Rajesh Shyamal
B.A Student, , PG Department of English. Bhatter College, Dantan E-mail: rajesh721426@gmail.com
Special Issue on Diseases, Death and Disorder, 2020
Abstract
There has hardly been a civilization/society that has not faced infectious disease, or so to say epidemics. Both its causation and its corollary aftermath have been a matter of much concern and quite a number of wirings (both historical and literary) have actually chronicled such epidemics and its horrific aftermaths. One such body of writings came from the Ancient Greek world where historians like Thucydides; epic poets like Homer and Attic dramatists like Sophocles had tried to capture them in various historical and literary representations. Whereas the Athenian historian Thucydides chronicles an eyewitness account of the epidemic in Ancient Greece, Homer in his epic Iliad describes this epidemic via narrative means and Sophocles in Oedipus the King through mimetic representation on the stage. This paper tries to engage in a detailed study of the three narratives of epidemics of the Ancient Greek world and engage in a debate whether the literary representations by Homer and Sophocles actually connote the actual historical events chronicled by Thucydides.
[Keywords: Plague, Epidemics, Athens, Thucydides, Sophocles, Homer]
Introduction
There has hardly been a civilization/society that has not faced infectious disease, or so to say epidemics. Both its causation and its corollary aftermath have been a matter of much concern and quite a number of wirings (both historical and literary) have actually chronicled such epidemics and its horrific aftermaths. One such body of writings came from the Ancient Greek world where historians like Thucydides; epic poets like Homer and Attic dramatists like Sophocles had tried to capture them in various historical and literary representations.
Words like plague, pandemic and epidemic have recently been used extensively in the contemporary context to denote the viral situation happening around the globe. But the notion of the plague existed long before it came into common parlance especially in relation to the Plague of Athens in 429 to 426 BCE which had wiped out thousands of its inhabitants including renowned persons like Pericles (495-429 BCE). The first recorded history of the Plague in Greece was between 1595 to 1605. The very Greek word ‘epidemia’ literally means “staying in one place, among the peoples” and in the medical practice of Greece it had been a matter of much analysis. Whereas in the medical field of Greece it was considered as a sort of a deadly disease, on the socio-cultural level, it had a huge impact in the Athenian society.
Well-known Athenian historian, Thucydides gave an eyewitness account of the notorious Athenian plague. A few literary artists like Homer and Sophocles in their literary representations alluded to the original historical events that Thucydides had chronicled. In their accounts epidemic/plague appeared as having supernatural or supra-natural type which was pretty much untamable and could be controllable only with a divine interevention. Pantelis Michelakis rightly points out that
They [disease or plague] moved the perpendicular routes followed by several myths, gods, prayers, smoke, and along the horizontal or flat networks followed by pointed arrows and the interchange in prizes of the war.[i]
It is obvious that the plague exposes and in a certain sense, hijacks the porosity of spaces whose physical boundaries and symbolic identities were conventionally perceived to be stable and autonomous. What more, it had effected was their connectivity, the normal routes or channels. It had its effects on the spaces between mortals and gods, sea routes of trade and the military, the material infrastructure of the city like ports, walls, wells, fountains, temples, and the human resources consisting of assemblages of people like leaders, soldiers, citizens, physicians, relatives and the overall Greek body politic.
Talking about the literary representations of plague in Greece was none other than Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King which truly conform to the events of plague chronicled in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War Book- II. Thucydides (c.460-400 BC) and Sophocles (c. 490-406 BC) would have known one another in Athens, although there is hardly enough evidence survived. Writing history in prose was a novel and challenging work in the time of Thucydides and in his History the main focus was the Peloponnesian war fought between Athens and Sparta between 431 and 404 BC. Although the primary narrative includes the inter-state fight for power and dominance, a few occasional references connote to the issues of plague and epidemics of that time especially in his reference to the death of Pericles who had died due to such disease.
Thucydides’ description of the plague that covers a huge section in his History actually allude to the devastating plague that had struck Athens in 430 BC and this event found many representations in literature. According to Thucydides’ chronicle, the disease had arrived from Ethiopia and was passing through Egypt and Libya into the Greek world. The plague did massive damage to Athens for two years before the beginning of Peloponnesian War, from which it had never recovered. It had greatly shaken the political strength and the military. With a huge Spartan combat, Athens was devastated and defeated by Sparta and finally fall from being the major superpower in Ancient Greece.
Contrary to Thucydides, the famous Roman historian, Livy conjectured many centuries later that the epidemics had actually occurred in Rome in 433 and 438 BC (Rhodes p. ).[ii] These might have been the outbreaks of the same epidemic that had first struck Athenian port, the Piraeus and then spread across the city states. It is in many of such sea voyages, infectious diseases like cholera, dengue, plague, and smallpox were spread by the crew members of these ships.
One of the masterpieces of Greek literature, Homer’s The Iliad opens with Apollo sending the plague as a sort of a divine retribution punishing the Greeks for Agamemnon’s refusal to ransom a captive, Chryseis. The anthropomorphic description of the disease is vividly described, where it descends “like night” on the Greek camps, his arrows are clattering in their quiver, and he shoots first the animals like mules and dogs, making them sick, before his turning to humans. As the bodies pile up, and the pyres are being offered day and night a seer tells Agamemnon that the only way to end the crisis is for the prisoner to be returned to her father. So as not to lose face, Agamemnon seizes Briseis from Achilles and one of Achilles’ captives, as compensation. This humiliation is what causes the famous wrath of Achilles the rage that sets the entire narrative of the poem.
At the beginning of The Iliad, for instance, the prophet Calchas, who knows the cause of a nine day Plague given by Apollo, is praised as someone “who knows what is, what will be and what happened before”(p. ) This rhetoric anticipates a chief criticism of Homer’s legendary character King Agamemnon, because he does not know “the before and the after”. The notion of the plague pervades across the episodes and provides a big setting where fate pushes human organization to their own human limit. The leaders belonging to the human species are always crucial to the causal consequences. As we have seen in Homer’s Odyssey that Zeus observes that:
Oh for shame, how the mortals put the blame upon us gods,
gods, for they say evils come from us, but it is they, rather,
who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given,
as now lately, beyond what is given… (32-35)[iii]
So, it is this complex clash of human-divine network that allows the epidemics to be machinery through which it could put a check on the human beings. Joel Christensen rightly points out that:
The problem is that the human being always wants to go beyond of the plagues and dieses. The poet Hesiod writes that the Greek god Zeus showed his disapproval for some bad leaders by burdening them with military failures as well as epidemics. The consequences of human failings are a refrain in the ancient critique of the great leaders, with or without plagues. The Iliad, for instance, describes the great rulers who ruin their people and country through recklessness. The Odyssey phrases it as bad shepherds ruin their flocks.[iv]
In another literary representations namely Oedipus Tyrannos by the century BC playwright, Sophocles describes how plague has devastated the city of Thebes nearly at the beginning of the play. The play Oedipus the King was produced around 429 BCE and the Plague of Athens occurred during this period. It is very interesting to note that the theatrical traditions of Greece continue to exists even at the epidemic crisis. It’s worth noting that Rachel Finnegan who describes that:
It is possible that the various symptoms of the traditional, Theban, blight would also have existed in the Athenian plague, the lack of crops reflecting the annual devastation of the fields by the marauding Peloponnesian armies; the blight on the cattle representing the live-stock shipped off to the neighboring island of Euboea or dying of neglect; and abortive births, being a typical symptom in many plagues, such as the one in Thasos, recorded in The Epidemics. (p. )[v]
The play, Oedipus the King opens with the common city dwellers undergoing the crisis of plague and making a plea to their King Oedipus to seek out a remedy from the disease. Here again, the roots of the disease lies with the divine retribution connected with the king himself. The very identity of the King, as divinely ordained to kill his own father Laius and marry his own mother Jocasta is at the root of this cause and such diseases/ plagues could only be controlled, as Tiresias, the blind prophet and Creon later on understood, with the banishment of Oedipus.
In an important speech, Tiresias claims that:
Listen to me closely:
the man you have sought so long, proclaiming,
cursing up and down, the murderer of Laius-
he is here. A stranger,
you may think, who lives among you,
he soon will be revealed a native Theban
but he will take no joy in the rwvelation.” (510-516)[vi]
In this play the plague symbolizes deeper malaise, a moral disorder that is afflicting not only the king’s family but the entire country and its people.
Athens was not prepared to meet the challenges of the epidemics. Thucydides describes the futility of any human response; appeals to the gods and depends on the physicians. The disease wreaked havoc the Athenians. Thucydides gives a general account of the early stages of this epidemic and its origins, the measures, how the doctors’ dealing with it and the high mortality rate including the doctors themselves. In an important section of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the historical plague of 429 BC has been dealt with care and concern. Nothing has seemed to ameliorate the crisis, not medical knowledge or other forms of learning, nor prayers or oracles to god. Thucydides states that people ceased fearing the law since they felt they were already living under a death sentence. Then People started spending money indiscriminately. Many felt that they would not live long enough to enjoy their fruits of wise investment, while some of the poor people unexpectedly became wealthier by inheriting the property of their own relatives. Indeed in the end of the epidemic people overcame their sufferings that they paid no further attention or anything to such things.
Not only its nature and its spread in his book, Thucydides describes the symptoms in some detail. A few symptoms were the burning feeling of sufferers, stomach aches and vomiting, the desire to be totally naked without any linen resting on the body itself, insomnia and restlessness. The next stage of the symptoms could be discerned after seven or eight days when the pestilences descend to the bowels and other parts of the body like genitals, fingers and toes. Fever, Redness and inflammation in the eyes, sore throats leading to bleeding and bad breath, sneezing, vomiting, loss of voice, pustules and ulcers on the body, extreme thirst, insomnia, and diarrhea were some other maladies found. Sick people died of medical neglect and a sort of lawlessness hovered over the entire city.
Conclusion
The ancient literary response to epidemic examined here is for the most part compact since describing the entire history would not be possible in this short space. The root cause of the plagues was not limited to divine retribution, but probably a few secular studies existed. Unfortunately, those texts didn’t exist. Thucydides’ History is the most important one. According to Thucydides, during the actual events of epidemics, the social cohesion broke down and most of the people tried to protect themselves without knowing the prognosis of such a disease. From a cultural materialist point of view, literary examples like Iliad and Oedipus the King are important texts that help us in understanding the issue. The close analysis of texts like Iliad and Oedipus the King, beside Thucydides` historical evidence, is a new space to venture with. Finally, we can conclude quoting Petrarch:
“It is possible in the future for people to believe that such horrors have happened? Even for us, who have seen and lived them, it is hard to believe they were possible.” (Francesco Petrarca).
Notes :
[i] See (Michelakis, Pantelis. https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/150/abstract/routes-plague-homer%E2%80%99s-iliad-sophocles%E2%80%99-oedipus-king-and-thucydides%E2%80%99 )
[ii] See Rhodes,P.J. A History Of The Classical Greek World. Blackwell Pub. 2006.
[iii] See (Fagles, Robert. Knox, Bernard. The Odyssey. Penguin Classics. 1992. Line- 32-35)
[iv] See Christensen, Joel. Plagues follow bad leadership in ancient Greek tales. https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/march/plagues-christensen.html )
[v] See (Finnegan, Rachel. Plagues in Classical Literature. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8021/68f30efe0bceca15045759885c183f8cc4be.pdf ).
[vi]See (Fagles, Robert. Knox, Bernard. The Three Theban Play: Antigone,Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles. Penguin Classics.1948. line- 510-516)
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[Rajesh Shyamal is a student of English Literature, UG, 4th semester, Bhatter College, Dantan. under Vidyasagar University, Medinipur. West Bengal]