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

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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 naïvete 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 interdisciplinary 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.

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Notes

  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.

  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).

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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=SHPY880AE&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.

  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.

  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.

  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).

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

  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).

  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.

  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.

  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).

  41. Glotz develops this picture further elsewhere, in Part Three (“the city in decline”) of La cité 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 (Bélios 1933).

  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.”

  44. They noted, too, the unenthusiastic reception by historians and hoped William McNeill’s recent Plagues and Peoples (1976) would change that.

  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).

  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. The Smithsonian version erroneously uses “epidemic” twice.

  51. Jones to Ross, 15, 21 April 1909, LSHTM 89/12/57, 59.

  52. 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.

  53. 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).

  54. Morbidity itself is problematic (Riley 1997: 1–2).

  55. 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.

  56. 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.

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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.

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Baron, C., Hamlin, C. Malaria and the Decline of Ancient Greece: Revisiting the Jones Hypothesis in an Era of Interdisciplinarity. Minerva 53, 327–358 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-015-9280-7

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