At present, we are living in an abnormal and unusual period, which seems to have came out from one of the best post-apocalyptic films: a virus, the infamous Covid-19, is forcing us to stay at home and to avoid every kind of social contact. Moreover, we have started to believe that other people are our “enemies”, plague spreaders who can put our lives in danger. This is a paradoxical situation, which we never expected to happen in the contemporary world. However, the Covid-19 emergency is not the first case of a pandemic in history: for examples, we should remember the Spanish flu, which lasted from 1918 to 1920, and the Asian flu, which lasted from 1957 to 1960. If we want to go back ever further in time, to the age of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, we will find various cases of epidemics, which the Greek designated with term of loimόs and the Roman with pestis. Both these terms have the general meaning of “calamity”, “catastrophe”, “curse” in their native language. So, we should ask ourselves a question: how did the Ancients fight against this “invisible” enemy without the help of modern technology? I believe that it is necessary to know the past in order to better understand the present and to build the future. For this reason, I think that the analysis of the concept of “plague” among the Ancient Greeks and Romans could help us to face the Covid-19 emergency better.
The causes of the plague: gods, men and pharmakόs
First of all, in the ancient world the idea that the disease had a divine origin was predominant: in particular, disease was perceived as a punishment sent by a god because of an extremely negative action by men. This concept of disease is clear in the first description of “plague” that we have in Western literature: the noúsos, the “disease”, which Apollo sends to the Achean camp, described by Homer in the Iliad (I 9-54). What causes Apollo’s wrath and, consequently, the spread of the disease is the behaviour of Agamennon, king of Argo and commander of the Greeks in the Trojan War. As Homer tells us, Apollo “angered by the king, brought an evil plague on the army, so that the men were dying, for the son of Atreus (i.e. Agamennon) had dishonoured Chryses the priest” (I 9-12). Agamennon had caught Chryseis, the daughter of Apollo’s priest, Chryses, and enslaved her. So, Chryses had gone to the Greek camp in order to redeem his daughter in exchange for rich gifts, but the king drove the priest away. Acting this way, not only did Agamennon not respect Chryses and his rank, but he was also blasphemous towards Apollo himself. In Oedipus Rex by Sophocles the “plague” which strikes the city of Thebe is attributed to the action of a god, in this case Ares (vv. 190-191; v. 205). In the tragedy, the cause of the divine wrath was explained later: albeit unwittingly, Oedipus killed his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, staining himself with parricide and incest, two of the most horrible crimes that a man could commit. By reading these sources, one can understand how the Ancients needed to find the pharmakόs, the “scapegoat”, the “patient 0”, the person who was believed to be responsible for the disease. The pharmakόs was perceived as an impure person due to his actions and, because he was seen as a “contaminating presence”, he was exiled from the community. This way, the community tried to free itself from an evil which had struck it, in this case an epidemic. In addition to Oedipus, another famous example of pharmakόs in the Greek literature is the figure of Philoctetes in the homonymous tragedy by Sophocles.
See also:
The myth of Hermaphroditus: nec femina dici nec puer ut possit
The epidemic: atoms and miasmas
This “sacred” and expiatory view of the disease characterized the way of thinking of the Ancients for a long time and it survived even after Hippocratic medicine was born. In particular, the Greek historian Thucydides was influenced by Hippocrates’ theories and his attempts to trace the origin of a disease to the inner workings of the human body itself. In fact, in the Peloponnesian War, where Thucydides describes the terrible plague which broke out in Athens in 430 B.C., he is inclined to think that the epidemic had a natural, “scientific” origin. However, the historian doesn’t specify what could be the possible causes of the plague, but he prefers to suspend his judgment:
“As to its probable origin or the causes which might or could have produced such a disturbance of nature, every man, whether a physician or not, will give his own opinion. But I shall describe its actual course, and the symptoms by which any one who knows them beforehand may recognize the disorder should it ever reappear. For I was myself attacked, and witnessed the sufferings of others” (II 48,3).
Thucydides is not a physician, he doesn’t have the competence to figure out what has generated this disease. As historian and patient, he can only describe the symptom to help the physicians do their job. Instead, Lucretius, a Latin poet of the first century B.C., in his De rerum natura seems to have a precise idea about the causes of the Athenian plague. By drawing on Epicureanism, the poet indicates the semina, the “seeds”, the atoms which everything is formed by, as the main cause of the epidemic. A lot of semina, morbos / incutere et mortem quae possint accelerare (VI 771-772), “can generate / disease and hasten death”. These atoms are not directly transmitted from one body to another, but through the air:
Ea cum casu sunt forte coorta/ et perturbarunt caelum, fit morbidus aër. / Atque ea vis omnis morborum pestilitasque / aut extrinsecus ut nubes nebulaeque superne/ per caelum veniunt, aut ipsa saepe coortae / de terra surgunt, ubi putorem umida nactast /intempestivis pluviis et solibus icta.
“When these have, haply, chanced to collect/ and to derange the atmosphere of earth, / the air becometh baneful. And, lo, all / that Influence of bane, that pestilence, / or from Beyond down through our atmosphere,/ like clouds and mists, descends, or else collects / from earth herself and rises, when, a-soak/And beat by rains unseasonable and suns, / our earth hath then contracted stench and rot” (VI 1094-1102).
As we can see, Lucretius was influenced by the so-called “miasma theory”, which had a wide appeal in ancient medicine for a long time. In accordance with this theory, the outbreak of a disease and the spreading of an epidemic would derive from the movement and the inspiration of an insalubrious mass of air, originated after a phenomenon of putrefaction or similar. Infact, the Ancients were aware of the fact that the overcrowding of a place contributed to the spread of a disease (Thucydides says that “the crowding of the people from the country into the city aggravated the misery” [II 52,1]), but they didn’t know the concept of contagion in its scientific sense, that is the transmission of pathogenic agents from one body to another.
See also:
Maesia Sentinas: the forgotten Androgynen
The consequences: social disorder
Among all the authors mentioned, perhaps Thucydides is the one who gives us the strongest image of the consequences of an epidemic. By comparing the description of the historian with the current situation caused by Covid-19, we are shocked by how “prophetic” Thucydides words are:
“For a while physicians, in ignorance of the nature of the disease, sought to apply remedies; but it was in vain, and they themselves were among the first victims, because they oftenest came into contact with it. No human art was of any avail, and as to supplications in temples, enquiries of oracles, and the like, they were utterly useless, and at last men were overpowered by the calamity and gave them all up. […]Appalling too was the rapidity with which men caught the infection; dying like sheep if they attended on one another. […] When they were afraid to visit one another, the sufferers died in their solitude, so that many houses were empty because there had been no one left to take care of the sick; or if they ventured they perished, especially those who aspired to heroism. For they went to see their friends without thought of themselves and were ashamed to leave them, at a time when the very relations of the dying were at last growing weary and ceased even to make lamentations, overwhelmed by the vastness of the calamity. But whatever instances there may have been of such devotion, more often the sick and the dying were tended by the pitying care of those who had recovered, because they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehension. […]The dead lay as they had died, one upon another, while others hardly alive wallowed in the streets. […] For the violence of the calamity was such that men, not knowing where to turn, grew reckless of all law, human and divine. The customs which had hitherto been observed at funerals were universally violated, and they buried their dead each one as best he could. Many, having no proper appliances, because the deaths in their household had been so numerous already, lost all shame in the burial of the dead” (II 47-52).
There is no need to comment further on Thucydides’ words: what we can read on a page written in the fifth century B.C. is happening today, that is social disorder and disruption of citizens’ lives.
Sources:
- R. Buzzone, Polemos, pathemata and plague: Thucydides’ narrative and the tradition of upheavel, in “Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies”, 57 (2017), pp. 882-909.
- G. Cosmacini, L’arte lunga. Storia della medicina dall’antichità a oggi, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 20163.
- L. Kallet, Thucydides, Apollo, the plague, and the war, in “American Journal of Philology”, 134 (2013), pp. 355-382.
- F. Stock, Peste e letteratura, in Medicina e letteratura, Atti del convegno svoltosi a Salerno il 25 ottobre 2012, Salerno, Ordine dei medici e degli odontoiatri della provincia di Salerno, 2013, pp. 55-75.
Translations:
- Iliad: Homer, The Iliad, a translation into English prose by A. S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, 2009.
- Thucydides: Thucydides translated into english, with introduction, marginal analysis, notes and indices, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1881 (except for II 52, 1: my translation).
- Lucretius: Lucretius, De rerum natura, edited by W.E. Leonard and E. P. Dutton, 1916.
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