Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

Though Thucydides was the first of extant writers to enunciate clearly the doctrine of contagion, there is reason to think that Oriental medicine had already grasped the idea. The Levitical ordinances seem to recognize it in the case of leprosy. It is true that these had not reached their final recension till after the time of Thucydides, but at the same time they represent a body of much older tradition.

Thucydides is careful to state that the season was not a sickly one, for Hippocrates himself attributed pestilence to heat and south winds distempering the atmosphere, and following the example of Acron and Empedocles of Agrigentum, essayed to alter the constitution of the atmosphere, in a season of pestilence, by kindling large fires. Acron aimed only at reducing its humidity, but Hippocrates may have sought to destroy by fumigation putrid effluvia, engendered by the heat in the air. His example was scrupulously followed in the Plague of London in 1666, and in that of Marseilles in 1720. A comparison of Thucydides with Diodorus Siculus redounds but little to the credit of the latter. Diodorus submits three distinct agencies as producing the plague of Athens by their concerted action. First, that so much rain had fallen in the preceding winter, that the soil had become saturated and waterlogged: following upon this an unusually hot summer led to the exhalation from the soil of putrid effluvia, that contaminated the air. In fact pestilence was a product of the marsh miasma. Empedocles of Agrigentum was reputed to have delivered Selinus from a pestilence, in the fifth century b.c., by draining its marshes, and an extant coin commemorates the event: and Hippocrates clearly recognized the association of periodic (i. e. malarial) fevers with marshes.

Secondly, he cites lack of good food as a contributory cause, for the rain had also damaged the grain. This was not an unreasonable proposition, for the prevalence of the ergot fungus in rye grain after a wet season has given rise to many and widespread epidemics of ergotism.

Thirdly, the Etesian winds did not blow, so that the air became superheated, inflaming men’s bodies with all sorts of burning distempers. It is enough for Diodorus that Hippocrates, Lucretius, and others had postulated these causes of pestilence, to secure for them acceptance in the sober record of his history. Thucydides declines even to discuss such vague hypotheses, and chooses for himself the better part of describing the actual symptoms of the disease, as he had experienced them in his own person, and witnessed them in the sufferings of others, so that any one familiar with them might be able to recognize the disorder at once, in the event of its reappearance.

To Thucydides then is due the credit not only of the first detailed description of an actual visitation of pestilence, but of a description that breathes in every line the true spirit of history, the recording of past events as a medium for the surer forecasting of the future—the spirit that animates him in all his historical writing to give ‘a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things’—the whole duty of the historian, which not even Herodotus had recognized to the full before him. So anxious is he that his readers shall see things as he saw them, and learn the same lessons from them as he has learnt, that he is willing on occasion to manipulate his narrative, as when he brings forward the great Funeral Speech of Pericles into immediate juxtaposition to the narrative of the pestilence, assuredly so as to heighten the dramatic effect. So vivid and so forcible is his picture of the plague, that it is difficult to believe that some ten years had elapsed before he set pen to paper, and some thirty or more before the whole attained its present form. It is no matter for surprise that Lucretius, Procopius, Boccaccio, and Froissart should have paid the homage of conscious imitation to this virile narrative. ([See Appendix].)[49]

Thucydides was the first to draw a picture of the demoralization of society in the presence of pestilence—a theme that became a commonplace with later historians of plague. The futility of the physicians, the merciless march of the pestilence, the sufferings of the sick, the neglect of the dead, the pollution of temples, the sacrilegious funeral rites, these scenes and the like throng the kaleidoscope of human misery. The sacred ties of kinship yielded under the cruel emotion of fear. Lawlessness prevailed everywhere, for men seeing the uncertainty of life and riches resolved to enjoy themselves, while they could. Those who saw all perishing alike thought that worship or neglect of the gods made no difference.

It is difficult to determine what traces of the pestilence are to be found in contemporary Greek art and architecture. By some the statue of Health Athena, set up by the Athenians just outside the eastern portico of the Propylaea, is believed to have commemorated the passing of the plague of Athens. Her cult was much older than this, and perhaps derives from some primitive conception of an Earth Mother, the great protectress of all her children, as in Christian hagiology the Madonna of Health shelters them from plague and pestilence.

Pausanias[50] regards the romantic temple of Apollo at Bassae as a memorial of the deliverance of Phigalia from an offset of this plague of 430 b.c. He seems to infer this from the dedication of the temple to Apollo, under his surname the Helper (Ἐπικούριος). On the other hand, we know from Thucydides[51] that the plague scarcely touched Peloponnesus. It is unlikely also that an Athenian architect, Ictinus, who as Pausanias says built it, would have worked for the Peloponnesians during the war with Athens.

The same doubt attaches to the attribution of the temple of Apollo the Helper at Elis, and that of Pan the Deliverer in Troezen, and the tradition appears in each case to be referable to the surname of the god, coupled with the dates at which they were erected.

Pausanias[52] says that a statue of Apollo, Averter of Evil (Ἀλεξίκακος), by Calamis, was erected in Athens as a memorial of deliverance from the plague, but this cannot be the case, as Calamis was dead before the plague commenced.