But people do not warm to the existential arbitrariness of this. With Covid-19, experts insist, your two best bets are: wash your hands often, touch your face never. We, meanwhile, bring to the struggle our ever-improving drugs and hygiene. Bacteria and viruses spread blindly where they can, their pathways facilitated by our globalised world.
We still tend to see agency in our pandemics.ĭisease has no agency. But in one respect we haven’t advanced at all. We understand contagious disease vastly better, and have a greater arsenal of medicine and hygiene to fight it. It can only be the god.īetween then and now there have been prodigious advances in medical science.
But this thought doesn’t occur to Thucydides. Hindsight suggests that Athens, under siege – its population swollen with refugees, everyone living in unsanitary conditions – was at risk of contagion in a way the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, clearly wasn’t. Soon afterwards, Sparta’s enemies started dying of the plague.
The Spartans had cannily supplicated the god and he in return had promised victory. Thucydides, the Athenian historian, has a simple explanation for the epidemic: Apollo. Seven centuries later a plague struck Periclean Athens, killing a quarter of the city’s population and setting the city-state on a path to military defeat at the hands of Sparta. Dean Koontz's novel 'The Eyes of Darkness' (1981) made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” When the Greeks make amends and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured. The plague lasts nine days, brief by modern epidemiological standards. The god manifests his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greeks disrespect one of Apollo’s priests.
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