,

and friend. But it was a union of expertise, too, especially as Jones began to read

ancient texts with an eye to malarial significance.

Ross first. In 1906, Ross, now at the new Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine,

was invited to give the annual address to the Oxford Medical Society. ‘‘Malaria in

Greece’’ was mainly a review of his recent epidemiological field work at the drained

Lake Kopais in Boeotia near Thebes, then being reclaimed by British capitalists.

After surveying the workers, he had made a malaria census of area children, using

the rapid technique of spleen enlargement. These children were ‘‘very intelligent,

and many [exceedingly] good looking,’’ but ‘‘most …were far from well, and some

looked miserably ill, emaciated and anaemic’’ (Ross 1909a: 703). Malaria affected

roughly a third of adults and two-thirds of children. The address, widely reprinted,

was also a fund raiser for the Greek Anti-Malaria Society.

But vulnerability was a larger theme than humanitarianism. Ross asked hearers to

imagine the effect on the ‘‘health and vigour’’ of British children of ‘‘a malady

which lasts for years and may sometimes attack every child in a village.’’ That was

what had happened in ancient Greece, and was happening in modern Greece, where

malaria, ‘‘unexpectedly high for any European country,’’ approached Indian or

African levels (Ross 1909a: 706). To a great British empire which hoped to plant its

civilization throughout the globe, that mattered.4

For Ross, who followed the commonplace Dorian invasion view of Greek

decline, the chief worry was racial replacement. Ancient Greek civilization had

been the achievement of ‘‘Aryan invaders,’’ a ‘‘fair-haired’’ people, ‘‘vigorous and

well trained in arms,’’ who were yet susceptible to a plasmodium that they would

inadvertently import in the immune bodies of enslaved north Africans. With suitable

Anopheline vectors already present, malaria had then ‘‘spread … from valley to

valley, … [to] gradually eat out the high strain of the northern blood.’’ Ross

emphasized its deadliness to infants and debilitation to others, ‘‘sapping … the

energies of the race’’ and resulting in a ‘‘darker’’ population. Differential racial

immunity to malaria was well recognized as an impediment to the imperial mission

and a perverse exemplar of racial Darwinism – in India, Italy, and Africa, ‘‘the

stronger … fair northern blood which nature attempts constantly to pour into the

southern lands’’ had been most vulnerable (Ross 1909a: 705–706).5

Ross’s hypothesis was a plausible extrapolation from tropical medicine to ancient

history. He supported it with a modern example: Mauritius, where malaria had

4 For the draft original of Ross’s speech, see LSHTM, 89/10/39.5 Ross was not worried in 1906 about reintroduction of malaria into Britain by returnees from malarious

colonies. That would become a concern for him (and another eminent malarial historian, Erwin

Ackerknecht) later. See Ross, ‘‘Question of Ultimate Disposal of Malarial Cases,’’ 13 November 1918,

Ross Papers, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow [hereafter RCPSG], WO 23/1/3.

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 331

123

wrought ‘‘infinite injury’’ following its introduction in 1866. Visiting the island in

1908, Ross found that roughly a third of the island’s children were afflicted, and that

mortality had nearly doubled (Ross 1908). But mainly he was happy to consign the

idea to the scrutiny of ‘‘scholars.’’ For, more than an opportunity to advance a new

hypothesis, his lecture was an occasion to bring malaria into the domain of classical

learning, and thereby to link the new discipline of tropical medicine with the eternal

verities of truth and beauty whose contemplation was the business of august

universities. Occupying the chair at Ross’s address was the clinician/medical

historian William Osler, who had taken the Oxford medical professorship to re-

humanize a medicine sullied by the grim laboratories of the physiologists. And by

talking learnedly about ancient Greece, the ambitious and multitalented Ross (poet,

novelist, mathematician) might show himself, though a graduate of no university, as

a person of liberal education and no mere colonial doctor.

Such contextual elements go some way to accounting for the flood of gratuitous

classical allusions in Ross’s address. He had come to Greece at the onset of the

malaria season to find ‘‘Andromeda in tears, awaiting the onslaught of the fell

monster which was just then preparing to arise (metaphorically speaking) from his

long winter sleep in order to devour her.’’ He had visited the sites of oracles,

Pegasus’ launching pad, and had found the fountain of the three Graces being

desecrated by ‘‘shameless [Anopheline] insects.’’ He was much struck by the sad

state of Thebes – equally a literary and historical site (Ross 1909a: 702–703). For

Ross, as for many admirers of the classical past, mythological, literary, and

historical Greece were all of a piece – he would merely add parasites and

mosquitoes to that mix. On the back of a leaf of Ross’s field notes from Lake Kopais

is a list of names of historical, literary, and mythological figures. It appears that

Ross was learning modern Anglicized spellings. But the list ends with the ancient

and modern terms for mosquito. For Ross, the mythic and the malarial were

somehow one, with Apollo and Anopheles part of the same ontology (Fig. 1).

Before presenting the malaria hypothesis at Oxford, Ross had proposed it to the

eminent classicist J.G. Frazer of Trinity College, Cambridge, who found the idea

plausible.6 Jones’s recruitment came not through Frazer, however, but through the

Cambridge biologist A.E. Shipley (1861–1927), who announced to Ross the next

May that he had found ‘‘a thoroughly capable Classical Scholar’’ who was already

‘‘hard at it, going through all Classical literature to find references.’’ ‘‘I think we

shall now get something satisfactory from the Classical side,’’ he concluded.7

At the time, Jones, BA 1897 (Selwyn College, Cambridge), MA 1902, was a

classical teacher at the Perse School in Cambridge.8 He had just published Greek

Morality in Relation to Institutions. An Essay, which he hoped (in vain) might be

6 Frazer to Ross, undated, probably early July 1906. LSHTM 89/11/2.7 Shipley to Ross, 10 May 1907, LSHTM 89/11/04. Shipley had known of Ross’s ideas before the Oxford

lecture, having written on November 8, 1906, to note his discussions of the matter with ‘‘Macallum of

Toronto,’’ probably the physiologist A.B. Macallum (1858–1934). See LSHTM 89/11/03.8 For a brief biography produced by the St. Catharine’s College archivist (‘‘News from the Archives,

Lent Term 2012’’), see http://www.caths.cam.ac.uk/assets/uploadedfiles/downloads/Jones.pdf.

332 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

accepted as a doctoral dissertation.9 He represented the work as a social history of

moral practice, with regard to religion, the state, the family, and finally to private

conduct and conscience. In fact, it was mainly a brisk review of ancient moral

philosophy, but it shows Jones struggling to contextualize unorthodox moral

practices and reveals his concern with moral change. There he recognized

successive ‘‘waves’’ of moral concern: between 500 and 300 BCE, ‘‘manly virtues

of courage and devoted patriotism’’ had given way to ‘‘humane ideals.’’ He would

not label these decline or ‘‘progress,’’ for ‘‘who shall say that one morality is better

than the other?’’ Jones attributed them to ‘‘environment,’’ for him a social rather

than a physical or biotic entity (Jones 1906: 151–156). Under Ross’s influence,

Jones would decide that Greece had declined, but he remained far more interested in

moral change than in military decline or racial replacement. In an early letter he

pressed Ross for modern texts dealing with malaria’s effects ‘‘upon character,

temper, etc.’’ – the ‘‘ethical’’ side of the question (Jones 1907: 48–49).10 Likewise

he was less interested in dating malaria’s arrival than with its effects in Athens

around 400 BCE.

But, like Ross, Jones was infected with imperial anxiety. These changes in the

spirit of a great people were far-reaching, and the ultimate stakes were the progress

of civilization and the ideal state of human souls. These events mattered to

Edwardian classicists, and certainly at the Perse School where, via the ‘‘direct’’

Fig. 1 Note from back of Ross’s field note on malaria of Lake Kopais employees. May 1906. Note thatRoss moves from Persephone in the fourth line from the bottom to the terms for mosquito in the next twolines. Ross Papers, RCPSG 1/7/1/1

9 Jones would be awarded a Cambridge Litt. D. in 1925: ‘‘University News,’’ The Times, 2 March 1925.10 Jones to Ross, 16 May 1907, LSHTM 89/12/02.

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 333

123

method of language teaching pioneered by the progressive headmaster W.H.D.

Rouse, boys learned to speak and think in Greek and Latin. The classical past was a

laboratory of noble ideals and actions, essential in the urban, industrial, and

utilitarian modern world. But it also revealed how vulnerable civilizations might be

to insidious assaults on ‘‘character’’ (Stray 1992: 37–41).11 Jones’s Morality reflects

his concern that Edwardian boys might not be up to the demands of empire (Jones

1907: 86–87). His teaching did too. Crack shot and second lieutenant Jones taught

Officer Training as well as elementary Latin.12

It was character that malaria threatened. It sapped the will, drained the civilizing

energy of Europeans living in hot and humid places, degrading their morality and

that of their subjects. There was much interest in ‘‘malarial cachexia,’’ the chronic

exhaustion from repeated reinfection, and equally in ‘‘masked malaria,’’ an umbrella

term for its indirect pathological effects. Noting a rumor that German colonials took

quinine to prevent ‘‘moral deterioration,’’ Jones suggested that malaria might be

responsible for Europeans’ ‘‘lapses into barbarism’’ (Jones 1908b: 536–538).

Reviewers were alert to these issues – Jones’s work would shed light on (non-

malarial) Japan’s remarkable progress when compared with malarial China or

Russia (Anonymous 1907). Ruled as well as rulers would benefit from the conquest

of malaria, but Jones, even more than Ross, worried more about English schoolboys

than native populations.

The Ross-Jones case was reasonably complete by June 1907. When Jones had

begun systematically ‘‘reading through all the Greek authors’’ for allusions to

malaria is not clear, but it was a labor intensive process – ‘‘I sometimes spent a week

without finding a single reference!’’ – and he must have begun well before Shipley’s

May 10 letter to Ross.13 In his first letter to Ross, four days later, Jones presented his

evidence – references to enlarged spleens, allusions (in Plato and Aristotle) to

tertian and quartan fevers, and the abandonment of cultivation in Attica during the

war years of the late fifth century. He noted an apparently new term, pyretos, and

suspected that it ‘‘may nearly always refer’’ to a new disease. A week later, he

speculated that malaria’s apparent prominence among adults might reflect its

relative recency. Where well-established, it would mainly affect children, who

would not be immune. He also suggested that another seemingly new term,

‘‘melancholia,’’ might refer to aspects of malaria. It affected the mind too, Jones

noted. Hence ‘‘melancholia’’ might initially have referred both to febrile excitability

and to associated moods – ‘‘short-tempered and morose’’ – of victims.14

Quite quickly too, Jones had begun to think in malarial terms. Despite his

deferential and self-deprecating tone, within weeks he had taken charge of the

11 Influenced by Ruskin and Morris, Rouse was fixated on the purity of rural cultures. The importance for

Jones of the charismatic reformer Rouse should not be underestimated. To join Rouse in reviving a failing

school was to embark on a crusade to recreate the ‘‘life’’ of the classical past.12 ‘‘From the London Gazette,’’ The Times, 9 June 1908. Concerns about manliness as a matter of

national or racial degeneration are prominent among reviewers, too.13 Jones to Ross, 14 May 1907, LSHTM 89/12/01. See also Jones to Ross, 14 June 1907, LSHTM 89/12/13.14 Jones to Ross, 19 May 1907, LSHTM 89/12/03.

334 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

collaboration, at least intellectually.15 Two weeks into the correspondence he was

learnedly enlisting the authoritative works on historical epidemiology by Charles

Creighton and August Hirsch.16 And while he would never commit the speculation

to print, he was reaching beyond Greece (and Rome). ‘‘Do you not think that

malaria will prove to be the cause why all empires – the Persian Empire, the

Alexandrian Empire, the domain of the Moguls in India, the Spaniards in America –

gradually declined?’’ he asked Ross. ‘‘The more I study the question the more

certain it appears.’’17 On some issues his views were diverging from Ross’s. For

Jones, malaria’s late introduction into Greece was less important than its effect on

Attica, due, he thought, to creation of Anopheline habitat from lapse of cultivation

during the last ten years of the Peloponnesian war, known as the Decelean war

(Jones 1907: 35–41; Jones 1908a; cf. Jones 1909a: 73–79).18

Early in the correspondence Jones had sounded out Ross on publication, perhaps

a catalogue of Greek sources. Over the summer, the project evolved into a pamphlet

and then a small book. Ross’s preface grew into a first chapter, and Jones solicited a

concluding chapter from the young medic Ellett, a 1903 St. Catharine’s medical

graduate.19 Jones was emphatic that their book (which he was subsidizing) be a

work of malaria prevention more than of classical erudition – they would ‘‘drive

home the importance, especially to Englishmen, of expelling malaria from every

country in which it exists. If malaria has caused the downfall of races, the expulsion

of malaria may lead to the growth of great nations in the future.’’20

Malaria: A Neglected Factor in Greek History appeared in September 1907.

Barely one hundred pages, it consisted of two chapters from Jones (Greece and

Rome) as well as Ross’s and Ellett’s contributions. Jones is main author on the title

page, but the book’s cover listed all three.21 The book did not sell, yet Jones was

15 ‘‘Why ever did not some great man take up the subject instead of leaving it to a nobody like myself,

whose name carries no weight?’’ Jones to Ross, 12 July 1907, LSHTM 89/12/16; 7 September 1907,

LSHTM 89/12/24.16 Jones to Ross, 31 May 1907, LSHTM 89/12/08. Curiously, Jones does not cite these sources in his

published works.17 Jones to Ross, 13 June 1907, LSHTM 89/12/12. He later speculated (10 September 1907, LSHTM

89/12/25) about the role of malaria in the fertile crescent in ways that anticipate concepts of river valley

civilizations: malaria would attack non-immune hill peoples as they conquered lowland empires.

Ultimately, Jones sought to enlist east Asian linguists in a parallel inquiry (Jones to Ross, 16 October

1907; LSHTM 89/12/28).18 Cf. Jones to Ross, 27 August 1907, LSHTM 89/12/22. Empirical association of lapse of husbandry

with malaria was longstanding. Jones’s focus on microscale determinants reflects the general trend of

Ross’s and subsequent work: endemicity requires much more than introduction (Ross in Jones 1907:

12–13; cf. Jones 1907: 40n). Ross’s uneasiness with Jones’s version was that it made malaria

consequence rather than independent cause. For Jones such chicken-and-egg issues were moot since he

never represented malaria as sole cause of Greek decline.19 Jones to Ross, 26, 29 May, 20 June 1907, LSHTM 89/12/05-06, 15. Ellett (1876–1974) took his B.A.

in 1898, his M.B. in 1903–4, and his M.D. in 1908. In 1906 he was associated with Cambridge’s

Pathological Laboratory and published a brief paper (Ellett 1906). See also Lancet, 7 November 1903,

1335.20 Jones to Ross, 12 July 1907, LSHTM 89/12/16.21 On the finances, see Jones to Ross, LSHTM 89/12/34. Curiously, the same publishers reissued the

book in 1920, with a new title page listing Ross’s accomplishments.

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 335

123

elected to a St. Catharine’s fellowship in November 1908. At 32 he felt old to be

beginning an academic career, but accepted the fellowship while continuing to teach

at Perse.22

Over that summer of 1907 and in the 18 months that separated this book from his

better known Malaria and Greek History, Jones was working to unite history and

biology in the study of the effects of endemic diseases. He was consolidating Ross’s

modes of reasoning with historical modes of inference, and building a network of

sympathetic experts in many fields.

Initially the recruitment was limited to Cambridge – some questions would have

to wait until October, when ‘‘the professors return,’’ he told Ross.23 The

parasitologist Shipley (Christ’s College), his recruiter, was lecturer in invertebrate

morphology. In 1907 he also acknowledged Professors Edward Vernon Arnold

(Trinity) (1857–1926), a classicist skilled in both Latin and Sanskrit, and Thomas

Clifford Allbutt (1836–1925), Regius Professor of Medicine, who, like Oxford’s

Osler, had historical interests.24 That he does not list several local experts who

might have helped – the historian J.B. Bury, the classicist Frazer (who had

welcomed Ross’s idea in July 1906), or the malariologist G.H.F. Nuttall, author of a

1900 review of anticipations of the mosquito vector – suggests Jones’s continuing

discomfort with pressing his bold ideas on senior figures. Nuttall lived too far away

(two miles), he told Ross.25 Still, it is an impressive group and reflects both the

greater integration of intellectual inquiry of the period and the workings of small

collegiate institutions which could nurture conversation among medics, classicists,

and biologists.

He had also begun selling the idea beyond Cambridge. He (and Ellett)

approached classicists first through a brief letter in the May 1907 Classical Review

(Jones and Ellett 1907).26 There what would become the Jones hypothesis was

merely a tantalizing juxtaposition of three sets of facts: the frequency in the

Hippocratic texts of allusions to swollen spleen (quickly becoming the standard

indicator of malaria), a malaria-conducive environment in Attica after the Decelean

war, and malaria’s power to cause ‘‘degeneracy – physical, moral, and mental.’’ Its

‘‘most marked symptom,’’ they insisted, was ‘‘dissatisfaction, or even despair,’’ and

added that ‘‘Greek thought during the fourth and third centuries B.C. shows this

characteristic.’’ Readers were invited to submit evidence bearing on these issues.

22 ‘‘University Intelligence,’’ The Times, 21 November 1908; Jones to Ross, 28 November 1908, LSHTM

89/12/38, 39.23 Jones to Ross, 18 September 1907, LSHTM 89/12/26.24 In 1921 Allbutt would publish Greek Medicine in Rome. Venn, Alumni Cantabigiensus, online ed.

http://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search.pl?sur=&suro=c&fir=&firo=c&cit=&cito=c&c=all&tex=SHPY88

0AE&sye=&eye=&col=all&maxcount=50. H. D. Rolleston, ‘‘Allbutt, Sir (Thomas) Clifford (1836–

1925),’’ rev. Alexander G. Bearn, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; http://www.oxforddnb.

com/view/article/30382 (accessed September 13, 2013).25 See Jones to Ross, 7 Sept. 1907, 3 November 1908, LSHTM 89/12/24, 89/12/35. In fact Jones

worshiped Frazer as the rare original thinker in an otherwise stodgy field.26 The issue probably appeared later in the summer. In October 1907 Jones mentions submissions to The

Lancet and The Morning Post. They are not published, he thinks, because he is an ‘‘unknown man.’’ Jones

to Ross, 8 October 1907, LSHTM 89/12/27.

336 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

In a 1908 paper to the Dutch medical history journal Janus Jones addressed

issues of colonial administration. Malaria could be eradicated, he declared, and

‘‘tropical countries… made healthy enough for white men to live there in comfort.’’

Again, the concern was comparative, collaborative research. Evidence of ‘‘the

mischief, economic, physical and moral’’ done by malaria and other diseases would

raise administrators’ awareness. One should look for instances of emigration of ‘‘the

rich, … capable and … energetic’’ from the countryside to towns – likely a result of

malarial invasion. Historical research might also reveal malaria’s true bill – the sum

of ‘‘loss of life, loss of time, … physical suffering, … and …permanent psychical

disturbances.’’ This was important for Ross, who was claiming that targeted

antimalarial measures would pay for themselves in India. After offering to

coordinate such inquiry, Jones turned cautiously to Greece. There the likely rise of

malaria had coincided ‘‘with certain changes in the Greek character,’’ which led

‘‘ultimately’’ to ‘‘the ruin of the race.’’ That malaria ‘‘undoubtedly has the power to

disintegrate the moral fibre of a people’’ made it ‘‘probable that the decline of the

Greeks is to be attributed, at least in part, to this cause’’ (Jones 1908a; Ross 1910:

295–305).

In ‘‘Malaria and History,’’ published in Annals of Tropical Medicine and

Parasitology, the house organ of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (and

thus Ross’s journal), Jones wrote as a biologist. Using the ‘‘struggle for existence’’

between humans and parasites as his framework, he called for ‘‘induction’’ of

‘‘general laws’’ from historical facts – instances of periodic fevers, autumnal fevers,

fevers in marshy areas, and swollen spleens (Jones 1908b: 529–530). He explained

more fully how malaria affected ‘‘character.’’27 Ross’s racial replacement was one

way (Ross in Jones 1907: 10–12). Poor health during childhood and the sapping of

energy in adults were others. Again, colonial administration would benefit from

anthropological research on the ‘‘psychological peculiarities of peoples among

whom malaria is endemic’’ (Jones 1908b: 536–538).

These pieces – and his 1909 works, Malaria and Greek History and a companion

study on ancient Italy (1909b) – reveal the growing network Jones had assembled. It

included Angelo Celli, one of the most prominent Italian malariologists and later

author of a history of malaria in Italy (Celli 1933), and Francesco Genovese of

Caulonia, who had published a translation of the Ross, Jones, Ellett volume (with

Rome added to the title and a preface by Celli) (Jones 1908c). From Borneo Anton

Willem Nieuwenhuis (1864–1953), physician, anthropologist, and expedition

leader, wrote that malaria there had ‘‘the disintegrating effect which I [Jones]

assert it had among the Greeks’’ (Jones 1908b: 537). An American lawyer and

amateur historian resident in Capri, Thomas Spencer Jerome (1864–1914), directed

Jones to the substantial literature on post-febrile psychosis that had followed Emil

Krapelin’s pioneering paper in 1881, and Jones noted ‘‘cerebral’’ malarial symptoms

27 This is Jones’s most enthusiastic endorsement of a view he was not enthusiastic about. He suggested,

contra Ross, that darker-skinned peoples might have been less susceptible to malaria because they were

original inhabitants, and not, as Ross would have it, slaves (see Jones 1909a: 70). Jones to Ross, 2

September 1908, LSHTM, 89/12/32.

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 337

123

in the Hippocratic corpus.28 Other correspondents included the Oxford Roman

historian William Warde Fowler (1847–1921), a specialist on popular religion and

friend of Rouse, Otto Effertz, a Mexican vaccinator, who had insights into

population immunity, Professor Edson of Denver (presumably Carroll Edson,

professor of therapeutics at the University of Colorado), and three Greek

malariologists, Professors Constantine Savvas and Aristotle Kouzis of Athens and

Dr. J.P. Cardamatis, active in the Greek anti-malaria organization (Jones 1907,

vii).29 Thus within two years a Cambridge circle had become an international

network – all long before email or even air-mail.

But the core of the collaboration remained the complex friendship of Jones and

Ross. While they agreed that fuller recognition of malaria’s historical effects could

spur and guide malaria policy, each was asking particular disciplinary questions and

engaging in a distinct mode of knowledge-making. Malaria scientist Ross sought

general truths. He saw ancient Greece as a case study, one with world-historical

significance perhaps, but not otherwise singular. Jones was concerned with the

singular effect of presumed malaria, individually and collectively, on late fifth-

century Athenians. Effectively, for Ross Greece answered a malarial question; for

Jones, malaria answered a Greek question. Jones’s question was predicated on a

positive answer to Ross’s: only if malaria were in Greece could it have had its

effects. But it was far trickier. And Jones could help Ross far more than Ross could

help Jones.

In answering Ross’s question, the two were, in piecemeal fashion, employing a

hypothetico-deductive approach. Three principles regulated their reasoning. First

was uniformitarianism: read the past from the present, infer the effects of malaria in

antiquity from its effects in the modern world, since it was a universal physical

cause. No society where malaria was rife could ‘‘thrive,’’ Ross maintained, and

Jones agreed that the ‘‘inevitable consequences’’ of endemic malaria were ‘‘decline,

physical, intellectual, and moral.’’ Since Greece had once thrived (men with swollen

spleens could hardly have cultivated their bodies in gymnasia, Ross held) but no

longer did, one could, on the grounds that like effects have like causes, posit

malaria’s arrival as the cause of that change. The logic was not only orthodox

geological reasoning but an application of Occam’s razor, the principle of

explanatory parsimony (Ross in Jones 1907: 13; Jones 1909a: 52–53; Jones 1908a).

Second was the natural experiment of Mauritius. Not only did one know that

malarial regions did not thrive, one could show cause producing effect. In fact, the

example was more symbolic than substantive: Ross’s 1908 Mauritius field study

came too late to impact Jones’s work and was concerned more with morbidity and

mortality than with social, economic, or cultural effects. For Ross, however,

Mauritius offered a basis for calculating the likely rate of spread of malaria in

ancient Greece. On that basis he hypothesized that mid-fifth-century Athenian

military campaigns in Asia and Africa were its source. To the more cautious Jones,

Mauritius merely exemplified the fact of introduction in historical time.

28 Two decades later, Jones’s work would inform the principal British treatise on the subject, by the

Glasgow psychiatrist William Kirkpatrick Anderson (Anderson 1927).29 Jones to Ross, 3 November 1908, LSHTM 89/12/35.

338 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

Parsimonious actualism and the Mauritius analogy made malaria-as-cause-of-

Greek-decline a plausible working hypothesis. It supported a prediction: if malaria

were new to Greece, it would have left literary traces. Not only did Jones find

abundant allusions to malaria in the later fifth century, he found no hint of it in the

seventh-century writings of Hesiod, who hailed from Boeotia, a region that would

become heavily malarial. Apparently independently, Jones also discovered other

non-trivial malaria-related phenomena that Ross might have predicted: allusions to

swollen spleens and indications of malaria’s prominence among adults, suggestive

of its recency (Jones 1909a, vii). Subsequently, he would present further diagnostic

and geographic evidence – references to Anopheles-nurturing locales, for example.

From the standpoint of malarial science, the case was strong enough to warrant

tentative adoption of the hypothesis. Malaria was clearly present and apparently

new. Since multiple forms of decline were its ‘‘inevitable’’ consequence, these could

be assumed to have occurred, though how fully they accounted for Greek ‘‘decline’’

might not be clear. But for that, there was no obvious alternative hypothesis. The

later enthusiasm for the Ross-Jones hypothesis among social scientists, including

epidemiologists and geographers, likely reflects the fact that by their standards and

with regard to questions of regional change, it was good science. In letters to Ross,

the humanist Jones occasionally indulged in scientists’ terms – he claimed proof.

Convinced that malaria must have deleterious effects, Ross was little concerned

with details. Jones’s far more difficult problem was to apply the hypothesis to

particulars of Greek history. And while he gave lip service to economic and

demographic matters, where the impact of endemic disease would be less

controversial, he remained fascinated with how malaria changed how persons

thought and acted.30 His description of such changes would often be quoted.

It is surely not fanciful to trace to … [malaria] the subtle but unmistakable

change which came over the Greek character after the fifth, and to a greater

degree the fourth century …. Gradually the Greeks lost their brilliance ….

This is painfully obvious in their literature, if not in other forms of art. Their

initiative vanished; they ceased to create and began to comment. Patriotism,

with rare exceptions, became an empty name, for few had the high spirit and

energy to translate into action man’s duty to the state. Vacillation, indecision,

fitful outbursts of unhealthy activity followed by cowardly depression, selfish

cruelty and criminal weakness are characteristic of the public life of Greece

from the struggle with Macedonia to the final conquest by the arms of Rome.

(Jones 1909a: 101–102)

In trying to explain shifts in Athenian culture, Jones tackled the hardest end of the

problem, confronting the full spectrum of historical contingency. How could malaria

have been responsible for these changes? One way was through a learned ‘‘laziness.’’

Since exertion triggered relapses, persons in malarious regions became disinclined to

‘‘toil, either of body or of mind,’’ resulting in a general ‘‘lack of enterprise.’’ In turn,

30 In shorter presentations (e.g. 1908a) Jones alluded to demographic and economic effects. In his longest

and final treatment (Jones 1909a: 107–108) he simply incorporated these general statements, verbatim,

without comment. He was more interested in such factors in Roman history, where there was a more

ample historiography to support such inquiry (Jones 1909b).

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 339

123

loss of ambition led to hedonism (and effeminacy), cowardice, and cruelty: thus ‘‘the

history of a malarious country will probably be marked by fitful efforts, begun under

the influence of excitement, pursued with no constancy or vigour, and often stained by

perfidy, deceit, blind folly and savage cruelty’’ (Jones 1909a: 92–94).

Admitting that these ‘‘moral faults’’ might have other causes, Jones turned to

direct mental symptoms of malaria – particularly melancholia. He argued that even

a few malarial melancholics might disrupt ‘‘healthy social life,’’ for (in Athens) so

much depended on the leadership of the ‘‘comparatively small number of men, who

met to discuss and transact the business of the city-state’’ (Jones 1909a: 100–102; cf.

Jones 1907: 45–46). Perhaps even within a generation, such a condition would

‘‘weaken the mental life of the whole community.’’ Children would learn from their

parents ‘‘habits of indecision, and … sink into pessimism, moroseness, ferocity and

other forms of psychic weakness.’’ Malaria also undermined the ability to respond to

other causes of degeneration. A ‘‘vigorous people’’ would ‘‘bravely cast aside worn-

out institutions; … [would] not yield to vicious habits, … [nor] calmly look on

while others succeed to their place’’ (Jones 1909a: 104–105).

Even under Ross’s influence, Jones did not see all malarial transformations as

unambiguous decline. Among elites, malarial malaise might have triggered the rise

of introspective philosophy, while fostering ‘‘degrading superstitions’’ among the

rest (Jones 1909a: 103–105). Malaria had perhaps improved the status of women, as

wives became nurses (Jones 1908a; cf. Jones 1909a: 123–126). But Jones was

understandably reluctant to specify how these mechanisms had operated in

particular cases. He was fighting a burden-of-proof battle. Malaria need not be

the explanation of first resort, but he hoped it would be included as an important

explanatory factor in the core questions of classical history, questions that were

ultimately biographical and existential: who were these ancient ones whose thoughts

and deeds were so striking? Only concede that malarial causation met the burden of

plausibility, and to exclude it from consideration would become as unacceptable as

including it had once been. Yet few would grant that indulgence.

The climax of the Jones-Ross collaboration was a January 1909 symposium at

Liverpool, jointly sponsored by the School of Tropical Medicine and the Liverpool

branch of the Classical Association, with Jones as main speaker (Fig. 2). This was

probably the first time Jones and Ross met in person. This symposium was less

interdisciplinary union than strategic alliance. Both the Classical Association

(created in 1903) and the new School represented marginal fields fighting for

recognition in curricula and in culture more generally (Stray 1992: 28–32).

Roughly a month later, Jones’s best known exposition, Malaria and Greek

History appeared, dedicated to Ross and published in the Manchester University

Historical Series. It included an essay on ‘‘Greek Therapeutics and Malaria Theory’’

by the Oxford medical historian Edward T. Withington, author of Medical History

from the Earliest Times (1894). The new book may not seem distinctively different

from his 1907 book, but Jones saw it as ‘‘evidence without any theorizing.’’ He

boasted of inspecting every extant source. He had been told that the case was now a

‘‘certainty.’’31

31 Jones to Ross, 31 October 1908, 3 November 1908, LSHTM, 89/12/34, 89/12/35. Cf. Jones (1909a, v).

340 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

But Jones was not making the argument usually attributed to him. At the end of

Malaria and Greek History he asserted unambiguously that malaria had not been

the cause of Greek decline, but merely an additional disturbing factor. Other factors

were political changes (unwise territorial ambition), religious changes (loss of

faith), cultural/economic changes (the coveting of luxury), war, and, finally, the

‘‘unnatural vice’’ (sometimes ‘‘prevalent among the Greeks to an almost incredible

extent’’).32 ‘‘It would be absurd to maintain that all these changes were produced by

malaria,’’ he had told readers of The Annals of Tropical Medicine, but surely their

effects had been ‘‘aided by …an insidious foe, which weakened the individual from

his birth, and left him an easier victim to the disintegrating forces of his

environment’’ (Jones 1907: 49–50, 53; Jones 1908b: 536–537). It would, he asserted

in Malaria and Greek History, ‘‘be a simple task to show how the imperfections of

the later Greeks, the decline in physical excellence, the lack of mental and moral

strength, even the depopulation of the country, can be accounted for by the wide

prevalence of malaria.’’ But he labeled ‘‘such … reasoning… fallacious in the

extreme.’’ Instead, malaria ‘‘was but one out of many causes, a single component of

a most complex whole’’ (Jones 1909a: 104–107 [authors’ italics]). In public Jones

had consistently been more circumspect than Ross; here, in what he saw as his final

statement, he was even more tentative in rejecting the position that would later be

attributed to him.

Fig. 2 Ticket to the Liverpool Symposium. LSHTM 89/13/12

32 Jones’s fascination with the role of male homosexuality is hard to miss. He could imagine no link

between malaria and homosexuality. Always it is an independent, and, to him, inexplicable aspect of

cultural contingency. He saw it as a weakness while acknowledging its importance: ‘‘It is hard not to

believe that much physical harm was caused thereby; of the loss to moral strength and vigour there is no

need to speak’’ (Jones 1909a: 103).

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 341

123

That tentativeness was both strategic and a reflection of complications. Rome

supplied the latter. Already in the summer of 1907 Jones recognized that if malaria

had come early to Rome (e.g. in the third century BCE), as Ross’s Liverpool

classics colleague Herbert Augustus Strong thought possible, the problem arose of

how Greece could fall and Rome rise under the same causes. If true, their case was

‘‘weakened.’’ While Strong’s citations did not allow unambiguous diagnoses, they

led Jones to consider the complex interplay between malaria and culture.33 In

Greece, malaria had sapped ‘‘manly vigour and intellectual strength’’ and produced

a ‘‘weak and inefficient’’ individual subject to ‘‘hedonism, pessimism,’’ and

‘‘brooding.’’ But it had ‘‘turned the sterner Roman into a bloodthirsty brute’’ (Jones

1909b: 120; Jones 1907: 85).

Rhetorically, Jones could also take the high ground of cautious (indeed, virtually

vacuous) moderation, because he had found an authority more outrageous than he

(or Ross). This was the physician-iconoclast John Macculloch (1773–1835). Jones’s

fullest account of malaria’s psychosocial effects came as ten pages of block

quotations from Macculloch’s 1827 Essay on Malaria, the better known of his two

works on the subject. These appear tacked on near the end of Malaria and Greek

History; that Jones fails to integrate them suggests he had discovered Macculloch’s

work at a late stage. Relying on an 80-year-old work may seem odd, but

Macculloch, who had brought ‘‘malaria’’ into English as a disease name, was still

respected, though on epidemiological more than on clinical matters.34 Macculloch

had written at length on malaria’s psychological and sociological effects. These,

particularly in southern Italy, included ‘‘‘Abortion, infanticide, universal libertin-

ism, drunkenness, want of religion, [and] gross superstitions’,’’ as well as murder

(Jones 1909a: 117). Jones’s only comment was that Macculloch’s observations

reflected malaria’s ravages ‘‘before scientific treatment and [quinine] prophylaxis

came into vogue’’ and thus were relevant to ancient Greece. But Macculloch’s much

stronger malarial determinism made Jones look sober by comparison. Thus

Macculloch was doing the heavy lifting. Only admit a fraction of what he claimed,

and malaria’s importance as historical agent would be undeniable.

Consistently, then, Jones had claimed that

• The changes in Greece after 400 BCE were not uniformly or unambiguously

‘‘decline’’

• Malaria was not necessarily a newcomer to Greece in the mid-fifth century

• Malaria was not the cause of change, or even necessarily the most important of

many causes.

33 Jones to Ross, 6, 9 June 1907, LSHTM 89/12/9-10. Strong believed malaria was in Rome roughly two

centuries before references to quartans and tertians. See Manton (1976).34 Macculloch’s subsequent work (1828) would have given Jones even more ammunition had he

consulted it. On Macculloch see Bruce-Chwatt (1977); Hamlin (2014: 206–249). A likely conduit is

Nuttall, whose review of the mosquito hypothesis (Nuttall 1900) mentioned Macculloch, but drew heavily

on the (1883) paper of A.F.A. King, for which Macculloch had been a major source.

342 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

The Historians’ Response: Explanans and Explanandum

Jones’s ‘‘brilliant studies’’ would launch ‘‘a new era in the study of … antiquity,’’

declared one early American commentator: ‘‘no longer’’ would it be possible to

ignore malaria, either in explaining depopulation or the ‘‘change in the character of

much of the life and thought in the ancient world’’ (Van Buren 1912–1913: 337).

Not so. Jones would be both dismissed and misread, saddled with the very view

he had called ‘‘fallacious in the extreme.’’ But even sympathizers rarely engaged

with his work or took up the campaign to include biological factors in accounting

for social and cultural changes. The Ross-Jones thesis had implications far beyond

ancient history. It raised more general questions of how historians should

incorporate malaria and endemic diseases in their accounts, and a host of meta-

issues: the inclusion of scientific reasoning in historical inference, default

explanatory assumptions, and the sensitivity of historical accounts to spatial and

temporal scale.

All these are evident in the first brief Times Literary Supplement review

(anonymous, but in fact by the archeologist David George Hogarth, then of the

British School in Athens and subsequently keeper of the Ashmolean) and the brief

controversy that ensued. Hogarth held that Jones had not established anything: a

plausible speculation remained that. The textual references were insufficient.35 Only

an explicit recognition of endemic malaria, ideally by lay writers, would have

sufficed – and beyond a single passage from the comic poet Aristophanes, there was

none. The extrapolations from malarial science were merely tendentious. Hogarth

misread Jones as a reductionist, as seeking to explain racial decline not cultural

change, and as claiming that Athens had been stricken by epidemic malaria. In any

case, the events needed no ulterior explanation. With the main thesis exploded, the

extensions were easy targets. That malaria might have improved the status of

women was risible. Hogarth admitted that malaria had existed in ancient Greece but

granted it no historical significance ([Hogarth] 1909a).

Very likely it was Hogarth’s review that led Jones to abandon the campaign to

join biology and classical history.36 His letters in the weeks following its appearance

mingle pain, humiliation, disappointment, outrage, and the vain hope that Ross

could somehow fix things.37 He represented himself as martyr to Clio. ‘‘Not only do

I suffer, but the cause of history receives a serious blow.’’ He hoped ‘‘the

physicians’’ would rise against this ‘‘narrow-minded’’ ‘‘scholar,’’ ignorant both of

disease and its history. He composed and had printed a long rejoinder which TLS did

not publish, but got Ross to write a short, sober one, reasserting that the thesis was

founded on convergent arguments – ‘‘medical’’ (Mauritius) and ‘‘historical.’’38 Ross

represented Jones’s work as hypothesis-testing and, while admitting his own

35 For a recent evaluation of the philological component of Jones’s argument and how his

‘‘methodological and … ideological presuppositions’’ affected it, see van der Eijk (2014: 115–117).36 van der Eijk (2014: 114) notes the persistence of the malaria hypothesis in Jones’s later works. But the

interdisciplinary project ended in 1909.37 Jones to Ross, April 10, 12, 13, 14 (two letters), 15, 21, 24, 25, 1909, LSHTM 89/12/52-61.38 Jones to Ross, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21 April 1909; LSHTM 89/12/52-59.

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 343

123

inability to assess its scholarly quality, thought Jones had presented a ‘‘considerable

body of evidence.’’ And he represented ancient Greece as an instance of a larger

historical phenomenon: the largely invisible effects of the ‘‘great endemic diseases

on the history of nations, and indeed, of species’’ (Ross 1909b).

In his response, printed in the following week’s TLS, Hogarth rejected general

forms of evidence. Modern Mauritius (or Scotland, a hypothetical Ross had thrown

in) had nothing to do with ancient Greece. Switching to an argument that would

frequently complicate the reception of Jones’s views, Hogarth questioned whether

Greece had declined – certainly not, he said, if one included the rise of Alexander

and the philosophy of the fourth century. If Ross wanted to ply his malarial

explanation, Crete, site of rapid and unexplained decline, would be a better choice.

But ultimately at issue was disciplinary imperialism: ‘‘If ancient history is to be

rewritten according to biological inferences, may she meekly ask that biology

reciprocate by accepting historical evidence? Biological textbooks would become

very interesting and entertaining if they included as facts all the remarkable physical

features of ancient human life which rest on very fair historical evidence’’

([Hogarth] 1909b).

The following week, Jones finally got in a riposte (1909c). He pointed out that

any reviewer who had read his book with care would know that, following the

ancient geographer Strabo, Jones had declared Alexandria malaria-free — thus

nullifying Hogarth’s attempt to point to the flourishing city (founded in 331 BCE) as

evidence of non-decline. Jones held (disingenuously) that his book was not mainly

about fourth-century Greece but about the history of malaria, and protested being

pigeonholed: ‘‘why does your reviewer think I am bound to assume that every

decline that has taken place in Greece is due to malaria?’’

But other early reviews of Malaria and Greek History in America and France

similarly failed to recognize that Jones was merely making malaria one factor

among several responsible for the decline of Greece (Ferguson 1909; Glotz 1910:

347). Jones protested the misreading in a letter published in the June 1910 Classical

Review. ‘‘In reply to many reviewers,’’ he began, ‘‘I should like to state … that I do

not hold that malaria caused the decline of Greece or of Rome.’’ He then asserted

two axioms: first, that ‘‘Endemic malaria does serious harm,’’ and second that

‘‘Malaria was not a static factor in ancient history.’’ He then alluded to evidence

from ancient Latium, from contemporary southern Italy, and to Hippocratic

passages suggesting that malaria affected dark-haired peoples less than fair-haired.

He concluded by reiterating the invitation he and Ellett had made three years before:

‘‘further research … would bring out some interesting results’’; he would be happy

to help and coordinate (Jones 1910).

While Jones’s two books had made little dent on classicists, readers concerned

with global malaria were more enthusiastic. R.T. Hewlett, who reviewed both books

for Nature, saw that Jones was not claiming malaria as a sole cause and found the

argument both plausible and as well-developed as it could be ([Hewlett] 1908;

1909). More importantly, Jones’s hypothesis became the exemplar of a critique of

historians’ narrow-mindedness made by the American geographer Ellsworth

Huntington in a December 1910 presentation on ‘‘The Burial of Olympia’’ at the

Geographical Society. Returning from central Asia, whose ‘‘pulse’’ he had famously

344 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

taken, Huntington had visited Greece. He, like Ross, saw degeneration from ancient

glory, though as deforestation not disease.

Huntington ended by urging historians to expand their scope to account for such

changes, by embracing all of the five large domains of human experience: the

‘‘political,’’ ‘‘psychological,’’ ‘‘economic,’’ ‘‘geographical,’’ and ‘‘pathological.’’

That all these were active (and interactive) in the fate of ancient Greece should be

self-evident. Preoccupation with the political (and psychological) was merely the

species-bias of an introspective story-telling animal. Oblivious to Jones’s struggles,

Huntington acquitted historians of blame for that narrowness. Economists were

taking the lead; geographers and ‘‘pathologists’’ should follow (Huntington 1910).

Ross and Jones had done precisely what should be done. Historians might check

the plausibility of the thesis by appealing to those who had suffered from malaria or

‘‘every traveler who has seen much of the Orient,’’ or to ‘‘physicians.’’ They would

learn that ‘‘initiative or energy’’ could not be expected where ‘‘the majority’’ were

‘‘permanently devitalized by this baneful disease,’’ whose psychological effects

were culturally specific. Those Jones had found – effeminacy in Greece and

brutality in Rome – were ‘‘just the effects which would have been produced by

malaria upon people of the temperaments of the two races.’’ Huntington saw Jones’s

discovery of malaria’s propensity to strike adults as convincing evidence of its

novelty. Of course other factors were involved. Yet one could ‘‘scarcely resist the

conclusion that … malaria must have had an important place in the psychological

changes which accompanied the decline of civilization and population in both

Greece and Rome.’’ Huntington also refined the claims. He was not convinced that

Jones and Ross had explained malaria’s onset, which he attributed to postglacial

climatic change in the seasonality of rainfall, producing the fishless, drying puddles

ideal for Anopheline breeding (Huntington 1910: 670–675).

Appearing within one year of Jones’s book, the pieces by Hogarth and

Huntington mark the poles of nearly all subsequent response to his hypothesis. It is

fair to say the substantive matter – malaria’s actual role in ancient Greece – rarely

surfaced, falling victim to disciplinary defensiveness, conflicting habits of

reasoning, or differing views of burden of proof. Because he demanded ‘‘positive

evidence,’’ Hogarth might have read more sympathetically and still concluded that

Jones was dealing with inherently inaccessible matters. While he did not claim that

the contents of texts exhausted what could be known, he sharply distinguished

textual testimony from ‘‘speculation.’’ He and Jones were disagreeing too about

what needed explaining and what constituted explanation. Though Hogarth (and

many successors) were ambivalent about whether fourth-century Greece had

declined or flourished, he (and they) often treated whatever had happened as already

explained. Often ineffable ‘‘culture’’ would serve as its own cause. By contrast,

Ross and Jones, with an explanation in hand, assumed that change – of culture or

anything else – required cause: Greece did not simply fall, it was pushed.

In fact, a key problem in assessing the thesis was ambiguity about the so-called

‘‘decline of Greece’’ that it purported to explain. Initially Ross (and Jones) had been

concerned with the ‘‘fact’’ of an essentially unreversed decline from the late fifth

through the first century, measured by military and economic decline. But while

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 345

123

Ross (and Huntington) remained concerned with that long period, Jones and most

classicists focused on its beginning, the ambiguous changes around 400 BCE.

Like Hogarth, scholars were becoming increasingly reluctant to diagnose

comprehensive decline for this earlier period. Two examples should suffice, both

major historians of the ancient Greek world. John Bagnall Bury, Regius professor of

modern history at Cambridge from 1902 to his death in 1927, first published his

history of ancient Greece in 1900, later editions of which were still being used as

textbooks in the 1980s. Bury, like Jones a few years later, highlighted growing

individualism in fourth-century Athens. To Bury, however, this was positive.

The individual citizen no longer looks at the outside world through the

medium of his city, but regards it directly, as it were, with his own eyes and in

its bearings on him individually…. And since his own life has thus become for

him something independent of the city, his attitude to the city itself is

transformed. The citizen of Athens has become a citizen of the world. His duty

to his country may conflict with his duty to himself as a man; and thus

patriotism ceases to be unconditionally the highest virtue. Again, men begin to

put to themselves, more or less explicitly, the question, whether the state is not

made for the individual and not the individual for the state—a complete

reversal of the old unquestioning submission to the authority of the social

organism. (Bury 1913: 560–561)

The decline of ‘‘patriotism’’ in fourth-century Athens which Jones ascribed to a

debilitating physiological and moral condition was, for Bury, an intellectual and

moral achievement, a rejection of ‘‘unquestioning submission to authority’’ in favor

of a man’s ‘‘duty to himself.’’

Mikhail Rostovtzeff, best known as author of multi-volume overviews of the

social and economic history of the Hellenistic world (1941) and the Roman Empire

(1957) took a similar stance. In an earlier work, based on lectures in 1921–1923,

Rostovtzeff, like Jones, noted a growing disunity in fourth-century Greece, leading

to military weakness, and reflecting declining participation in its fundamental

political and social institution, the polis (Rostovtzeff 1930: 314–321). But

Rostovtzeff identified no particular cause. Democracy (whose levelling tendencies

looked to him like socialism) contributed, but oligarchy and tyranny per

definitionem were no better equipped to stoke citizen interest in self-governance.

However, notwithstanding ‘‘weakness and anarchy’’ in political life, he found

energy, invention, and a flourishing economy: ‘‘the Greek world was never so rich

as [in the fourth century], whether in Greece proper, Asia Minor, and the Black Sea,

or in Italy, Sicily, Gaul, and Spain’’ (Rostovtzeff 1930: 319). Artistic and

intellectual endeavors had thrived, too:

On the whole, the fourth century was a worthy successor of the fifth. The

creative power of the Greek people was as strong as ever. It grew and

flourished, conquering one new domain after another and attaining in some of

them the same perfection that stamps the literature and art of the preceding

century. (Rostovtzeff 1930: 319)

346 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

This is a far cry from the lethargy and disillusionment one might expect from a

malaria-ridden region. Rostovtzeff ignored malaria, along with disease generally.

Even those who admitted a fourth-century decline usually ignored the malaria

thesis. An examination of general overviews of Greek history in the four major

languages of classical scholarship during the 1920s and 1930s reveals few mentions

of Jones’s research or malaria. An exception is George Willis Botsford’s Hellenic

History (1922, with four revised editions through the 1970s). Botsford painted a

bleak picture of Athens after Spartan victory in the Peloponnesian War, due to loss

of soil productivity and labor, and weakened finance from the dismantling of

Athens’ overseas empire. His first edition (but not later ones) cited Jones: ‘‘it is

probable that the spread of malaria from the neglected fields militated against racial

vitality’’ (Botsford 1922: 401).39 But Botsford’s depiction of economic and political

affairs in the fourth and third centuries was hardly one of unreversed decline.

Athens recovered, spurred by renewed industry and efforts in farming, commerce,

and manufacture. He acknowledged declining Athenian political participation and,

like Jones, attributed it to growing individualism and ‘‘the aversion of cultured

citizens from military life’’ – but not to the ulterior factor of malaria (Botsford 1922:

414–415).40

A few years later Cyril E. Robinson, in his textbook History of Greece, treated an

early fourth-century ‘‘era of decadence’’ in Athens as a matter of fact, and began a

discussion of its causes by noting the plausibility of the suggestion that ‘‘the decline

of the Greeks in the Fourth Century may have been attributable in part to the spread

of malaria’’ (Robinson 1929: 254). He then summarizes Jones’s arguments without

naming him. But in his subsequent treatment Robinson points to economic and

psychological causes, finding the biggest culprit in the teaching of the Sophists:

their individualism turned men inward and away from their duty to the state

(Robinson 1929: 255–257).

If this individualism required causes, increasingly these were institutional. M.W.

Laistner, writing in 1932, asserted that the ‘‘weakness of the Athenian democracy in

the [fourth] century was the result largely of economic conditions’’ and a few lines

later noted the growing political and military apathy in Athens, ‘‘the most serious

indictment that can be brought against the ordinary citizen.’’ But this too was

couched in the larger framework of economic issues; there is no hint of moral decay

(Laistner 1932: 336). Considering ‘‘the end of the Greek city’’ two decades earlier,

Eugene Cavaignac had blamed individualism (especially concerning land owner-

ship) as the biggest threat to the polis, but then sought an institutional explanation

for why the polis had been so instable, appealing ultimately to ‘‘profound tendencies

of the Greek mind’’ (Cavaignac 1913: 378).

Elsewhere too, the diagnosis of some failure of the will, often expressed in terms

similar to Jones’s, is ascribed to grand impersonal forces. Describing ‘‘the

39 Botsford lists Malaria and Greek History in the further reading after the first chapter, and includes

malaria as one cause of decline in the book’s concluding paragraph (473).40 Like Ross, Botsford saw Greece’s problems largely in racial terms, and a strong Orientalist attitude

runs deep in his history. Interestingly, a reviewer of the first edition implies that he should have given

Jones’s hypothesis fuller consideration, noting that Botsford ‘‘is lukewarm in regard to the theory of Jones

… that malaria had a marked effect on the racial vitality of Greece’’ (Hyde 1923: 126).

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 347

123

weakening of public spirit’’ in the Greek city of the fourth century, Maurice Croiset

wrote that ‘‘strong and firm resolutions now give way to hesitation, indecision,

discouragement, and, consequently, disagreement…. A certain languor, quite

natural after so much fighting and destruction, invades the soul of the people’’

(Croiset 1925: 160–161). Desire for peace had destroyed the steadfast and clear-

headed resolve of the people. Malaria could cause such languor, Jones knew. Did

warfare have a similar ‘‘natural’’ effect? To Croiset, however, an economic recovery

incompatible with malaria had contributed to the neglect of public duties by

allowing men to enjoy more fully the pleasures of peace (Croiset 1925: 161).

Like Croiset, Gustave Glotz, still one of the best-known scholars of the ancient

Greek city and economy, viewed the fourth century largely as a period of decline for

the polis. His language, too, echoes Jones. ‘‘Never again, after 404, did the moral

atmosphere in Greece become what it had been before. An invasive egoism came to

corrupt public and private morals’’ (Glotz and Cohen 1936: 3). But he then notes

advances during this same period, including improvements in the monetary

economy (especially at Athens) and in agriculture. Overall Glotz presents a nuanced

image of decline, explained by warfare, economic and political policies, and

intellectual developments.41 As with other scholars, Glotz blames individualism for

the lack of concern among all classes for the welfare of the city and for the general

unwillingness to devote oneself to the public good. But here, too, Glotz appeals to

economics.

Jones’s works do not appear in Glotz’s bibliography to La cite grecque, though it

includes a good deal of English-language scholarship from the period. In just over

100 pages given to the decline of the Greek city in the fourth century, there is not a

single mention of malaria, or disease in general (Glotz 1928: 345–448). Not only

had Jones failed to leave his mark on classicists and ancient historians, but the

whole realm of health and disease was ignored, even by scholars whose framework

was largely economic and social.42

By the 1970s, the traditional narrative of Greek decline had been flushed from

mainstream scholarship. Since then, scholars have gone to great lengths to show that

the Greek polis remained vital even after the Macedonian conquests of the fourth

century (Billows 2003; Gruen 1993). One now uses value-neutral terms to describe

changes in societal structures and the individual’s place in the world, vis-a-vis his or

her fellow humans or the gods, rather than ‘‘decadence’’ or ‘‘decline.’’ Jones’s

‘‘inferences about social, moral and economic decline … appear naıve to a modern

public’’ and ‘‘are based on outmoded racial and social premises’’ (Borza 1979:

41 Glotz develops this picture further elsewhere, in Part Three (‘‘the city in decline’’) of La cite grecque

(Glotz 1928: 345–448).42 One other notable example: A.W. Gomme makes only two passing references to ‘‘medical science’’

(Gomme 1933: 48, 79) and none to malaria. He concluded that the Athenian population increased

between 400 and 320. Curiously, and apparently independently of Jones’s writings, a similar argument

about malaria and decline, with references to other supporting work, appears in a 1933 French medical

thesis (Belios 1933).

348 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

105).43 And the literature and art of the Hellenistic period (not to mention the fourth

century) is more carefully and sensitively treated, viewed not as a baroque,

degenerate afterimage of classical purity, but as informed by and reacting to the new

world created by Alexander’s conquests (Pollitt 1986).

Whatever its merits, Jones’s hypothesis faced changing explanatory conventions.

Economic (and social) factors, as Huntington presciently recognized, were

becoming important to historians reckoning with industrialism and Marx. The

Edwardian imperialism of Jones and Ross was giving way to the ambivalent

introspective individualism that would flourish in the age of Freud. Croiset’s appeal

to the exhaustion of the Peloponnesian war to explain the Athenians’ rejection of the

civic expressed as well the mood of Paris in 1922: ‘‘Above all they want peace,

which thereafter seems to the majority of them the greatest of all blessings; it is

peace which they wish to preserve at any price, even to the extent of closing their

eyes to more or less imminent dangers’’ (Croiset 1925: 161). Perhaps the non-

judgmental celebration of the polis reflects the toleration and communitarianism of

more recent times. But nowhere amongst these explanatory options had there been

room for pathological explanans.

The Malariological Response

While Jones’s ideas were becoming less truth-like for historians, they were

becoming more so for malariologists – not a happy prospect if we expect

interdisciplinarity to bring convergence. Generally, malaria experts approached the

Jones thesis as a matter for refinement not refutation. In broad terms, their approach

was Ross’s: to apply general knowledge to particular cases. Collectively, the new

and varied post-Ross approaches to malaria – epidemiological, parasitological,

immunological, ecological, eradicationist, and finally genomic – have made his

single-invasion view less likely, and Jones’s local surge notion more so. Malarial

outbreaks, as noted in a recent summary, ‘‘can only be really understood by micro-

analyses, conducted at a very local level, of geography, hydrology, climate,

competition between different species of mosquito for breeding sites, and human

activities’’ (Sallares et al. 2004: 312). They are local and transitory, matters of here

and there, now and then. But vastly greater knowledge has brought less certainty,

and Jones’s great idea is probably forever condemned to the limbo of plausibility.

Very likely malaria did affect ancient Greek history in important ways, but the

complexity of those effects precludes precision on individual cases, like late fifth-

century Athens.

There were many sources of complexity. First, malaria was not one but many

diseases. The malaria one lived with (the milder, but recurrent and debilitating

vivax) differed from the deadlier falciparum malaria that killed children. (Ross had

found both in Boeotia.) Second, there might be natural long-term waves in malarial

43 For the new attitude, see Paul Cartledge’s introduction to Cartledge et al. (1997); Giovannini (1993);

Mikalson (2006: 218–220). Emily Mackil’s investigation of settlement abandonment in Hellenistic

Greece (Mackil 2004) exemplifies a more nuanced approach to ‘‘decline.’’

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 349

123

intensity, or so argued the eminent malaria scientist Angelo Celli in a 1925 longue

duree history of malaria in the Roman Campagna, the most important comple-

mentary work to Jones’s studies of Greece. Though Celli thought Jones had

overstated his case – at least for Rome – he agreed that malaria was responsible for

‘‘ruining mental energy and moral determination’’ and that it had had momentous

effects, including the rise of the latifundia: small landholders could not make it in

malarial regions (Celli 1933: 5–10).

A decade later, Lewis Hackett, the Rome-based head of the Rockefeller

Foundation’s European malaria-eradication program, highlighted ecological distur-

bances of a human-malaria ‘‘equilibrium.’’ The First World War was one such.

Malaria overwhelmed armies on the Macedonian front and had briefly spread to

remote and normally non-malarial places (as far north as Archangel). Doubtless, the

human past had been full of such ‘‘localized’’ outbreaks. Each, ‘‘like a storm of

limited extent but devastating character,’’ was a ‘‘disturbance in the intricate and

age-old balance of man’s environment.’’ Their causes were so ‘‘inconceivably

complicated’’ that any ‘‘simple explanation’’ was usually wrong. But the best

knowledge of such events came from ‘‘Greece and Rome where history is oldest and

most precise,’’ that is, from Celli and Jones (Hackett 1937, xi–xv, 1–5).

Writing in 1980, Hackett’s successors, the WHO malariologists Leonard Jan

Bruce-Chwatt and Julian Zulueta, held that much greater awareness of the habitats

of newly discriminated Anopheline species, of their varying host preferences, larval

predators, and plasmodium-transporting competence, were significant factors as

were the differing strains of plasmodia. They took seriously Jones’s ‘‘masterly

study,’’ especially his philological achievement. They accepted that Greece had

declined over several centuries following the Peloponnesian war, but acknowledged

anomalies, particularly those noted by Brunt and Braudel, who had pointed out that

malaria had not prevented great military undertakings (Bruce-Chwatt and Zulueta

1980: 17, 33–34).44 Like Huntington and Macculloch they focused on alluvial

aggradation, mainly from 300–100 BCE. It had created prime habitat for the most

important of the Greek Anopheline vectors, A sacharoviae and A lanbranchiae.

Coastal trade would then have allowed repeated reintroductions (Bruce-Chwatt and

Zulueta 1980: 21–26).

Bruce-Chwatt and Zulueta, like Hackett before them, could admire Jones’s work

without committing to the Ross-Jones thesis. That malaria might have been in

Greece before 500 made no difference since its effects were local and transitory.

Equally, it was ‘‘a moot point’’ whether it had been ‘‘the main factor of the decay of

Greek civilization’’ (Bruce-Chwatt and Zulueta 1980: 34). They understood

contingency and complexity in the relations between plasmodium and society.

From the 1920s, however, some began to reject the Ross-Jones thesis (in fact

Ross’s version) due to its political implications. Ross had wanted to treat malaria as

an independent variable: it caused decline. But blaming nature absolved govern-

ments of responsibility in the creation or toleration of plasmodium-facilitating

institutions. Jones had been comfortable with complex causal reciprocity:

44 They noted, too, the unenthusiastic reception by historians and hoped William McNeill’s recent

Plagues and Peoples (1976) would change that.

350 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

abandonment of farmland in Attica during the Decelean war had allowed malaria to

flourish and had helped catalyze subtle cultural changes. But he would be branded

with the Ross position by those for whom a malarial explanation of regional

backwardness was the antithesis to recognition of structural injustices.45

Holding such a view was the most influential medical historian who might have

sympathized, Erwin Ackerknecht. To his magisterial 1945 study on the disappear-

ance of malaria in the upper Mississippi basin, Ackerknecht had appended ‘‘Some

Remarks on Malaria and History.’’ History made malaria, not the reverse, he held.

Yet the ‘‘highly artificial’’ and ‘‘monistic’’ theories of Ross, Jones, and Celli had

invidiously become textbook truths. Perhaps malaria had impeded settlement in

America, but it had yielded to economic institutions (full return on one’s labor), to

culture, and to sheer cussedness. Even ‘‘disregard for human life,’’ evident in

lynching and in the ‘‘barbaric’’ birthing practices of the European pioneers, had

been factors. The shaking of revivalist religiosity might symbolize the overcoming

of malaria, while malaria-associated indolence might be interpreted as cause rather

than effect. Ackerknecht was speculating, but his point was that malaria did not

dictate the human response to it. Returning to the question of ancient Greek malaria

two decades later, he suggested that agricultural deterioration had been the main

factor, overlooking the fact that the malarial monist Jones had said the same thing

(Ackerknecht 1945: 131–133; Ackerknecht 1965: 89; Rosenberg 2007).46

That the findings of successive generations of malaria biologists have sometimes

converged with Jones’s insights does not mean that the classicist’s questions were

high on any scientific agenda, or that the growth of knowledge will automatically

answer all the questions scholars ask. Rather, in malariology as in other sciences,

methods privileged questions. Beginning in the 1950s many of these were genomic:

recognition of the sickle cell mutation helped explain long-recognized racial or

regional differences in susceptibility. Later, it, along with thalassemia-related genes

and the G6PD gene, would allow molecular population geneticists to reconstruct the

movements of malaria-challenged populations.47 On that basis Robert Sallares, the

rare expert in genomics and classics, suggests that falciparum malaria was in

Greece long before 500 BCE, and thus that the Jones (or rather the Ross) hypothesis

might be ‘‘dismissed’’ (Sallares 2002: 23).48

45 See e.g. Hackett (1937, xvi); Evans (1989) (thanks to Ann Carmichael for this reference). The

sharpness of the divide reflects a political split in Italian anti-malaria policy: see Snowden (2006).46 Tensions persist. The anthropologist Peter J. Brown argues that the ‘‘MBD’’ (Malaria Blocks

Development) model deflects attention from exploitative land tenure, yet eradicationist campaigns based

on DDT and more recently bed nets remain the main approach to breaking the disease-poverty cycle

without recourse to profound political change (Brown 1987; Brown 1997).47 For an early review, see the medical anthropologist Carol Laderman (1975). More recently see e.g.

Sallares et al. (2004: 311).48 Here and in his earlier work, Sallares reads Jones as heavily reductionist. Thus, he describes Jones as

having ‘‘invoked malaria as a deus ex machina to explain the decline of ancient Greece’’ (Sallares 1991:

271). He does proceed to examine the hypothesis in more detail, ultimately concluding that the evidence

speaks against it (278–281). In 2004, the wording is slightly more reflective of Jones’s actual argument:

‘‘his view that malaria was a major reason for the degeneration of the moral character of the ancient

Greeks…’’ (Sallares et al. 2004: 311).

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 351

123

What once was only qualitative can now be quantitative, Sallares et al. (2004)

recognize, but Jones’s problem was qualitative, defiantly humanistic. Not popula-

tions, plasmodia, mosquitoes, or genes, but persons interested him. His fixation on

‘‘character’’ would be dismissed as outdated and judgmental. Yet it was merely an

inquiry into malaria’s clinical sequelae, which included physical and psychic

exhaustion. After the Second World War, interest in clinical aspects of malaria

would recede as new anti-malarials became available. ‘‘Malaria cachexia,’’ a term

that had once comprehended the panoply of psychosocial symptoms, would be

replaced by the narrower ‘‘cerebral malaria,’’ a rare form of falciparum infection.49

Accepting the revelations of genomics leaves us in the odd position of admitting

malaria’s presence in ancient Greece, yet allowing it no effect on ancient society.

‘‘The Movement to Connect History with Biology’’50

Ross and Jones badly wanted to bring biology into history. In his Oxford address

Ross had challenged historians: malaria and other parasitic diseases had ‘‘modified

history to a much greater extent than we conceive’’; historians (and economists) had

irresponsibly neglected such endemic diseases (Ross 1909a: 707).51 He expanded on

the point in 1907:

The student of biology is often struck with the feeling that historians, when

dealing with the rise and fall of nations, do not generally view the phenomena

from a sufficiently high biological standpoint. … They seem to attach too

much importance to individual rulers and soldiers, and to particular wars,

policies, religions, and customs; while at the same time they make little

attempt to extract the fundamental causes of national success or failure. (Ross

in Jones 1907: 1–2)

These fundamental causes were ‘‘sociological’’ – i.e. ‘‘ecological.’’ Jones agreed.

He worried in spring 1909 that his own failure to make a stronger case had doomed

consideration of malaria’s enormous role in history.52

As we have seen, he was right to worry. Generally the response to Jones has not

been to reinterpret malaria’s role, but to ignore it. Paul Burke began a review on

malaria in antiquity by dismissing the question: ‘‘The sparseness and the ambiguous

nature of ancient references to fevers … combined with the necessarily inferential

nature of conclusions to be reached, is presumably one of the reasons why the major

modern historians of Classical antiquity leave the question of the role of disease in

ancient life almost entirely alone’’ (Burke 1996: 2252–2253). Burke was not

denying the presence of disease, but merely disciplining a discipline. ‘‘Major’’

historians evidently knew enough to concentrate on soluble questions.

49 Curiously, Jones and Ross do not use the term, but they certainly invoke its legacy. See James (1905);

Stratman-Thomas (1941: 187–189). For modern views of cerebral malaria, see Gay et al. (2012).50 Jones to Ross, 16 October 1907, LSHTM, 89/12/28.51 The Smithsonian version erroneously uses ‘‘epidemic’’ twice.52 Jones to Ross, 15, 21 April 1909, LSHTM 89/12/57, 59.

352 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

Often that caution has been justified, and the historian has been the voice of

sobriety, reminding us of how little we actually know. If changing biological

theories are themselves properly a subject of history, to found historical knowledge

on them would be unwise indeed. Unfortunately that has often been done –

History’s own history is littered with enlistments of bad biology, e.g., racism, social

Darwinism, geographic determinism, and eugenics. A half century after Jones, in

‘‘The Next Assignment,’’ the 1957 presidential address to the American Historical

Association, the eminent Harvard historian William L. Langer repeated Ross’s call

to bring biology into history. ‘‘Buried in their own conservatism,’’ historians were

failing to open ‘‘new horizons as our cousins in the natural sciences are constantly

doing,’’ he complained (Langer 1957). For Langer, these new horizons came from

psychoanalysis, then well accepted, just as malariology had been in 1907. Langer,

who accurately summarized Jones’s argument, was particularly interested in

traumas induced by deadly epidemics. Plague psychology might even help us

understand Luther’s tormented mind.53

While the decline of psycho-history surely reflects the decline of Freud’s

authority, it may also reflect historians’ unease with the kinds of explanation it

offered. The Jones controversy too exposes tensions within interdisciplinary

epistemology. One concerns the sacrifice of professional judgment. Early on, Jones,

struggling to convince classicists of malaria’s ‘‘devastating effects….upon charac-

ter,’’ made the same appeal Huntington would make. Doubters should consult the

tropical diseases specialist or malarial recoveree (Jones 1907: 54). But such appeals

to external authority undermine disciplinary identity and integrity – surely a mature

classicist should not jettison customary knowledge-making practices for every

neophyte with extra-disciplinary fantasies?

Despite profound differences in disciplinary agendas, the humanist Jones and the

scientist Ross managed to work together because they were using the same kinds of

evidence in the same sorts of ways. Allusions to seasonal periodic fevers, enlarged

spleens, or disturbed drainage suggested malaria. The contemporary historian, by

contrast, is rarely equipped to collect, much less interpret, genetic data or

discriminate mosquito species. The historian must trust pronouncements made by

non-historians using alien methods.

Why then the abandonment of Jones, in his day and our own? We suggest two

factors.

First is inability to assess the subclinical. Epidemics, distinct events that horrified

those who experienced them, have been easy to accommodate into historical

narratives.54 The morbidity of invisible endemic disease, a quotidian pathology in

more ways than one, is less easy to accommodate.55 Untrained as diagnosticians,

wary of stereotyping, historians have had no real option other than assuming a

common state of psychic and biotic integrity among those we study.

53 Langer ranged even further afield. His conclusion – ‘‘we may, for all we know, be on the threshold of a

new era when the historian will have to think in ever larger, perhaps even in cosmic, terms’’ – referred not

to the Anthropocene, but to sunspot cycles.54 Still, we should not assume that epidemics are uniformly recorded. The obliviousness of the

Hippocratic writers to the plague of Athens is a case in point (Nutton 2000).55 Morbidity itself is problematic (Riley 1997: 1–2).

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 353

123

Second are malaria’s anarchic implications. Malaria disrupted cultural stability,

Jones argued, but did so in ways that were both varied and insidious. It affected

Greece differently than Rome. While cultural change had other causes, Jones held,

few of these could be taken as wholly extra-malarial, since malaria operated directly

on central elements of human agency. Admit malaria on Jones’s terms, and it could

displace all other forms of historical accountability. Thus, Burke’s admonition not

to stray from texts to the plasmodia-filled bodies of their authors.

Can we do better? While few classical historians other than those focusing

specifically on health, medicine, or the environment consider malaria (Hughes 2014:

199–200), in recent decades an interdisciplinary enterprise of paleopathology,

drawing on fields ranging from genomics to archaeology, has made it possible at

least to demonstrate its presence in ancient Greece far more confidently than Ross

and Jones could do (Grauer 2012). That enterprise is predicated on the actualism of

Jones and Ross: modern malaria is the guide to past malaria. And yet modern paleo-

malariologists have been reluctant to embrace the full range of implications of that

stance: the complex cultural aspects of malaria remain a no-man’s land between

disciplines, a domain some may recognize but which most hesitate to enter. The

literature review in a recent dissertation on malaria in prehistoric Greece is

illustrative. A short section on ‘‘social and economic effects’’ (Morgan-Forster

2010: 44–48) includes allusions to Jeffrey Sachs, development economist, bed-net

crusader, and most prominent contemporary advocate of the MBD hypothesis, and

quotations from Jones, Macculloch, and Ross to illustrate mental and emotional

distress malaria may generate.

Morgan-Forster is open to Jones’s question – what did malaria do to the Greeks?

– and her tentative answer is, as far as it goes, Jones’s (though stripped of its

inflammatory moralisms: ‘‘decline’’ is now ‘‘lack of progress,’’ while ‘‘lethargy’’ is

‘‘decreased productivity’’).56 Still, she offers no updating of these citations, which,

in the climate of any modern science, will raise suspicions merely from their

datedness. Moreover, in Morgan-Forster’s work and more generally, citation has not

led to application. Indeed, the suite of methods paleopathologists have confidently

developed do not themselves require or even invite attention to such matters: subtle

psychiatric/cultural effects will not show up in DNA or skeletons. Consolidating the

known may indeed be a better strategy of discipline-building than extrapolating into

contested disciplinary territory. We may insist on privileging Jones’s question – did

malaria have important (perhaps transitory and regional) historical effects – but it

seems unrealistic to expect technique-driven research to do so.

Morgan-Forster does cite the work of S.D. Fernando, one of a small group of

scattered investigators carrying out clinical and epidemiological studies of the

neurological, psychological, and psychiatric sequelae of malaria (and who also often

cite Jones, Macculloch, and Hippocrates). This new work complements the more

recent focus on the acute neurological and psychiatric symptoms of hospitalized

victims of ‘‘cerebral’’ malaria with well-controlled studies showing a ‘‘hidden

burden’’ of subclinical psychosocial effects, including cognitive impairment in

56 It should be noted that in classical medicine ‘‘lethargy’’ was not the judgmental term it would become

but a technical diagnostic term for a dangerous clinical state which can arise in many diseases.

354 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

children who experience multiple infections of more benign forms of malaria –

precisely what Jones and Ross would have expected (Fernando et al. 2010).

The existence of such work makes it clear that modern malariology could support

extension into social and behavioral reconstructions if paleopathological recon-

structors wished to do so. But whether that extension would be tolerated is another

question. It is significant that Morgan-Forster’s study is of prehistoric and not of

classical Greece. She can assert the priority of biological evidence to account for

historical change (including the gesturings toward the concerns of Sachs, Jones,

et al.) precisely because text-based classicists do not contest that territory. But one

may well ask, if paleopathological approaches are robust enough to warrant

conclusions in the prehistoric period, why not in the historic period? And yet, the

response of most classical historians remains Hogarth’s: if an important event

happened, we expect the texts to testify to it.57

These implications go well beyond the issue of malaria in classical Greece. The

Jones episode suggests that the biology-history interface is more likely to continue to

be one of disjunctive contestation and compartmentalization than one of comple-

mentarity and multidimensional enrichment. We have here a situation in which before

about 800 BCE, persons living in Greece are effectively biological entities, subject to

malaria and to whatever economic and psychosocial effects it brings. After that date,

they are text-creating cultural entities who either do not experience malaria or are

unaffected by it. But surely such a representation is more an artefact of the partiality of

disciplinary gazes than a depiction of ancient existence.

For what is at stake is the important issue of how we humanize historical subjects, a

problem which historians often handle with allusions to ‘‘agency,’’ but which often

will be more problematic for archaeologists and anthropologists. The cultural and

psychosocial domain that so fascinated Jones, where personhood and pathology

mingle, is so important because it is the junction of the historical and the biological.

Jones asks that we regard even classical Greeks as biological entities; he protests a

dichotomy that separates text-creating agents – subjects with whom we can seek

existential connection – from prehistorical, and, too often, acultural humanoid beings,

who merely register as populations of pathogen hosts. We are both.

Acknowledgments We wish to thank Jessica Baron, Ann Carmichael, Daniel Smail, Julia Adeney

Thomas, and attendees at a symposium at the University of Notre Dame in November 2014 for their

critical readings, comments, and suggestions.

References

Ackerknecht, Erwin H. 1945. Malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1760–1900. Baltimore; reprint

1977, Arno Press: New York.

Ackerknecht, Erwin H. 1965. History and Geography of the Most Important Diseases. New York: Hafner.

57 Arguably, whether the (relative) absence of (non-medical) evidence should be taken as evidence of

absence is a subject-specific matter. We know of no single study of narrative practices in malaria-ridden

communities, but it would appear that diagnoses of pervasive unhealthfulness usually come from

outsiders, the sufferers presumably being too debilitated to reflect on their situation (see Snowden 2006).

Here epidemic disease is not a good precedent.

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 355

123

‘‘AHR Roundtable.’’ 2014. History Meets Biology. American Historical Review 119 (2014): 1492–1629.

Anderson, William Kirkpatrick. 1927. Malarial Psychoses and Neuroses with Chapters Medico-Legal,

and on History, Race Degeneration, Alcohol, and Surgery in Relation to Malaria. London:

Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press.

Anonymous. 1907. Malaria in Ancient Greece and Rome. The American Naturalist 41: 785.

Belios, Georges. 1933. L’Histoire du Paludisme en Grece depuis l’antiquite jusqu’a la decouverte de

Laveran. Paris: Jouve.

Billows, Richard. 2003. Cities. In A Companion to the Hellenistic World, ed. Andrew Erskine, 196–215.

Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Borza, Eugene N. 1979. Some observations on malaria and the ecology of Central Macedonia in

antiquity. American Journal of Ancient History 4: 102–124.

Botsford, G.W. 1922. Hellenic History. New York: Macmillan.

Brown, Peter J. 1987. Microparasites and macroparasites. Cultural Anthropology 2: 155–171.

Brown, Peter J. 1997. Malaria, Miseria, and Underpopulation in Sardinia: The ‘Malaria Blocks

Development’ Cultural Model. Medical Anthropology 17: 239–254.

Bruce-Chwatt, Leonard J. 1977. John Macculloch, M.D., F.R.S. (1773–1835) (The Precursor of the

Discipline of Malariology). Medical History 21: 156–165.

Bruce-Chwatt, Leonard J., and Julian de Zulueta. 1980. The Rise and Fall of Malaria in Europe: A

Historico-Epidemiological Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burke, Paul F., Jr. 1996. Malaria in the Greco-Roman World: A Historical and Epidemiological Survey.

In Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen Welt, ed. Wolfgang Haase, II.37.3, 2252–2281. Berlin:

Walter de Gruyter.

Bury, J.B. 1913. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, 2nd ed. Reprint 1937, London:

Macmillan and Co.

Cartledge, Paul, Peter Garnsey, and Erich S. Gruen (eds.). 1997. Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in

Culture, History and Historiography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cavaignac, Eugene. 1913. Histoire de l’Antiquite, Vol II: Athenes (480-330). Paris: Fontemoing et Cie.

Celli, Angelo. 1933. The History of Malaria in the Roman Campagna from Ancient Times. Edited and

enlarged by Anna Celli-Fraentzel. London: John Bale.

Croiset, Maurice. 1925. Hellenic Civilization: An Historical Survey (trans: P.B. Thomas). New York:

Knopf (French orig. 1922).

Ellett, G.G. 1906. A Note on the Effect of Bodily Exertion on the Opsonic Index of healthy Persons.

British Medical Journal 21: 131.

Evans, Hughes. 1989. European Malaria Policy in the 1920s and 1930s: The Epidemiology of Minutiae.

Isis 80: 40–59.

Fernando, S.D., C. Rodrigo, and S. Rajapkse. 2010. The ‘hidden’ Burden of Malaria: Cognitive

Impairment Following Infection. Malaria Journal 9: 366–377.

Ferguson, William Scott. 1909. Review of Jones 1909a. American Historical Review 15: 115–116.

Gay, Frederick, et al. 2012. Cerebral Malaria: What Is Known and What Is on Research. Revue

Neurologique 168: 239–256.

Giovannini, Adalberto. 1993. Greek Cities and Greek Commonwealth. In Images and Ideologies: Self-

Definition in the Hellenistic World, eds. Anthony Bulloch, et al., 265–286. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Glotz, Gustave. 1910. Histoire grecque. Revue Historique 104: 330–357.

Glotz, Gustave. 1928. La cite grecque. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre.

Glotz, Gustave, and Robert Cohen. 1936. Histoire Generale. Histoire Ancienne. Histoire Grecque. Tome

III. La Grece au IVe siecle: La lutte pour l’hegemonie (404-336). Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France.

Gomme, A.W. 1933. The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C. Oxford: Clarendon

Press; reprint 1967, Chicago: Arno Press.

Grauer, Anne L. (ed.). 2012. A Companion to Paleopathology. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.

Grmek, Mirko. 1989. Diseases in the Ancient Greek World (trans: M. Muellner and L. Muellner).

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gruen, Erich S. 1993. The Polis in the Hellenistic World. In Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of

Martin Ostwald, eds. Ralph R. Rosen, and Joseph Farrell, 339–354. Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press.

Hackett, Lewis. 1937. Malaria in Europe: An Ecological Study. London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford

University Press.

356 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123

Hamlin, Christopher. 2012. The Cholera Stigma and the Challenge of Interdisciplinary Epistemology:

From Bengal to Haiti. Science as Culture 21: 445–474.

Hamlin, Christopher. 2014. More than HOT: A Short History of Fever. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press.

[Hewlett, R.T.]. 1908. Malaria and History. Nature, 19 March 1908: 457–458.

[Hewlett, R.T.]. 1909. Malaria and its Influence on National History. Nature 16 December 1909:

192–193.

[Hogarth, David George]. 1909a. Malaria and Greek History. Times Literary Supplement 378 (8 April

1909): 134.

[Hogarth, David George]. 1909b. Malaria and Greek History. Times Literary Supplement 381 (29 April

1909): 164.

Hughes, J. Donald. 2014. Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans: Ecology in the Ancient

Mediterranean, 2nd ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Huntington, Ellsworth. 1910. The Burial of Olympia: A Study in Climate and History. The Geographical

Journal 36: 657–675.

Hyde, W.W. 1923. Review of Botsford 1922. Classical Weekly 16: 124–126.

James, S.P. 1905. On Kala Azar, Malaria, and Malarial Cachexia. Scientific Memoirs by Officers of the

Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India. Calcutta: Superintendent of

Government Printing.

Jones, W.H.S. 1906. Greek Morality in Relation to Institutions. An Essay. London: Blackie and Son.

Jones, W.H.S. 1907. Malaria: A Neglected Factor in Greek History. With an Introduction by Maj.

R. Ross, F.R.S., C.B. and a Concluding Chapter by G.G. Ellett, M.B. Cambridge: Macmillan and

Bowes.

Jones, W.H.S. 1908a. Disease and History. Janus 13: 622–624.

Jones, W.H.S. 1908b. Malaria and History. Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology 1: 529–546.

Jones, W.H.S. 1908c. La Malaria: Un fattore trascurato nella storia di Grecia e di Roma (trans:

Francesco Genovese). Naples: Libreria Detken & Rocholl.

Jones, W.H.S. 1909a. Malaria and Greek History. Manchester: The University Press.

Jones, W.H.S. 1909b. Dea Febris: A Study of Malaria in Ancient Italy. University of Liverpool Annals of

Archaeology and Anthropology 2: 97–124.

Jones, W.H.S. 1909c. Malaria and Greek History. Times Literary Supplement 382 (6 May 1909): 174.

Jones, W.H.S. 1910. Letter to the editor. Classical Review 24: 166.

Jones, W.H.S., and G.G. Ellett. 1907. Malaria in Ancient Greece. Classical Review 21: 92.

King, A.F.A. 1883. Insects and Disease—Mosquitoes And Malaria. Popular Science Monthly 23:

644–658.

King, Helen (ed.). 2005. Health in Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge.

Laderman, Carol. 1975. Malaria and progress: Some historical and ecological considerations. Social

Science and Medicine 9: 587–594.

Laistner, M.W. 1932. Greek History. Boston and New York: D.C. Heath.

Langer, William L. 1957. The Next Assignment. Presidential address of the American Historical

Association, 29 December 1957. http://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-

and-archives/presidential-addresses/william-l-langer. Accessed 10 April 2015.

Macculloch, John. 1827. Malaria: An Essay on the Production and Propagation of This Poison, ….

London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.

Macculloch, John. 1828. An Essay on the Remittent and Intermittent Diseases, Including, Generically

Marsh Fever and Neuralgia…, vol. 2. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.

Mackil, Emily. 2004. Wandering Cities: Alternatives to Catastrophe in the Greek Polis. American Journal

of Archaeology 108: 493–516.

Manton, G.R. 1976. Strong, Herbert Augustus. Australian Dictionary of Biography. Online edition. http://

adb.anu.edu.au/biography/strong-herbert-augustus-4659. Accessed 10 April 2015.

Mikalson, Jon D. 2006. Greek Religion: Continuity and Change in the Hellenistic Period. In The

Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World, ed. Glenn W. Bugh, 208–222. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Morgan-Forster, Antonia H. 2010. Climate, Environment and Malaria during the Prehistory of Mainland

Greece. Diss. University of Birmingham.

Nuttall, G.H.F. 1900. Upon the part played by Mosquitoes in the propagation of Malaria: A Historical and

Critical Study. Journal of Tropical Medicine 2: 198–200, 231–233, 245–247.

Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece 357

123

Nutton, Vivian. 2000. Medical thoughts on urban pollution. In Death and Disease in the Ancient City, eds.

Valerie M. Hope, and Eireann Marshall, 65–73. London and New York: Routledge.

Nutton, Vivian. 2004. Jones, William Henry Samuel (1876–1963). In The Dictionary of British

Classicists, vol. 3, ed. Robert B. Todd, 2.525–527. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum.

Pollitt, J.J. 1986. Art in the Hellenistic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Riley, James C. 1997. Sick, not Dead: The Health of British Workingmen during the Mortality Decline.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Robinson, Cyril E. 1929. A History of Greece. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Rosen, George. 1957. The Biological Element in Human History. Medical History 1: 150–159.

Rosenberg, Charles. 2007. Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Social Medicine, and the History of Medicine. Bulletin

of the History of Medicine 81: 511–532.

Ross, Ronald. 1908. Report on the Prevention of Malaria in Mauritius. London: Waterlow.

Ross, Ronald. 1909a. Malaria in Greece. In Smithsonian Miscellaneous Reports for 1908, 697–710.

Washington, D.C.: AAAS.

Ross, Ronald. 1909b. Malaria and Greek History. Times Literary Supplement 380 (22 April 1909): 154.

Ross, Ronald. 1910. The Prevention of Malaria. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Rostovtzeff, Mikhail. 1930. A History of the Ancient World. Volume I: The Orient and Greece, 2nd ed.

(trans: Duff, J.D.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sallares, Robert. 1991. The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World. London: Duckworth.

Sallares, Robert. 2002. Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Sallares, Robert, A. Bouwman, and C. Anderung. 2004. The Spread of Malaria to Southern Europe in

Antiquity: New Approaches to Old Problems. Medical History 48: 311–328.

Snowden, Frank M. 2006. The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900–1962. New Haven: Yale University

Press.

Stratman-Thomas, Warren. 1941. The Infection of the Intermediate Host Symptomatology: Vivax

Malaria. In A Symposium on Human Malaria with Special Reference to North America and the

Caribbean Region, ed. F.R. Moulton, 183–189. Washington, D.C.: AAAS.

Stray, Christopher. 1992. The Living Word: W.H.D. Rouse and the Crisis of Classics in Edwardian

England. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press.

Thomas, Julia Adeney. 2014. History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of

Value. American Historical Review 119: 1587–1607.

Van Buren, Albert W. 1912–13. The Geography of Ancient Italy. Part II. Classical Journal 8: 327–340.

van der Eijk, Philip. 2014. An Episode in the Historiography of Malaria in the Ancient World. In

Medicine and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. Demetres Michaelides, 112–117.

Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Whewell, William. 1840. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, founded upon Their History, vol. 2.

London: J. Parker.

358 C. Baron, C. Hamlin

123