Section I: The Ancient World Dr. Eli Diamond, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Dalhousie University
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. 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.
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
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 3
