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Section I: The Ancient World
Dr. Eli Diamond, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Dalhousie University
In the Ancient World, and certainly in Greek religious belief, a plague was traditionally interpreted as a punishment from the gods for some moral or religious pollution within the city. Many of Greek tragedies we regularly study in FYP involve a city’s reckoning with a plague within its walls. In the Ancient World, and certainly in Greek religious belief, a plague was traditionally interpreted as a punishment from the gods for some moral or religious pollution within the city. Many of Greek tragedies we regularly study in FYP involve a city’s reckoning with a plague within its walls.
One of the most famous excerpts from all ancient Greek literature is the historian Thucydides’ reconstruction of the Funeral Oration given by the great Athenian general and political leader Pericles. At the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, Pericles delivered a funeral speech which praised not only the war dead, but the distinctive greatness of the Athens for which they died. It is an eloquent expression of Athenian political ideals and self-confidence, but also offers a good dose of the hubristic arrogance which leads to a tragic hero’s downfall. Directly following the soaring oratory of that speech, Thucydides shifts immediately to his devastatingly grim account of the plague which ravaged many other cities in Greece and the Mediterranean region, but none worse than Athens. The plague appeared in 430 BCE and lasted almost four years, killing roughly one third of the population of Athens (perhaps as many as 100,000 people). Thucydides reports he himself caught the plague but survived. The plague was many times worse than what the world is experiencing right now with COVID-19, but some details of the reaction to the plague are strikingly similar:
“It is said that the plague had already struck widely elsewhere, especially in Lemnos and other places, but nowhere else was there recorded such virulence or so great a loss of life (as in Athens). The doctors could offer little help at first: they were attempting to treat the disease without knowing what it was, and in fact there was particularly high mortality among doctors because of their particular exposure. No other human skill could help either, and all supplications at temples and consultations of oracles and the like were of no avail. In the end people were overcome by the disaster and abandoned all efforts to escape it….it fell on the city of Athens suddenly. The first affected were the inhabitants of the Peiraeus (the port of Athens), who went so far as to allege that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the wells (at the time there were no fountains in Piraeus). Afterwards the plague reached the upper city too, and now the number of deaths greatly increased.” (II, 47-8)
We can see here that even in Athens, the heart of Greek science and philosophy, forces of nature overcame all human ingenuity and technical expertise, indifferent to either medical or religious treatment. The great temples in which prayers and supplications failed would soon be overflowing with corpses, and rather than pointing to some clear divine message, this plague shook Athenian piety and produced in many a kind of resigned indifference to their obligations to the gods.
Thucydides’ description of the symptoms is detailed, gruesome, and gripping, but beyond the terrible physical effects, Thucydides is a keen observer about how the unfolding of the plague affected the Athenians psychologically, when any hope seemed foolish, and all acts of courage and duty to others were rewarded by deadly infection:
“Some died in neglect and others died despite constant care…The most dreadful aspects of the whole affliction were the despair into which people fell when they realized how they had contracted the disease (they were immediately convinced that they had no hope, and so were much more inclined to surrender themselves without a fight), and the cross-infection of those who cared for others: they died like sheep, and this was the greatest cause of mortality. When people were afraid to visit one another, the victims died in isolation, and many households were wiped through the lack of anyone to care for them. If they did visit the sick, they died, especially those who could claim some courage: these were people who out of a sense of duty disregarded their own safety and kept visiting their friends, even when ultimately the family members themselves were overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and abandoned the succession of dirges for the dead….” (II, 51)
The isolation required for survival led to breakdown of duties to friends and family. And where Pericles in his speech earlier that year had celebrated not only the freedom of Athenian democracy, but its deep respect for written and unwritten laws, the plague, for Thucydides, had the effect of eroding this reverence for law, opening up a new age of individualism, shamelessness, and anarchy which would only grow over the course of the war:
“…the plague was the beginning of increased lawlessness in the city. People were less inhibited in the indulgence of pleasures previously concealed when they saw rapid changes of fortune - the prosperous suddenly dead, and the once indigent now possessing their fortune. As a result they decided to look for satisfactions that were quick and pleasurable, reckoning that neither life nor wealth would last long. No one was prepared to persevere in what had been thought the path of honour, as they could well be dead before that destination was reached. Immediate pleasure, and any means profitable to that end, became the new honour and the new value. No fear of god or human law was any constraint. Pious or impious made no difference in their view, when they could see all dying without distinction. As for offences against the law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to justice and pay the penalty; they thought that a much heavier sentence had already been passed and was hanging over them, so they might as well have some enjoyment of life before it fell.” (II, 53)
Pericles himself contracted the disease, and, unlike Thucydides, did not survive it. The confident idealism and collective unity of Athens under Pericles never recovered after the plague. Many of these forces Thucydides describes as being unleashed by the plague will further intensify throughout the thirty years of war between Athens and Sparta. Were these moral and social forces initially caused by the terrible experience of the plague? Or did the plague merely help reveal and intensify psychological and ethical tendencies already present in Athens and Athenians? Figuring this out requires some careful reading of Thucydides, one of our tasks in Section I of FYP. This question gets to the heart of what our own plague might do to reveal our political and individual characters, or how it might even transform them in lasting ways. These are not primarily questions for epidemiology, but for ethics, religion, and politics. Thinking through Thucydides’ account of the 5th century Athenian experience can help illuminate our own distinctive strengths and vulnerabilities for coping with these exceptional circumstances.
