Paludal Romans and their Dispersion

The ancient Romans inherited and developed the Greeks’ denigration of wetlands, especially with Virgil’s view of wetlands and Hades, or hell. Dante took up Virgil’s view and Christianized it in The Inferno with the souls of the sullen stuck in slime in a circle of hell. John Milton later syncretized Dante’s Christianized vision of hell with ancient Greek and Roman views. In Paradise Lost Milton portrayed Satan as a monstrous swamp serpent engendered in slime. In the legend of St George killing a dragon, the dragon is a marsh monster in one version, a swamp serpent in others, and St George is canonized as a Christian knight in all of them. The legend became widespread in Europe and the foundation myth of England enshrined in its flag and exported to its colonies. Rather than figuring hell as a swamp, and in increasingly secularized and post-Christian cultures, for later Anglophone writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the swamp is hell. It is a place of death and destruction. By contrast, for twenty-first century writers attuned to wetland ecology, such as Delia Owens in her recent novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, swamps are places of both life and death.