Malaria was prevalent in the Roman Empire, and the Roman scholars associated the disease with the marshy or swampy lands where the disease was particularly rampant.[13][14] It was from those Romans the name "malaria" originated. They called it malaria (literally meaning "bad air") as they believed that the disease was a kind of miasma that was spread in the air, as originally conceived by Ancient Greeks. Then it was a medical consensus that malaria was spread due to miasma, the bad air.