“There’s a story of the tyrant of Troezen. Because he wanted to get rid of any plots and conspiracies against him, he ordered that no one could talk to anyone else in public or private. This was an impossible and harsh matter. But the people circumvented the tyrant’s command: they were nodding to each other and using hand gestures too. They also used angry, calm, or bright facial expressions. Each person was clear to all in his emotions, showing the suffering in his spirit on his face by grimacing at bad news or implacable conditions.
These actions caused the tyrant annoyance too—for he was believing that even silence accompanied by plentiful gestures was contriving something bad for him. So, he stopped this too.
One of those who was burdened and troubled by this absurdity was longing to end the monarchy. A group rose up with him and stood together sharing their tears. A report came to the tyrant that no one was using gestures any longer, because, instead, they were trafficking in tears. Because he was eager to stop this, he was proclaiming not only slavery of the tongue and gestures, but he was even trying to ban the freedom of the eyes we get from nature. So he went there without delay with his bodyguards to stop the tears. But as soon as the people saw him they took away his bodyguards’ weapons and killed the tyrant.”
There once was a tyrant from Troizen Who banned speech in public and said then If they grimace and fuss Or shed tears thus I'll send in my thugs to despoil 'em
“Then there was a younger daughter, Jane, still at home, who passed her life between her mother’s work-table and her father’s Greek, mending linen and learning to scan iambics,—for Mr. Crawley in his early days had been a ripe scholar.”
[…]
“But beneath the hands of Mr. Crawley it always stood open; and with the exception of the small space at which he wrote, was covered with dog’s-eared books, from nearly all of which the covers had disappeared. There were there two odd volumes of Euripides, a Greek Testament, an Odyssey, a duodecimo Pindar, and a miniature Anacreon. There was half a Horace,—the two first books of the Odes at the beginning, and the De Arte Poetica at the end having disappeared. There was a little bit of a volume of Cicero, and there were Cæsar’s Commentaries, in two volumes, so stoutly bound that they had defied the combined ill-usage of time and the Crawley family. All these were piled upon the secretary, with many others,—odd volumes of sermons and the like; but the Greek and Latin lay at the top, and showed signs of most frequent use.”
[…]
“And he had Greek at his fingers’ ends,—as his daughter knew very well. And even to this day he would sometimes recite to them English poetry, lines after lines, stanzas upon stanzas, in a sweet low melancholy voice, on long winter evenings when occasionally the burden of his troubles would be lighter to him than was usual. Books in Latin and in French he read with as much ease as in English, and took delight in such as came to him, when he would condescend to accept such loans from the deanery. And there was at times a lightness of heart about the man. In the course of the last winter he had translated into Greek irregular verse the very noble ballad of Lord Bateman, maintaining the rhythm and the rhyme, and had repeated it with uncouth glee till his daughter knew it all by heart. And when there had come to him a five-pound note from some admiring magazine editor as the price of the same,—still through the dean’s hands,—he had brightened up his heart and had thought for an hour or two that even yet the world would smile upon him. His wife knew well that he was not mad; but yet she knew that there were dark moments with him, in which his mind was so much astray that he could not justly be called to account as to what he might remember and what he might forget. How would it be possible to explain all this to a judge and jury, so that they might neither say that he was dishonest, nor yet that he was mad?”
[…]
“Early on the following morning she contrived to let him know that she was about to send a neighbour’s son over with a note to Mr. Walker, fearing to urge him further to change his mind; but hoping that he might express his purpose of doing so when he heard that the letter was to be sent; but he took no notice whatever of her words. At this moment he was reading Greek with his daughter, or rather rebuking her because she could not be induced to read Greek.”
Past mid-October, it is about time things start to get a bit creepy…
Aelian, On the Nature of Animals 1.51
“People say that the spine of a human corpse turns into a snake as the marrow decomposes. As the beast slips out, so the most savage creature is born from the mildest. In this way the remains of men who were once fine and noble rest and they have peace as their prize just as the soul too does of these kinds of men according to what is sung and hymned by the wise.
But the spines of evil men bring forth these kinds of things after life too. Well, the truth is that the story is either completely a myth or if these things prove trustworthy, then it seems to me that the evil man’s corpse has earned this reward of becoming the serpent’s father.”
Tully, in the fourth of his Tusculans, distinguishes these terrors which arise from the apprehension of some terrible object heard or seen, from other fears, and so doth Patritius lib. 5. Tit. 4. de regis institut. Of all fears they are most pernicious and violent, and so suddenly alter the whole temperature of the body, move the soul and spirits, strike such a deep impression, that the parties can never be recovered, causing more grievous and fiercer melancholy, as Felix Plater, c. 3. de mentis alienat. speaks out of his experience, than any inward cause whatsoever: and imprints itself so forcibly in the spirits, brain, humours, that if all the mass of blood were let out of the body, it could hardly be extracted. This horrible kind of melancholy (for so he terms it) had been often brought before him, and troubles and affrights commonly men and women, young and old of all sorts. Hercules de Saxonia calls this kind of melancholy (ab agitatione spirituum) by a peculiar name, it comes from the agitation, motion, contraction, dilatation of spirits, not from any distemperature of humours, and produceth strong effects. This terror is most usually caused, as Plutarch will have, from some imminent danger, when a terrible object is at hand, heard, seen, or conceived, truly appearing, or in a dream: and many times the more sudden the accident, it is the more violent.
Stat terror animis, et cor attonitum salit,
Pavidumque trepidis palpitat venis jecur.
Their soul’s affright, their heart amazed quakes,
The trembling liver pants i’ th’ veins, and aches.
Artemidorus the grammarian lost his wits by the unexpected sight of a crocodile, Laurentius 7. de melan. The massacre at Lyons, 1572, in the reign of Charles IX., was so terrible and fearful, that many ran mad, some died, great-bellied women were brought to bed before their time, generally all affrighted aghast. Many lose their wits by the sudden sight of some spectrum or devil, a thing very common in all ages, saith Lavater part 1. cap. 9. as Orestes did at the sight of the Furies, which appeared to him in black (as Pausanias records). The Greeks call them μορμολύχεια, which so terrify their souls, or if they be but affrighted by some counterfeit devils in jest,
———ut pueri trepidant, atque omnia caecis
In tenebris metuunt———
as children in the dark conceive hobgoblins, and are so afraid,
they are the worse for it all their lives. Some by sudden fires, earthquakes, inundations, or any such dismal objects: Themiscon the physician fell into a hydrophobia, by seeing one sick of that disease: (Dioscorides l. 6. c. 33.) or by the sight of a monster, a carcase, they are disquieted many months following, and cannot endure the room where a corpse hath been, for a world would not be alone with a dead man, or lie in that bed many years after in which a man hath died.
At Basil many little children in the springtime went to gather flowers in a meadow at the town’s end, where a malefactor hung in gibbets; all gazing at it, one by chance flung a stone, and made it stir, by which accident, the children affrighted ran away; one slower than the rest, looking back, and seeing the stirred carcase wag towards her, cried out it came after, and was so terribly affrighted, that for many days she could not rest, eat, or sleep, she could not be pacified, but melancholy, died. In the same town another child, beyond the Rhine, saw a grave opened, and upon the sight of a carcase, was so troubled in mind that she could not be comforted, but a little after departed, and was buried by it. Platerus observat. l. 1, a gentlewoman of the same city saw a fat hog cut up, when the entrails were opened, and a noisome savour offended her nose, she much misliked, and would not longer abide: a physician in presence, told her, as that hog, so was she, full of filthy excrements, and aggravated the matter by some other loathsome instances, insomuch, this nice gentlewoman apprehended it so deeply, that she fell forthwith a-vomiting, was so mightily distempered in mind and body, that with all his art and persuasions, for some months after, he could not restore her to herself again, she could not forget it, or remove the object out of her sight, Idem.
Many cannot endure to see a wound opened, but they are offended: a man executed, or labour of any fearful disease, as possession, apoplexies, one bewitched; or if they read by chance of some terrible thing, the symptoms alone of such a disease, or that which they dislike, they are instantly troubled in mind, aghast, ready to apply it to themselves, they are as much disquieted as if they had seen it, or were so affected themselves. Hecatas sibi videntur somniare, they dream and continually think of it.
“When you see me you, fail to recognize me
But when you glanced at this lock of hair
Or followed along the shape of my feet,
You took flight and imagined me there!”
Today we come to the second play of the Oresteia, the Libation-Bearers, which follows the death of Agamemnon some time later with the return of his son Orestes. Motifs from this play remained well-known enough that audiences of the later Elektras by Sophocles and Euripides could be relied upon to recall its moments of recognition and the tension between the expectations placed on Euripides and his hesitation when finally facing the deed.
Along with the rest of the trilogy, the Libation-Bearers earned first prize at the City Dionysia in 458 BCE. But what was it about these plays that charmed the judges and audiences? This play certainly does not present the heroic narrative one might expect from the Homeric Odyssey, where Orestes is repeated hailed as a returning avenger and a model for Telemachus. This Orestes reunites joyously with his sister and joins her in a shared song of lament that takes up the central portion of the play. When the time to act arrives, pushed on by Apollo’s prophecies, Orestes hesitates before taking his mother’s life. And then he is cursed by the furies, pushing him into the exile resolved in the Eumenides.
The story of Agamemnon and Orestes hinges on the balance of justice and vengeance. The horrible logic of the later faces up to the demands of the former and comes up short. In the distance between the two, humankind continues to suffer.
Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers 387-394
“May I sing a song of victory
Over a slaughtered man
And a woman as she dies—
Why should I hide
The kind of plan floating in my mind?
Before my heart’s prow
A driving anger blows,
Hatred’s rage.”
Chorus – Carlos Bellato, Tamieka Chavis, and Sara Valentine
Slave – Sara Valentine
Special Guests: Anna Uhlig and Oliver Taplin
Special Director: Liz Fisher
Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers 585-95
“The earth feeds many things,
Terrible griefs of fear,
And the folds of the sea
Are full with similar monsters.
Lights burning between
Sky and earth cause harm
To creatures on wing and on foot.
You might even mention the wind-borne rage of hurricanes.
But who can speak of the arrogant
Mind of a man or the all-daring
Lusts in a woman’s thoughts,
The joined paths of mortal ruin?”
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Associate Director: Liz Fisher Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Dramaturg: Emma Pauly Executive Producer: Lanah Koelle (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers 434-438
“You speak of complete dishonor!
She will payback the dishonoring of my father
With willing gods
With my willing hands.
When I have cut her out, may I die too.”
October 28 Libation Bearers, Aeschylus; translation by O. Taplin
November 4 Eumenides, Aeschylus
with Ellen McLaughlin (Barnard College) and Andrew Simpson (Catholic Univeristy of America); translation by O. Taplin
November 11 Medea, Euripides
with Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford)
Pieter Lastman – De offerstrijd tussen Orestes en Pylades
Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers 548-550
“It is right—because she raised a terrible monster—
For her to die violently. Once transformed into a snake,
I kill her. That’s what this dream is telling us.”
CW: Violence against children; infanticide; violence against an intersex person. There are a range of intersex tales in ancient Greece, for ancient criticism of their superstitious and salacious nature, go here.
This might be the most disturbing thing I have read all summer. When I was reading the Greek for the final sentence below, I actually uttered “what the f*ck” aloud. Go here for the second part.
Phlegon of Tralles, On Marvels 2 (Part 1)
Hieron the Alexandrian or Ephesian tells of the following wonder which occurred in Aitolia.
There was a certain citizen, Polykritos, who was voted Aitolian arkhon by the people. His fellow citizens considered him worthy for three years because of the nobility of his forebears. During the time he was in that office, he married a Lokrian woman. After he shared a bed with her for three nights, he died on the fourth.
The woman remained in their home widowed. When she gave birth, she had a child who had two sets of genitals, both male and female, which was alarmingly different from nature. The parts up top were completely rough and masculine and those near the thighs were feminine and softer.
Awestruck by this, her relatives forced the child to the agora and held an assembly to take advice about this, calling together the omen readers and interpreters. Some were claiming that this meant there would be dissent between Aitolians and Lokrians, since the mother was Lokrian and the father was Aitolian. But others believed that it was necessary to take the child and mother to the frontier and have them burned.
While the people were deliberating, suddenly the dead Polykritos appeared in the assembly dressed in black near his child. Even though the citizens were thunderstruck by this apparition and many of them were rushing to flight, he asked the citizens to be brave and not to be rattled by the sight which appeared. Then a bit of the chaos and the uproar receded, and he said these things in a slight voice:
“My fellow citizens, although I am dead in my body, I live among you in goodwill and thanks. And now I am present imploring those people who have power of this land to your collective benefit. I advise you who are citizens not to be troubled or angry at the impossible miracle which has happened. And I ask all of you, vouching for the safety of each, is to give me the child who was born from me so that no violence may come from those who make some different kind of plans and that there may be no beginning of malicious and hard affairs because of a conflict on my part.
It would not be possible for me to overlook the burning of my child thanks to the shock of these interpreters who are advising you. I do have some pity, because you are at a loss when you see this kind of unexpected sight as to how you might respond to it correctly for current events. If you assent to me without fear, you will be relieved of the present anxieties and of the evils to come. But if you fall prey to another opinion, then I have fear for you that you will come into some incurable sufferings because you did not trust me.
Therefore, because of the goodwill I experienced while I was alive and the unexpectedness of the current situation, I am predicting the suffering to you. I think it is right that you do not delay any longer but that, once you deliberate correcly and obey the things I have said, you should hand over the child to me with a blessing. It is not fitting for me to waste any more time because of the men who rule this land.”
After he said these things, he kept quiet for a bit as he awaited what kind of decision there would be once they deliberated about it. Some were thinking it was right to give him the child and consider the sight sacred and the influence of a deity; but most of them denied this, claiming that it was necessary to deliberate in a calmer atmopshere when they were not at so great a loss, because the affair was a big deal.
When he saw that they were not moving in his favor but were actually impeding the decision there, he spoke these things in turn: “Fellow Citizens. If something more terrible happens to you because of a lack of decision, do not blame me, but this fate which directs you to something worse—it sets you in opposition to me and compels me to transgress against my child.”
When the mob ran together in strife over surrendering the monster, he reached for the child and and pushed off most of the people boldly before butchering and eating the child.
“If we truly encounter some pain and grief, we need to force cheer and ease from the good things we have left to us, smoothing away everything from the outside with our inner strength.
But for those things whose nature bears no evil, but whose pain is completely and simply fashioned from empty opinion, we need to behave as with children who fear masks, putting them into their hands and turning them over, training them not to think too much of them. In this way, by touching things and submitting them to reason, we can uncover their weakness, their emptiness, and their histrionic facade.”
Marcus Cornelius Fronto to Antoninus Augustus Ambr. 390 17
“Aesopus the tragedian reportedly never put a mask on his face until he had looked at it for awhile from the other side so that he might change his gestures and alter his voice in line with the appearance of the mask.”
Tragicus Aesopus fertur non prius ullam suo induisse capiti personam, antequam diu ex adverso contemplaret, ut pro personae voltu gestum sibi capessere ac vocem <adsimulare posset>
Diogenes Laertius, Ariston 160
“[He compared] the wise man to a good actor who could take up the role of both Thersites and Agamemnon and play either appropriately
“There will soon be a time when the tragic actors will believe that their masks and costumes are their real selves. You have these things as material and a plot. Say something so we may know whether you are a tragic actor or a comedian. For they have the rest of their material in common [apart from the words]. If one, then, should deprive the actor of his buskins and his masks and introduce him to the stage as only a ghost, has the actor been lost or does he remain? If he has a voice, he remains.”
“Remember that you are an actor in a drama, whatever kind the playwright desires. If he wishes it to be short, it is short. If he wants it to be long, it is long.
If he wants you to act as a beggar, act even that part seriously. And the same if you are a cripple, a ruler, or a fool. This is your role: to play well the part you were given. It is another’s duty to choose.”
Teles the Philosopher, On Self-Sufficiency (Hense, 5)
“Just as a good actor will carry off well whatever role the poet assigns him, so too a good person should manage well whatever chance allots. For chance, as Biôn says, just like poetry, assigns the role of the first speaker and the second speaker, now a king and then a vagabond. Don’t long to be the second speaker when you have the role of the first. Otherwise, you will create disharmony.”
By chance a fox had seen a tragic mask: What a sight, he has no brains inside!–he gasped. To whomever fortune grants honor and glory, It deprives of common sense, as in this story.
Personam tragicam forte vulpes viderat: O quanta species, inquit, cerebrum non habet! Hoc illis dictum est, quibus honorem et gloriam Fortuna tribuit, sensum communem abstulit.
N.B. I saw a few threads from the amazing Flint Dibble earlier in the year and invited him to put them together here. Just in time for an epidemic spike, he delivered! – Joel
There are lessons to be learned from the failed leadership of Pericles during the plague of Athens in 430 B.C.E. Despite his popularity and great deeds, his mismanagement of the plague and the resulting misery inflicted on the Athenian people led to him losing his election the following year and losing his leading role in the city.
While the situations are very different, there is value in looking to the past to help contextualize our present. Given the unique nature of our own historical moment, this is a key test for the old adage that history repeats for those who don’t learn from it.
The disease first struck in the summer of the second year of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta. It ravaged the Athenians as their entire population was crowded in the besieged city. The specific disease is still debated by scholars, but we know it caused fever, blisters, and sores. Due to the histories of Thucydides (and despite the risk of being infected with Thucyd-431), we have a reasonably detailed record of these events from 2500 years ago (all translations from Mynott 2013).
Thucydides’ eyewitness narrative includes a personal appeal:
I will say what it was like as it happened and will describe facts that would enable anyone investigating any future outbreak to have some prior knowledge and recognize it. I speak as someone who had the disease myself and witnessed others suffering from it.
Thucydides 2.48
The parallels to our perilous situation today are immediately obvious.
The physicians were not able to help at its outset since they were treating it in ignorance, and indeed they themselves suffered the highest mortality since they were the ones most exposed to it. Nor were other human arts of any avail. Whatever supplications people made at sanctuaries and whatever oracles or the like they consulted, all were useless and in the end they abandoned them, defeated by the affliction.
Thucydides 2.47
With no cure from ancient medicine or religion, many people blamed foreigners:
It first came, so it is said, out of Ethiopia beyond Egypt, and then spread into Egypt and Libya and into most of the territory of the Persian King. When it got to Athens it struck the city suddenly, taking hold first in the Peiraeus, so that it was even suggested by the people there that the [Spartans] had put poison in the rain-water tanks… Later on it reached the upper city too and then the mortality became much greater.
Thucydides 2.48
Unfortunately, this is true of most epidemics. It’s really easy to blame others, whether or not they deserve the blame. It’s harder to accept responsibility and deal with the problem. Then and now, us humans need to work at being better to others.
Thucydides’ emotions still resonate with us today: “The most terrible thing of all in this affliction, however, was the sense of despair when someone realised that they were suffering from it; for then they immediately decided in their own minds that the outcome was hopeless” (2.51).
The plague tore at the fabric of society:
There was also the fact that one person would get infected as a result of caring for another so that they died in their droves like sheep, and this caused more death than anything else. If in fear they were unwilling to go near each other they died alone… but if they did make contact they lost their lives anyway.
Thucydides 2.51
These are some of the first historical descriptions of the need for social distancing during an epidemic. The invading Spartans recognized the need and “made haste to leave the territory through their fear of the plague” (2.57).
The Athenians trusted in Pericles to lead them through their own unique historical moment. From the wealthy Alcmaeonid family and blessed with powerful oratory skills and nativist and populist policies, he had led the city-state for over two decades. He consolidated Athenian control over the far-flung anti-Persian alliance known as the Delian League turning it into what some historians call the Athenian Empire.
Taking control of the League’s treasury, he oversaw a monumental building program that included lavish marble temples such as the Parthenon (which Shaquille O’Neal once called Greece’s most forgettable nightclub) and also a massive urbanization program that brought water, food, and security for those lucky enough to be citizens (you only had to be born a free male to two Athenian parents and wealth enough to own land).
Photo Credit: Konstantinos Tzortzinis and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
Pericles’ confidence in Athenian power helped spur the start of the Peloponnesian Wars. Tensions had been building up between Athens and Sparta for decades, and as war was debated among the people, Pericles harnessed an innovative strategy to win.
It relied on big, beautiful walls and convenient, at-home delivery.
Sparta had the dominant army, while Athens had the dominant navy. Pericles thought to rely on the city walls to keep Sparta’s army away. The bustling port at Piraeus was also walled and connected by “The Long Walls” to the city, creating a protected corridor for commerce.
Before the war began, Pericles called the entire rural population and the inhabitants of nearby towns into the city. He figured that with the wealth of Athens and a strong naval empire, they could just import everything they needed.
This was a big deal! Thucydides writes (2.16-7) that most Athenians had
lived in the countryside in the traditional way and therefore did not find it at all easy to make the move with their entire households… changing their way of life and leaving behind what each of them felt to be the equivalent of their native city. When they arrived in Athens only a few had homes or places they could take refuge with friends or relatives. Most settled in unoccupied parts of the city and occupied sanctuaries…. [or] in the towers of the city walls or wherever else each of them could. The city could not cope with this general influx; indeed they later divided up the long walls and most of Piraeus into lots and occupied those too.
Thucydides 2.16-7
Pericles’ strategy worked for a year. The Spartan army pillaged the Athenian countryside. The Athenian navy raided the Spartan coastal settlements. But most people were safe. Pericles wrapped up the first year with his famous Funeral Oration, encouraging them to fight on.
The plague struck Athens in the summer of the second year (430 B.C.). Pericles’ wartime strategy was a terrible strategy for containing a contagious disease. Most Athenians, rich or poor, were living in the ancient equivalent of a refugee camp in a besieged city.
Yet, Thucydides’ descriptions, despite not having our germ theory, demonstrate that the Athenians recognized that this disease was spread through close contact. Like today, responsible people knew they needed to socially distance during a plague.
Their general misery was aggravated by people crowding into the city from the fields, and the worst affected were the new arrivals. There were no houses for them but they lived in huts that were stifling in the heat of summer and they were visited by death in conditions of total disorder…. The bodies of those dying were heaped on each other, and in the streets and around the springs half-dead people reeled about…. The sanctuaries in which they had taken shelter were full of the bodies of those who had died there
Thycidides 2.52
Greek archaeologists have uncovered clear archaeological evidence for this dire situation in the form of a mass grave, or plague pit, in which bodies were heaped together. But Pericles ignored the need for social distancing and kept going with his original strategy, letting the Spartans pillage the Attic countryside, while the navy raided Spartan coastlands. The plague didn’t care, it continued to spread through Athens.
But…
The Athenians had undergone a change of heart… feeling the combined pressure of the plague and the war. They now began to criticize Pericles, holding him responsible for persuading them to go to war and for being the agent of the misfortunes they had encountered. They became eager to come to terms with the Spartans. They even sent ambassadors to them, though to no effect. And in complete despair they turned their anger on Pericles
2.59
As Joel Christensen has written, there’s a long tradition in Greek mythology and tragedy of blaming the leader for plague. Pericles recognized this and gave the last of his famous speeches.
I have been expecting your outbreak of feeling against me – and I know the reasons for it. I mean to administer some reminders to you and take you to task for any misplaced resentment against me or any undue weakening in the face of difficulties.” Continuing: “Even though this plague has been inflicted on us, coming out of nowhere (it is in fact the only thing out of all that has happened to have defied prediction). I know it is largely because of this that I am even more a hated figure now – unjustly so.
Thucydides 2.60 and 2.64
He argues to ignore the plague: “We must treat afflictions sent by the gods as necessary ills and bear with courage those that come from our enemies” (2.64) in order to protect their empire.
Thucydides concludes,
With such words Pericles tried to dispel the anger the Athenians felt towards him and distract them from their present troubles…. Indeed the people as a whole did not put aside their anger towards him.
Thucydides 2.65
After this, Pericles’ power as a demagogue waned. This is the last point Thucydides mentions the deeds of Pericles, ending the section by saying “Pericles lived on two years and six months longer.”
We find out from Plutarch’s later biography of Pericles (translated here by Waterfield 1999) how he watched his family died of plague, and eventually caught it himself and died. As Plutarch notes (176) he lost his next election and was relieved of his command: “But he did not succeed in getting them to shed their anger or change their minds before they had taken their ballots in their hands.”
They had been persuaded by his political enemies that the plague was caused by packing crowds of refugees from the countryside into the city, where, at the height of summer, large numbers of people were being forced to stay all jumbled together in stifling tents…. The man responsible for all this, his enemies said, was Pericles: because of the war he had squeezed the rustic rabble inside the city walls and … left them penned up like cattle, to infect one another with death.
Plutarch, Life of Pericles, 34
If Pericles had not ignored the devastation of the plague and sued for peace, they could have protected their refugee population. Ancient history would look very different. Instead, the plague ravaged them and – weakened – then they still lost the war.
History shows that the decisions leaders make matter. We can see this with the Athenian plague and, in front of our own eyes, in our current historical moment.
We must learn from history and entrust our fate to a leader who will take our pandemic seriously, listen to scientists (and historians), and enforce mask-wearing and social distancing. Thucydides and the ancient Athenians knew this. They voted out of office the greatest leader their city had known. While our situation is different, our misery is similar. It is time to vote.
It seemed best to the Argives and it was so unanimous
that I felt young again in my old heart
for the air was thick with the right hands
of the whole people as they approved this plan:
that we strangers should have the right to settle
here freely, safe from arrest or attack from mortals,
that no one domestic or foreign might drive us away.
And if force is used against us,
that any citizen who does not help us
may lose his rights in exile from this country.
The leader of the Pelasgians persuaded the people
when he spoke about us, warning about how the rage
of Zeus the suppliant god might fall in future days
on the city, promising a double curse
on citizen and foreigner alike, emerging for the city
to be an insatiable parent of pain.
When they heard this, the Argive public voted
without the official call to approve the asylum.”
“Here, the convoy fleeing from their own homes met an armed force which was being taken for the food-gathering there to be safer; the disorganized and unarmed crowd which was mixed as well with noncombatants was murdered by armed men.”
hoc sedibus suis extorre agmen in praesidium incidit quod ad Thaumacos quo tutior frumentatio esset ducebatur: incondita inermisque multitudo, mixta et imbelli turba, ab armatis caesa est
This is a kind of argument deduced from connected notions: “If the highest praise must be given to piety, then you should be moved when you see Quintus Metellus grieving so dutifully”. And, as for a deduction from generalities, “if magistrates owe their power to the Roman people, then why impeach Norbanus when he depends on the will of the citizenry?”
Ex coniunctis sic argumenta ducuntur: ‘si pietati summa tribuenda laus est, debetis moveri, cum Q. Metellum tam pie lugere videatis.’ Ex genere autem: ‘si magistratus in populi Romani potestate esse debent, quid Norbanum accusas, cuius tribunatus voluntati paruit civitatis?’
Suetonius, Julius Caesar 1.30
“Others claim that he feared being compelled to provide a defense for the things he had done in his first consulate against auspices, laws, and legislative actions. For Marcus Cato often announced with an oath that he would impeach Caesar by name, as soon as he dismissed his army.”
Alii timuisse dicunt, ne eorum, quae primo consulatu adversus auspicia legesque et intercessiones gessisset, rationem reddere cogeretur; cum M. Cato identidem nec sine iure iurando denuntiaret delaturum se nomen eius, simul ac primum exercitum dimisisset
Accius, Fr. 598 (From Oedipus)
TEIRESIAS
“They impeach him voluntarily and they separate him
From his good fortune and all his wealth,
A man isolated, bereft, depressed and tortured”
Incusant ultro, a fortuna opibusque omnibus
desertum abiectum adflictum exanimum expectorant.
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