Sphinx

I’ve been yelling at the internet again… Nothing new there, especially when it’s a matter of people misrepresenting Thucydides; what’s weird is that my target should be Adam Roberts, a man with astonishing breadth of knowledge and insight whose blog posts on literature and science fiction regularly leave me in absolute awe. But even Homer nods, or rather occasionally draws an unwarranted conclusion from a academic article that’s much more controversial than is obvious at first sight.

In brief: Roberts’ article in this morning’s Grauniad surveys the depictions of plague and epidemics in a range of modern science fiction novels and films. His core argument is that all these stories, going back to Homer’s Iliad, demonstrate humans’ wish to find order and meaning in such outbreaks; disease cannot be arbitrary, because that suggests the universe is a terrible, inhuman, merciless place, but rather they must be the result of divine anger or malevolent aliens or human agency. Fine; and Thucydides’ account of the plague at Athens is clearly relevant to such an argument, for the way it shows the different ways in which the victims of this devastating event try to make sense of it (including claims that it was actually foretold in prophecy), and the psychological consequences when some people conclude that it is actually senseless and arbitrary.

But that’s not how Roberts presents things; rather, he lines Thucydides up squarely with Homer in the supernaturalist camp:

Thucydides, the Athenian historian, has a simple explanation for the epidemic: Apollo. The Spartans had cannily supplicated the god and he in return had promised victory. Soon afterwards, Sparta’s enemies started dying of the plague. 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. But this thought doesn’t occur to Thucydides. It can only be the god.

Really, no. Thucydides discusses those who came up with such an explanation, in conjunction with a couple of other examples of people reinterpreting cryptic prophecies in the list of events; he doesn’t endorse their belief. The closest one can reasonably get to that idea, as Lisa Kallet does in the article which Roberts referred me to as the source for his claim, is the argument that Thucydides doesn’t expressly rule out such a possibility, contrary to the claims of some of his more enthusiastic admirers. I’ve never been persuaded by this; it rests, for me, too much on the assumption that Thucydides cannot plausibly have completely rejected the mainstream beliefs of his time, and therefore anything other than explicit dismissal of any role for Apollo must imply acceptance of it as a possibility. But even if you go along with Kallet’s argument completely, that’s a long way from the implication that Thucydides offers a clear, simple explanation of the plague as Apollo’s doing, ignoring any natural causes.

The spread of coronavirus has prompted a lot of references to Thucydides, and at least a couple of articles already, most of which fall into the trap which Kallet identifies of exaggerating his sceptical modernity credentials; no, he doesn’t actually discover the ideas of infectious disease or pathogens (at best, you can say that his narrative is compatible with modern understanding of disease, precisely because it doesn’t present an explanation but just a lot of symptoms and other data – see Helen King’s work on the reception of the passage in modern medicine).

What Thucydides is most interested in is the response to the event – and above all its arbitrariness. In a lot of ways his project is precisely that of Roberts’ article, observing the ways that humans tell stories and otherwise attempt to give meaning to events that frighten or baffle them. The Athenian plague is the result of the interaction of multiple events and decisions: the short- and long-term causes of the war, Pericles’ particular choice of strategy and its consequences, and the way – perfectly natural in retrospect – that a disease, having emerged in Africa, makes its way to one of the most-connected hubs of the ancient world. Some people catch the disease, some don’t; some die, some recover. And what people do is either tell stories that make everything simple, such that events are preordained or divinely instituted, or conclude that absolutely everything is arbitrary and meaningless.

Thucydides – like the narrator of Albert Camus’s La Peste, directly modelled on him – offers a third way: a basic belief that there must be some sort of underlying rationale to events that is capable of being understood, even if it escapes us for the moment, hence the drive to record accurately and avoid rushing to erroneous conclusions. He would, I imagine, have been most interested in the human response to coronavirus: the instinct to explain everything in terms of globalisation/conspiracy/politics, the rush to the extremes of panic or insouciance (“it’ll only affect the old; it’s much safer than Spanish flu”), the opportunism of selling magical cures or writing articles that make our particular interests as topical as possible…