Here again pestilence figures as a signal evidence of God’s displeasure. An angel is the agent by which He spreads the plague, and the drawn sword, Israel’s favourite weapon, replaces the bow and arrow. The sheathing of the sword is the sign that the pestilence is ended. This imagery appears again and again in Christian literature and art, and seems to have its origin here. Angels are a beautiful fancy of all religions of the East. So vivid is the primitive conception of pestilence, that we find it personified from earliest times: now as an archer-god: now as one walking in darkness: now as an angel with drawn sword. David offers the same expiatory sacrifice and rears a commemorative altar, as was done in the [plague of Ashdod].
Pierre Mignard (1610-95) has painted the [plague of David]. The original is lost, but an engraving by Audran is to be had at the Chalcographie of the Louvre. As with Poussin, the scene is set with a background of classical architecture, but the rendering of the figures shows little trace of classical feeling. The central theme is the idea of devotion in the presence of suffering. An angel in the sky is pouring forth sulphurous fumes from two vessels, as brimstone and fire were rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah. On the peristyle of a temple King David offers sacrifices of atonement to stay the plague, while the people prostrate themselves in attitudes of supplication around the steps of the temple. In the background is a cascade of water falling into a basin, beside which one man lies dying, while others endeavour to slake their thirst. Two men hasten forward to drive them from the basin, before they pollute its water. This incident is derived with some licence of interpretation from the narrative of Thucydides. In the centre of the picture, reminiscent of Raphael, a young woman lies dying in her husband’s arms, her dead child still stretched across her knees. In the foreground is a charcoal brazier giving off purifying fumes. Near it a doctor, who has just incised a bubo in a woman’s armpit, falls back in a state of collapse, dropping his bistoury and bowl, while his assistant, who is still holding the woman’s arm away from her side, grasps at his master to prevent him falling. A bystander makes off in horrified dismay. Compassion and cowardice are here ranged side by side. To the right two men are distributing food and medicine to the sick. An attendant kneels to offer a stricken man a cup of water, while a torch-bearer follows with a lighted torch to disinfect the air. Close beside them lies a dog dead. To the left one young woman is giving some remedy in a spoon to another stretched on the ground, while behind them stand a woman and child, both in tears. Detached incidents fill in the picture. A woman grasps a delirious man as he escapes from his house. A man carries off a girl in his arms. A woman tears her hair over the dead body of her child. A woman draws up food to her window with basket and cord.
With the exception of the [plague of Ashdod], it is difficult to hazard a guess at the nature of these Biblical plagues. All through the Old Testament, sword, famine, and pestilence are habitually linked together. As plague has followed the flag of commerce, so famine and typhus have followed the flag of war. During the Thirty Years’ War the whole of Central Europe was devastated by famine and typhus. They were rampant in the wake of Napoleon’s armies, and thousands perished of typhus during the retreat from Moscow. In the Crimea typhus decimated the ill-fed army of the French, and only to-day, as it were, have we learnt that the body-louse stands as the connecting link between famine and typhus. The eighteenth century in Ireland, even when war was absent, was an almost unbroken record of famine and typhus, and Ireland was quit of epidemic typhus only when she had so widened her area of supplies as to ensure immunity from famine. For her deliverance from typhus Ireland is beholden to her potatoes, not to her physicians. In the light then of the evidence of modern history, typhus may well have figured prominently in the list of Biblical plagues. Still there are not wanting many instances in which true plague has followed hard on the heels of famine; and in India cholera and dysentery only too often appear, to complete the work that famine has but half done.
CHAPTER II
The conception of pestilence as a punishment for sin is as prominent in Greek as in Hebrew literature. We have seen it in the Homeric story, and we see it again, where we should less expect it, in Sophocles. Pestilence still centres round the personality of Apollo, but whereas in Homer Apollo stays the plague, in Sophocles he is appealed to only for knowledge, whereby to stay it. Homer endows him with special power, Sophocles only with special knowledge. In Homer he is the god of the bright light (φοῖβος), that dispels the darkness of pestilence: in Sophocles his is the light that illumines the dark places of mind.
The Oedipus Tyrannus seems to have been first publicly performed between 429-420 b.c., possibly therefore before the plague of Athens had finally died out. Sophocles is certainly not describing the plague of Athens in the guise of a Theban plague, but it must needs have coloured his thoughts as well as those of his audience. His description of the pestilence blighting the crops, and causing murrain among cattle and disease and death among men, suggests one of the famine plagues common in ancient history. Hesiod[41] was not unaware of them (λιμὸν ὁμοῦ καὶ λοιμόν). Sophocles is the first writer to attempt even in outline a description of pestilence, and in doing so he has drawn the picture of pestilence sent by the gods for the punishment of sin. The way of atonement is sought for at Delphi, and pending this knowledge supplication is made to Athena, Artemis, and Apollo, the deities who control pestilence and have the plague-stricken city in their special keeping. Here is the invocation to Apollo, the Delian Healer:
Shower from the golden string Thine arrows, Lycian King. O Phoebe, let thy fiery lances fly Resistless, as they rove Through Xanthus’ mountain-grove! O Theban Bacchus of the lustrous eye, With torch and trooping Maenads and bright crown, Blaze on the god whom all in Heaven disown.[42]
Set in this archaic atmosphere the Oedipus Tyrannus reads strange beside the realistic record of Thucydides, published only a few years later. But Sophocles has given only in outline what Thucydides has given in arresting detail.