On a good day Thucydides is an inscrutable read in the Greek.  Despite this, or maybe because of it, the Histories of Thucydides are monument of ancient historiography.  Many consider Thucydides (ca.460-395 B.C.E.) the first political scientist because of his perceptive analysis of political behavior and its motivations.  Although Thucydides was deeply indebted to Homer and Herodotus, especially the latter, his eight books on the Peloponnesian War represent the West’s best first efforts at writing history from a scientific, objective perspective.  After his exile from Athens in 424 B.C.E. for not acting decisively enough in a military campaign, Thucydides was able to become one of the few neutral parties to the Peloponnesian War, which allowed him to gain information others could not.  His exile also presumably gave him a more objective understanding of the conflict.  There are limitations to Thucydides as a writer, and his methodology is not as sound as it first comes off.  He writes practically nothing about women, is overconfident in his ability to recreate speeches, and omits information on significant events and exaggerates the importance of other events.  Nonetheless, Thucydides is a first-rate, if inscrutable, literary stylist and a keen observer of human nature in the context of war.  Nowhere is this more evident than in his account of the plague that struck Athens beginning in 430 and continuing for several years thereafter (2.47-54).

Thucydides’ account of the plague follows immediately on the heels of Pericles’ funeral oration, a literary masterpiece that we all know even if we do not know it (2.34-46).  Speeches down the centuries, even up to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and beyond, have echoed the words Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles.  Some of the funeral oration’s more memorable lines include “Athens is the school of Greece (Hellas)” and “we love beauty with moderation and we love wisdom without weakness.”  In addition, there are many fine lines about democracy and freedom, which I do believe many Americans would still find uplifting.  The juxtaposition of Pericles’ inspiring and confident words with the demoralizing and horrific account of the catastrophic plague are jarring to any casual reader.  For many, myself included, the account of the plague functions as a deconstruction of the façade of Athenian virtue constructed by Pericles. 

The image Pericles creates of Athenian character is admirable, but as the plague makes so clear it is merely an image; it is virtue untested by trial.  The Athenians believed themselves to be something noble, and at times in their past they had been noble, particularly in the Persian Wars in battles such as Marathon and Salamis.  But the Athenians who had lived with such courage and virtue were dying out or already dead by 430 B.C.E. The Athenians of Thucydides’ day were living on borrowed virtue and it would be found wanting in the time of crisis.

Thucydides gives the contemporary understanding of the origins of the plague.  He mentions that it seemed to spread from Ethiopia and then north through Egypt and then Persia around to the Piraeus, the port city of Athens.  His narrative, however, reveals no racist or ethnocentric prejudices against the places and peoples the plague originated or travelled amongst.  The plague is not given a name at all, let alone one designating its place of origin.  The only hint of malice he reports is the conspiracy theory that the Peloponnesians poisoned the cisterns in the Piraeus; he refutes this prospect by noting how the disease spread once it got to the city. 

Thucydides was a survivor of the plague and gives a clinical description of the disease rich enough to tantalize epidemiologists down the millennia but not quite scientific enough for them to make a hard and fast diagnosis.  The pain and suffering of those struck by the disease is horrific.  Thucydides tells us of victims so stricken by fever and thirst that in vain they flung themselves headlong into wells seeking some relief. 

As compelling as Thucydides’ report of the physical effects of the plague are for general readers and epidemiologists alike, his narrative of the impact the plague had on Athenian daily life and customs is equally gripping.  The way the plague, and the war in general, changed the Athenians revealed something sinister in the Athenian soul, and perhaps, a warning to us all, the human soul. 

Thucydides tells us with great pathos how when the plague first broke out the charitable and noble among the Athenians hastened to the side of their suffering brothers and sisters only to catch the illness themselves and die before their rightful time.  The best of the Athenians were snuffed out in this way.  Thucydides implies that those who survived, himself included, were the selfish and the cynical, those who thought not of the suffering but of themselves first, who heard the cries of the distressed and did not yield to soften their hearts of stone.  Many were left to die alone; the streets were littered with corpses.  Even the houses of worship were befouled with rotting bodies.  Wood for burning the dead became scarce.  Stories are told, and likely they are true, that family members were hastily thrown onto the burning funeral pyre of a stranger, mixing the blood and bones of the deceased together for eternity.  In desperation, sometimes a funeral pyre was seized in anticipation and lit aflame before its builder could heap upon it its rightful dead.

Enough of the dead, let us talk of the living, who gave themselves over to wanton pleasure or despair deadly before its proper time. Those with the means and sentiment turned their final days into parties and acts of debauchery.  Why maintain the habits of moderation and decorum when tomorrow we die?  Why try to fight against the inevitable when it is easier to yield today? 

It’s a ponderous question though, isn’t it?  Am I one of those checking in on others or am I just taking care of my own?  And which of the two is the right answer?  Do I just live it up like the spring-breakers in Miami, or do I allow despair to set in around me?  What’s another legitimate alternative to these two choices?

At times of crisis there is often a summoning of solidarity in the name of the common good.  We even take such disasters out of our hands and call them an act of God, since no human can be to blame.  This is the right and proper response.  The need to think of others is real, and certainly times of crisis require all of us pulling together to see us through.  But Thucydides reminds us that plagues and natural disasters are not simply the act of God; whatever their origins, humanity often does much to exacerbate the problem.  Thus by engaging in a questionable war and taking the strategy of bringing people from the countryside into the city, and thereby overcrowding the city, the Athenians greatly increased the suffering and fatality of the plague.  The plague’s lethality can in part be attributed to an act of mere humans.  The call for the common good can also ring hollow for many if it is sounded only when the affluent come into danger or risk losing financially.  If a society has accepted gross economic inequality, if it has functioned on the principle of private gains and public losses, if it has marginalized groups of people and ignored their pleas for a more just society, then calls for coming together, however real and necessary, seem quite the opposite of the common good and appear more like hypocrisy.  Those who have already been alienated will be slow to heed the call.  The common good needs to be the common good all the time not just when there is a crisis. 

Thucydides was not merely speaking of the Athenians of 430 B.C.E. at all.  He was writing a history for the ages – a ktēma eis aiei  – for you and me of 2020 C.E., us Americans, and Europeans, and Asians.  Are we merely reliving the plague of Athens all over again as humanity has across the centuries?  Has our narrative already been written whether it is Covid-19 or some other pandemic?  I may have not stolen the funeral pyre of another, but have I committed the modern day equivalent?  And even if I have not done the equivalent, have I taken a step in that direction and prepared myself in advance to do so when the proper time arrives?  There is a Thucydides amongst us, scribbling down our lives and responses to this difficult time.  She will undoubtedly write about the powerful and famous, but she will also write of the nameless American or Italian or Chinese.  Will she, despite the new names and places, be accused of merely plagiarizing Thucydides because of our own faults, the smudge of humanity, or will she be able to write a new narrative?

Resources

Thucydides, On Justice, Power, and Human Nature, trans. Paul Woodruff, Hackett, 1993, is a  fine abridgement of the text and a good translation; the introduction is a helpful overview of Thucydides’ life and writings.

Papagrigorakis, Manolis J. and Christos Yapijakis, Philippos N. Synodinos, Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani.  “DNA Examination of Ancient Dental Pulp Incriminates Typhoid Fever as a Probably Cause of the Plague of Athens.”  International Journal of Infectious Diseases 10 (2006): 206-214.   

Bella, Timothy.  “‘If I get corona, I get corona’: Miami Spring Breakers Say Covid-19 Hasn’t      Stopped Them from Partying.”  Washington Post March 19, 2020.

Chiu, Allyson.  “‘China has blood on its hands’: Fox News Hosts Join Trump in Blame-Shifting.”  Washington Post March 19, 2020.

Eilperin, Juliet and Ben Golliver.  “VIPs Go to the Head of the Line for Coronavirus Tests.”  Washington Post March 19, 2020.