Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

CHAPTER IV

Into his great poem ‘On the Nature of Things’ (De Rerum Natura) Lucretius has grafted a description of the plague of Athens, converting the record of Thucydides into Latin hexameter verse. His prime motive in its introduction is to show that the chief phenomena of nature, and pestilence as one of these, all harmonize with the atomic theory, that he has adopted from Democritus and Epicurus. Lucretius indeed propounds an atomic explanation of pestilence, consonant in its main features with the doctrines of his contemporary Asclepiades. We can reason of the imperceptible, he argues, only from our knowledge of the perceptible. Our eyes see clouds descend from the sky, and noxious vapours rise as mists from the land. Our minds then may not unreasonably infer, that pestilence also either comes down from heaven by the medium of clouds, or rises up from the rain-sodden earth by the medium of mist. In each manner the atmosphere becomes impregnated with noxious atoms that distemper it. These particles enter our bodies, either by the air we breathe, or by the food and drink they have contaminated, and thus provoke infection. Such, he holds, was the cause of the plague of Athens.

The views of Lucretius as to the proximate causes of pestilence are almost identical with those of his contemporary, Diodorus Siculus. With each of them moisture, as cloud or mist, distempers the air or damages food, and so finds entry into lungs or stomach. With each an ill wind may engender pestilence: with Lucretius, by bringing a harmful to replace a beneficent atmosphere: with Diodorus Siculus, by failing to cool the air to an appropriate temperature, thus causing fever. To Lucretius clouds, mists, and winds are carriers of noxious particles. In this atomic theory of infection he faintly foreshadows the doctrine of particulate poisons, that held the field of scientific speculation within the memory of living men. But even so Lucretius came less near the truth than his great contemporary Varro,[92] who actually ascribes disease in animals to living organisms beyond the range of human vision (‘crescunt animalia quaedam minuta, quae non possunt oculi consequi, et per aera, intus per os ac nares perveniunt atque efficiunt difficiles morbos’).

To Lucretius pestilence is a purely natural process, in which there is no place for the handiwork of gods. Of this theme, in varying applications, he is a fierce exponent throughout the length and breadth of his poem. Perhaps it is for this reason that he chose the narrative of Thucydides as the basis of his poem, for Thucydides, too, referred epidemic pestilence to natural causation, not to the special act of any god. Like Thucydides, too, Lucretius accepts without reserve the doctrine of contagion:

Qui fuerant autem praesto contagibus ibant Atque labore.

(Those who had stayed near at hand would die of contagion and the toil.)

Pestilence, too, affords Lucretius a rare text for the exposure of the hollow sham of state-worship, which represented now all that survived of religion in Rome. We have seen how much of Roman religion had its origin from time to time in the necessity of exorcising pestilence: and we have seen how popular superstition revivified the ritual of popular atonement. Now the Sibylline books are consulted. Now a nail is driven into the temple of Jupiter. Now Apollo is brought to Rome, and a temple erected in his honour. Now Aesculapius comes in the form of a serpent to deliver Rome: now Hygieia. Now sacrifices are offered and feasts set out before the statues of the gods. This is the fabric that Lucretius, fired with iconoclastic zeal, would fain demolish, not as the enemy of religion, but as the ruthless enemy of religious sham.

In literary form this part of the great Lucretian poem falls far below the rest. The poem as a whole possesses a rugged grandeur of its own, but this terminal portion, while retaining all the ruggedness, has lost most of the grandeur. It gives the impression of having been merely rough cast, to await the polishing, which, owing to the premature death of the poet in 55 b.c., it never received. Fault also may be found with the literary substance, for in places he misunderstands the language of Thucydides, and misrepresents his meaning. Again, he incorporates here and there fragments of Hippocrates and fancies of his own into the record of Thucydides, as though all disease presented a single clinical facies. For example, he reproduces as cor the καρδία of Thucydides, which the latter used, as did Hippocrates, for the cardiac end of the stomach. Again, he misinterprets Thucydides with regard to the effect of the disease on the extremities. He represents στερισκόμενοι τούτων as ferro privati, whereas clearly Thucydides means that the parts sloughed off, not that they were amputated. It would seem that Lucretius was versed in the Greek language of his day, but that language was no longer the Greek of Thucydides and Plato. Nor does Lucretius scorn the full licence that Horace accords to the poet, and exigencies of metre sometimes compel him not to adhere strictly to his model: thus he transforms the critical days into the eighth and ninth. One long passage beginning

Multaque praeterea mortis tum signa dabantur

consists of various excerpts from Hippocrates turned into Latin verse. These are gathered from such diverse parts of the Hippocratic writings, as to indicate considerable acquaintance with them. The lineaments of the Hippocratic facies are reproduced in detail. The fact is that Lucretius was more anxious for the picturesqueness than for the accuracy of his description, provided always that the logical soundness of the main thesis and its didactic purpose were not compromised thereby.