Sphinx

The Thucydides Bot (@Thucydiocy) is not monolingual, but I remember only occasionally to check variant spellings like Thukydides and Thucydide, and to be honest I very rarely remember Tucidide. It’s therefore taken me a while to realise that there is a new iffy quotation in town, that is circulating almost exclusively in Italian media and social media (with one slightly surprising reference from an Albanian language school in Kosovo), so that even the couple of citations of the line in English use Tucidide rather than Thucydides.

Atene fu distrutta dalla paura della peste, non dalla peste

Athens was destroyed by fear of the plague, not the plague itself.

Hmm. Surely not? Thucydides never makes anything resembling this claim, as far as I can see – not least because Athens doesn’t actually get destroyed until decades later, and not in his surviving narrative. One might, if you squint at the text a bit, offer this as an interpretation of the reason why the plague was so deadly (T’s comment in the way that those who fall ill were filled with despair and basically resigned themselves to death), or as an interpretation of the collapse of traditional values and morals (which T presents as a response to the uncertainty of life and the dramatic changes of fortune, rather than to the fear, but it would be reasonable enough to say that the way people responded to the plague was more important than its actual effects). But that doesn’t make it an actual quote.

The earliest reference I can find via Google is an essay by the writer Pierfranco Bruni on March 7th (in Polis Notizie), which was reprinted next day in the Corriere di Puglia e Lucania. It’s a slightly rambling meditation on Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera (context obvious), with wide-ranging reference to other plague-related literature: Camus, Lucretius, Gogol, Thucydides…

Così come disse Gogol riprendendo una frase di Tucidide. Gogol: “Più
contagiosa che la peste la paura si diffonde in un batter d’occhio”.
Tucidide: “Atene fu distrutta dalla paura della peste, non dalla peste”.
Variazioni in tema e oltre. Considero Marquez riferimento insieme a
Camus.

The Gogol is perfectly genuine; it’s from Dead Souls (p.301 in the edition I found online: “fear is more contagious than plague and spreads in an instant”. But the idea that he’s reworking a phrase of Thucydides is something I can’t find mentioned anywhere; is this Bruni’s own idea (it certainly seems to be his own translation of Gogol – where he has “in un batter d’occhio”, published versions have “all’istante” or “in un baleno”).

Bruni’s article seems to have been picked up and quoted by various people (and, interestingly, on 8th March an article by one Alessio Mannino, discussion official responses to coronavirus in the Veneto opened with the “Athens was destroyed…” quote as if it was familiar to everyone – but I can find no trace of it before Bruni’s piece, so absent other evidence I think Mannino simply took it on Bruni’s authority). But what really disseminated the line was a news story for Corriere TV by Claudio Bozza, which interviewed the head of the carabinieri in a town in Lombardy about the way his men were now delivering vital oxygen cylinders. The article opens:

Atene fu distrutta dalla paura della peste, non dalla peste». Per affrontare la drammatica ondata di contagi, il comandante della stazione dei carabinieri di Alzano Lombardo cita la massima di Tucidide: «Stiamo facendo di tutto per aiutare i cittadini, anziani in particolare — spiega il luogotenente Fabrizio Dadone — siamo 15 militari e nelle ultime due settimane siamo impegnati a tappare la falla più grave che sta lasciando in ginocchio la nostra terra». Il comandante si riferisce alla forte carenza di ossigeno, vitale per curare questo maledetto coronavirus che attacca i polmoni e lascia senza respiro.

“Athens was destroyed by the fear of the plague, not by the plague.” To face the dramatic wave of contagions, the commander of the police station of Alzano Lombardo quotes the Thucydides maxim: “We are doing everything to help citizens, the elderly in particular – explains Lieutenant Fabrizio Dadone – we are 15 soldiers and in the last two weeks we are busy plugging the most serious leak that is leaving our land on its knees.” The commander refers to the severe lack of oxygen, vital to cure this damned coronavirus that attacks the lungs and leaves you breathless.

Unfortunately the video clip doesn’t show Lt. Dadone quoting Thucydides; rather, it offers a much more mundane summary of what he and his men are up to. I’ll be quite honest, while I love the idea of a local carabinieri chief quoting Ancient Greek history, even if it’s not actually a genuine quotation, I remain somewhat sceptical in the absence of any concrete evidence…