Listmembers interested in the ancient history of anthrax may wish to check out the following webpage, maintained by Adrienne Mayor -
http://www.hometown.aol.com/afmayor/myhomepage/news.html which contains bibliography and selected commentary on 'Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World.' The page is a little slow to download, but it does come up. We tend to think of an outbreak of disease as being either 'natural' or caused by human mischief. Yet most ancients would have added a third category: disease sent by the gods. To which category does the plague in the third Georgic belong? At first it may seem obvious that Vergil regards the cattle-plague as 'natural'; certainly that's how it would seem to us. But then at the end of the fourth Georgic, we encounter the myth of Aristaeus, in which the mysterious death of Aristaeus' swarms turns out to have had a divine cause (it's Orpheus fault - or really, Aristaeus' fault, for having tried to rape Eurydice and thus causing Orpheus so much grief). Should we read divine causation back into the cattle-plague? Or read a natural cause forward into the death of the bees? Or do the narratives at the ends of books 3 and 4 each retain their own peculiar logic? Philip Thibodeau The University of Georgia ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
