Plague in an Ancient City by Michiel Sweerts
Plague and Politics: The Combination of Disease and Narrative in Thucydides’ History
By Joshua Rose
At this point in the Covid-19 Pandemic, it should be unnecessary to reiterate just how devastating the virus has been over the past several years. And yet, even rolling past the third year of masks and intermittent lockdowns, we are constantly given new updates on the serious toll Covid has taken. One particularly grim new statistic shows that the US death toll from Covid will soon reach one million people (Fisher et al.). An even more disturbing milestone is that globally the virus has already claimed fifteen million lives, many of which have gone unreported (Adam). While this data is certainly a sobering reminder of the incredible damage the Pandemic has wreaked on the world, simply looking at the mortality rate does not tell the whole story. There are, of course, the numerous people who haven’t died from the virus but who have gotten serious symptoms as a result of pre-existing conditions or because they developed long Covid, which might affect as many as 10% of those who get infected (“COVID Long Haulers”). There have also been many other costs from the Pandemic besides those related to health. The economy and job markets have suffered, children’s education has been postponed and hampered, and people’s social lives have been steadily interrupted by quickly changing public health measures. In combination with these costs have come the stories we tell ourselves about the Pandemic and how it has shaped our society. These narratives play an equal, if not greater, role in our understanding of Covid compared to the public health and economic data. This is not something unique to the current Pandemic, but in fact, has heavily influenced what we know about previous plagues and pandemics as well, going all the way back to one of the oldest and most seminal texts on a plague outbreak: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In this short paper, I will attempt to show that there is indeed a connection between the narratives of Thucydides and the conversation surrounding our descriptions of Covid by specifically focusing on the political narratives of plague.
Before diving into the main analysis of this paper, it is critical to understand the framework through which I will approach the connection between the plague Thucydides experienced and Covid-19. I will first provide background on my motivations and inspirations for this project, particularly examining the connection between plague and political narratives. Then, I will look at a few of the political narratives of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Following this modern analysis, I will perform a close reading of Thucydides and explain his understanding of the Plague of Athens. Finally, I will focus on extracting some main political focuses of his narrative for analysis and comparing these with modern trends.
My belief in the importance of the literary record and the narratives they leave behind, regardless of their facticity, was heavily influenced by Peter Sarris’s work entitled: The Justinianic Plague: Origins and Effects. In this article, Sarris makes it clear that the literary record is critical to our understanding of plagues and other disasters of antiquity. This is because it helps corroborate physical evidence and provides insight into how the plague was perceived. Perception often has as much of an effect as the disease itself. Another important article for the rationale behind this paper was the work of Rene Girard called: The Plague in Literature and Myth. This text makes several insightful points about how plagues are conceived and constructed, but one of Girard’s most important observations is that plagues are phenomena of reversal and inflection. Specifically, a plague will “… turn the honest man into a thief, the virtuous man into a lecher, the prostitute into a saint” (833). These texts are crucial to understanding the connection between ancient plagues and modern pandemics because they provide us with a framework for how ancient authors thought plagues changed society beyond simple public health effects. Furthermore, they touch on the two most famous plagues from the Ancient Mediterranean: The Plague of Athens and the Plague of Justinian. The importance of plague narratives to our understanding of disease and the narratives’ tendency to implicate large epidemics as moments of inversion are the lenses through which I will compare politics during the Plague of Athens and the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Moving into some of the modern narratives that have come along with Covid, one story that has received a lot of attention is the spike in violent crimes across the country which, if true, would track well with Thucydides’s ideas of societal breakdown, which will be discussed later in this article. According to the FBI, the homicide rate in the US was at a twenty-year high in 2020 at 6.5 homicides per 100,000 people (King). According to data from the World Bank, this was a nearly 30% increase from the previous year. This was such a significant trend that it firmly entered US political discourse on both sides of the aisle. On the right, this information was used as a political weapon against Democratic mayors of large cities, who have seen substantial increases in crime (Montanaro). Conservatives accuse Democratic mayors and governors of overreaching their powers in regard to lockdowns and public health measures while not doing enough to reduce crime. For Democrats, this crime spike has come amid a national reckoning of police and criminal justice reform. As a result, they have been faced with the choice of continuing many reforms they initially supported or putting more funding into traditional police work. And yet, despite all this political focus on the crime rate, it was substantially lower than its peak in the 1990s, when the homicide rate topped out at 9.8 cases per 100,000 (King). This is not to say that the Pandemic did not affect crime, but it is interesting that the narratives have changed somewhat during this violent crime spike. For instance, this time around, experts said that they expected an increase in violent crimes because of the increased uncertainty many Americans were facing due to the economic downturn, regarding their jobs, health, and housing (King). However, in a study done several years ago about what caused the decrease in crime since the 1990s, the researchers found that, in fact, a strong economy did not substantially lower crime rates (Ford). While I am not personally advocating for a position on this topic, I do believe that the Pandemic has created a moment of inflection about the crime situation, especially in cities, despite the overall lower rates compared to a time without a major viral outbreak.
The second political narrative I would like to explore is the reversal and outright disregard of established norms. Recently, we have seen a large uptick in far-right extremism and conspiratorial ideas. This phenomenon is not new to American politics, but the Pandemic has changed both the scale and the types of issues that these groups target. For instance, before the Pandemic, the Tea Party wave of candidates represented essentially the edge of what was acceptable on the right for mainstream politics (this is up for interpretation, but I would also not classify the Tea Party as extremists, at least not in the way we view some of their replacements). Since then, many people who represented the Tea Party have either been replaced by more extreme politicians or have gone even further to the right themselves. Such politicians now not only advocate against government spending and size but even against basic public health policies such as vaccines and masks. What is particularly new regarding this situation is how these once-fringe ideas have co-opted more mainstream ideas. For instance, the anti-vaccine movement has now rebranded itself as “anti-mandate” to gain a broader following (Bergengruen).
Thucydides’s work on the Peloponnesian War is a wide-ranging text with eight books covering the initial stages of the war through the defeat of the Athenian forces at Syracuse and the invasion’s immediate aftermath. Instead of focusing on the entire text, for this project, it is only necessary to examine the sections where the historian specifically describes the plague and its effects. This description of the outbreak occurs in Book Two, sections 47 through 65. Immediately upon describing the plague’s initial discovery, Thucydides makes it clear that the disease responsible for the plague was completely novel, at least to his knowledge, and was also incredibly difficult to cure (2.47). It became such a problem that, in fact, many people who attempted to aid the infected became sick as well, creating one of many reversals that exist in Thucydides’s description of the plague (2.47). Instead of curing the disease or alleviating its effects, the city’s physicians became some of its initial victims, leaving Athens even more vulnerable and helpless to combat the new contagion.
Thucydides then describes the nature of the disease itself, including its symptoms. One of the first properties of the plague that Thucydides conveys is its ability to consume or replace any of the other diseases that normally would affect the Athenians (Thucydides, 2.49). In other words, the many other infections present in the city seemed to vanish, and those infected by normal diseases fell victim to this new plague. He then goes on to describe a myriad of symptoms associated with the plague, including fever, severe thirst, violent cough, ulcerations, diarrhea, and in some cases where the patient seemingly recovered, a later occurrence of memory disorder or amnesia (Thucydides, 2.49). According to Thucydides, the disease was so varied and powerful that no single remedy would work (in fact, some remedies that helped certain patients were actually a detriment to others), and furthermore, it “… carried off all alike and defied every mode of treatment” (2.51). The infection and mortality rates became so bad that people began abandoning the sick and leaving them to die alone without care, except in instances where one had recovered from the disease (Thucydides, 2.51).
Following the description of the disease’s nature and symptoms, the History elaborates on the social inversions and reversals caused by the plague. Firstly, immigrants poured into the city and were decimated by the contagion, and with no one willing to bury their bodies, they simply lay in the streets where they fell (Thucydides, 2.52). While not explicitly mentioned in this section of the History, the plague was a turning point for immigrants in Athens in more ways than just their burial rights. In 451 BC, Pericles passed a law preventing Metics (recent immigrants from another city-state to Athens) from becoming citizens. The uncertain position of immigrants in the city was exacerbated by the plague, and never again did immigrants play as large of a role in Athenian society as they did during Athens’s more cosmopolitan golden age (Martinez, 144-45). The complete breakdown in funerary rites and customs not only impacted newcomers to the city but established citizens as well. Thucydides even describes cases where people who did not have the proper equipment or motivation to create a funeral pyre simply tossed the corpses of their loved ones onto someone else’s already burning fire (2.52). Another severe problem after the plague outbreak was a breakdown of order. Lawlessness increased as “no fear of Gods or law of man deterred a criminal… For offenses against human law no punishment was to be feared; no one would live long enough to be called to account. Already a far heavier sentence had been passed and was hanging over a man’s head; before that fell, why should he not take a little pleasure” (Thucydides, 2.53)? Without the proper incentives, good or bad, nor the officials present to enforce those incentives, the people devolved into a state of belligerence out of a complete sense of nihilism.
And this irreverence was not only applied to everyday laws but even to the fabric of Athenian society itself. As a result of the plague and the poor results of the war, the Athenians turned against Pericles, the most famous general and statesman of the time, who was largely in charge of the city’s defenses and military strategy. Thucydides, from his description of the incident in sections 59 through 65 of Book 2, makes it clear that this was a serious mistake, given Pericles’s natural gifts for leadership and foresight. Furthermore, this also represented a significant shift in the political situation in Athens. And although this political dispute was eventually resolved with Pericles retaining his leadership position in the government, Thucydides seems to suggest that the entire saga had an irreparable effect on Athenian democracy. He writes: “Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each one struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people” (Thucydides, 2.65). Put more simply, with Pericles alive, he alone ran the government’s affairs (although he did an admirable job), and when he died, his successors all attempted to replace him as the head of state and were willing to bend to populism to do so. Clearly, in Thucydides’s view, the plague had an almost supernatural effect not only on the health of Athenian citizens but on the health of society as a whole, something I believe we can relate to, given our recent experiences.
In the grand scheme of possible pathogens and their level of transmissibility and deadliness, Covid has actually been fairly mild. As many skeptics of the virus and its danger have pointed out, the mortality rate of Covid is relatively low, at 1.2% in the US and, even at the highest number in Mexico (which has enacted very few public health measures), only reaching 5.6% (“Mortality Analysis”). Yet despite what seems like a low mortality rate, the US has seen an economic recession, spiking violent crime rates, and a significant increase in extremism due to the Pandemic. In the case of the Plague of Athens, experts estimate that the mortality rates were much higher, exacerbated by the lack of medical knowledge and cramped conditions from the war. Epidemic typhus, for instance, has a mortality rate of 20% and can kill after just seven days of infection (“Plague of Athens: Another Medical Mystery Solved”). If mortality rates of the plague were similar to that estimate, then perhaps as many as 25% of the total population of Athens died, which would have led to around 75,000 fatalities (Littman, 2009). If just a 1.2% percent mortality rate can lead to widespread lockdowns, supply chain issues, and other drastic changes to society, a mortality rate of 25% could no doubt cause many of the social changes described in the History.
Given the possible culprits of the disease, the public health costs of the Plague of Athens were probably substantial. Furthermore, as I have established, it is also likely that the societal costs of the plague were similar to what Thucydides observed. Still, it is a good idea to provide some rationale for why Thucydides decided to describe the plague as he did, regardless of the facticity of his claims. It is important to remember that before he became a historian, Thucydides was a high-ranking Athenian general and thus had a strong bias towards Athens. This is also made clear when he says, through a speech allegedly given by Pericles, that Athens has “… the greatest name in all the world” (2.64). Clearly, then, it would have been an uncomfortable truth for Thucydides to admit that Athens was an inferior military power to Sparta, its chief rival. As a result, trying to blame the plague as much as possible for the city’s predicament would be a natural motivation for some of the narratives that Thucydides employs.
One of the notable traits of Thucydides’s work is that it is based, for the most part, on human affairs with relatively little mention of the gods. However, in Book 2, he does slip back into some of the habits of his predecessors when he acknowledges an oracular prophecy foretelling that a plague would strike in the midst of a war (Thucydides, 2.54). Normally, Thucydides can be flippant or even sarcastic in regard to supernatural phenomena, but in this particular case, he seems to corroborate everything that the prophecy foretold (Kallet, 364). It is possible that given the extreme severity of the plague, Thucydides had a change of heart regarding the possibility of divine intervention. If this is not the case, though, the prophecy certainly provides one route through which to explain the Athenian military’s poor performance in the initial stages of the war. In his description of how it afflicts the rest of Greece, Thucydides continues this trend of using the plague as a scapegoat. The disease only tends to strike the Athenians and never the Spartans. Specifically, Thucydides writes: “The disease certainly did set in immediately after the invasion of the Peloponnesians, and did not spread into Peloponnesus in any degree worth speaking of, while Athens felt its ravages most severely…” (2.54). It is possible that because the Athenians were cooped up in an overcrowded city, the disease was more able to spread amongst them than the Spartans, who were out in the field on campaign. However, this does not explain all parts of Thucydides’s story, as even when Athenian soldiers left the city on a raid, they also were ravaged by the disease. In chapter 58 of Book 2, Thucydides describes a siege of a town called Potidaea that failed because much of the soldiery sent there eventually came down with the plague (2.58). If it is true that the plague could also affect soldiers out in the field, then we should expect to see the Spartans being struck with plague, but that would undercut Thucydides’s narrative: specifically, the narrative that this pathogen was divinely ordained to disproportionately impact the Athenians and not their enemies.
To briefly conclude, after reading Thucydides’s work on the Plague of Athens and considering our own experiences of the last three years, there are clearly strong parallels between both situations, at least politically. Disease seems to have the capacity, either in actuality or simply in the collective consciousness of the afflicted society, to create upticks in crime and a decreased respect for the established order. Both of these case studies corroborate the importance of plague narratives as well as the power of plagues to act as inversion points for a society. The reason behind this phenomenon remains unclear, but if I were to speculate, I would imagine that plagues have such an outsized impact on society for two main reasons. First, the disease transmission process is largely invisible and thus provides an extra sense of uncertainty that does not come with other natural disasters such as fires or floods. Second, the fact that diseases can spread so widely and rapidly makes them especially worrisome. Other disasters can usually be contained even without strenuous human intervention. Pathogens are not naturally contained in the same way as other disasters and thus require extensive changes to human life to mitigate transmission. It is my belief that these changes create a sense of reversal in society. In a future paper, I would like to explore other plagues and the narratives surrounding them to see if a more concrete pattern can be established.
Joshua Rose (‘23) is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania who majored in Classical Studies and PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics).
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