Why Did Ancient Rome Empty Out Every Summer?

The Romans built a temple to Fever. Not to a god who cured it: to Fever herself. Every summer half of Rome ran for the hills, and it wasn't the heat. Why did ancient Rome empty out every summer? The fever season, the Dog Star, malaria, the villas in the hills and the half of the city that couldn't leave. We follow one Roman summer from the Dog Star rising in July to the first frost in October. The fevers Roman doctors timed to the day. The courts and the Senate that went quiet until the season passed. The tenant on the fourth floor with nowhere to go. And a farmer who guessed, two thousand years before anyone proved it, that the killer was tiny, alive and carried on the air. CHAPTERS: 0:00 A temple to Fever 1:16 The Dog Star 2:44 It wasn't the heat 4:09 Half a city 4:50 The fourth floor 5:32 The roads out 7:09 The villa 8:17 The fever with a schedule 10:07 Hoping for the mild one 11:04 The healthy hills 12:32 The farmer's advice 13:43 The answer in the same sentence 15:13 The government takes the autumn off 16:04 Running from a place 16:58 The people who stayed 18:23 The goddess Fever 19:22 Counting the dead 21:01 Even the emperor 22:19 The frost 23:25 The bad air 24:47 Too small to see 27:01 So why did Rome empty out every summer? SOURCES • Horace, Epistles 1.7 and 1.16; Satires 1.5 and 2.6 • Varro, On Agriculture 1.12; Columella, On Agriculture 1.5; Vitruvius, On Architecture 1.4 • Celsus, On Medicine 2.1, 3.3, 3.15; Galen, Commentary on Hippocrates' Epidemics I (Kühn 17A.121–122) • Pliny the Elder, Natural History 2.16, 2.107, 2.123; Pliny the Younger, Letters 5.6, 8.21 • Suetonius, Augustus 5, 35, 72, 81, 82; Claudius 23; Julius 44; Plutarch, Caesar 58 • Cicero, On the Republic 2.11; On the Laws 2.28; Letters to his brother Quintus 3.1; Letters to Atticus 6.9 • Livy 3.6, 5.54, 41.21; Tacitus, Histories 2.93; Strabo, Geography 5.3 • Seneca, Letters 104; Juvenal, Satires 3, 4, 10; Martial, Epigrams 2.40, 10.62 • Valerius Maximus 2.5.6; Festus, "Rutilae canes"; Frontinus, On the Aqueducts 2.88; Digest 2.12.1 • Horace Walpole, letter to H. S. Conway, 5 July 1740 • B. D. Shaw, "Seasons of death", Journal of Roman Studies 86 (1996) • R. Sallares, Malaria and Rome (2002); Sallares, Bouwman and Anderung, Medical History 48 (2004) • D. Soren, "Can archaeologists excavate evidence of malaria?", World Archaeology 35 (2003) • S. Marciniak et al., Current Biology 26 (2016) • G. Majori, "Short history of malaria and its eradication in Italy", Mediterranean Journal of Hematology and Infectious Diseases (2012) WHERE THIS IS LESS CERTAIN Nobody counted Rome's people, so the city's size is an estimate: somewhere between about 450,000 and a million. The summer death peak comes from nearly four thousand dated Christian epitaphs from the third to the sixth century, as analysed by Brent Shaw; the 80 percent figure is for adults aged roughly 20 to 50 in the worst month, and the epitaph scholars are careful not to blame malaria alone for it, which is why the video calls it the season. Varro's "tiny creatures the eye can't follow" was a guess, not a discovery: he had the idea right and the details wrong. The story of reddish dogs sacrificed to turn the Dog Star's harm away comes from Festus, a late Roman dictionary, and is known only in that one entry.