Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature by Hunter H. Gardner (review)

Abstract

his timely book explores two paradoxically unified narratives of plague in Latin literature: dissolution and reconstitution. Gardner analyzes Roman approaches to “zombie-esque” plague narratives not merely as ruinous episodes of death but, more broadly, as apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narratives, asking what comes after destruction. Beginning with the simple notion that disease affecting individual corpora offers a convenient metaphor for the political corpus , Gardner draws out a range of complex nuances latent in the multivalent nature of Roman contagion. Plague erases individual bodies and familial ties through liquefaction, dissolution and decay; this destruction of the individual cre-ates a tabula rasa on which a new socio-political collective can be written.