Pale Horse
The coronavirus proves once again the power of epidemics to upend, and sometimes erase, civilizations. Relearning a lesson the ancient world understood only too well.
by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson: The he great plague at Athens (430–29BC), which broke out in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, according to the historian Thucydides, wiped out as many as eighty thousand people (a fourth of the population of Athens), including rural refugees from the Attic countryside. Nothing, the historian claimed, did more damage to the city-state.Some twenty-five hundred years later, it remains a parlor game among classicists to identify the precise infectious culprit. Some form of either typhus or typhoid seems most likely.Most historians agree that this epidemic that killed Pericles was probably a result of his policy of forced evacuation of the Attic rural population from the country to inside the walls of Athens during the Spartan invasion in late May 430 BC. The busy port at Piraeus was an incubator and force multiplier of the disease.
Thucydides’s contemporary description of the pestilence inaugurated a tradition in Western historiography of envisioning plagues as reflections on the pathologies of contemporary society. He focused not just on the deaths and the demographic swath of the disease but even more so on the psycho-logical and sociological damage the disease wrought. In his view,such natural and man-made calamities, like war and revolution, by the nature of their illogical violence and unpredictable mayhem, eventually rip off the thin veneer of civilization. They reduce people to their animal essences. In their instinctual and deadly competitive efforts to survive one more day, the mob in extremis will do almost anything—and blame almost anyone and anything.
Most preindustrial mass plagues were bacterial, caused by urban over-crowding and poor-to-nonexistent garbage and sewage disposal. In the disruptive aftermath of pandemics, fundamental social and political change sometimes followed—wars were lost, governments ended, wealth and power were reversed. Today, cheap antibiotics, modern medical care, and sophisticated sewage treatment and refuse collection have mostly ended the epidemic threat of typhus, typhoid, and bubonic plague. But our trust in modern drugs is such that we arrogantly overlook the chance of pandemic danger posed by a half million or so homeless Americans who live outside in harsh weather, amid vermin, excrement, and rodents on our major urban-center sidewalks.
In the modern age, viruses have mostly replaced bacteria in posing theoretical threats of mass infection, illness, and death. While modern Western medicine, given enough time, can sometimes prevent many pandemic viral infections through mass vaccinations, they are, unlike many bacterial illnesses, often impossible, or at least difficult, to treat.
Globalization has made possible the specter of a viral epidemic—Ebola,Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and, most recently, Covid-19. The A and B influenzas, despite mass inoculations, infect about twenty million to thirty million Americans every year. Depending on the particular annual mutating strain, between ten thousand and eighty thousand die from those seasonal influenzas, mostly the elderly or chronically sick. There are also fears that it may be possible to weaponize a disease in labs to spark a historic pandemic.
RUINS OF EMPIRE
In the ancient world, plagues usually arrived in early summer from the non-west (such as Egypt or Asia). They entered European ports, usually int he south and east, and accelerated through filthy and densely populated cities. Pandemics triggered debates between those who focused on science—symptoms,diagnoses, therapies,and prognoses—and the majority with its popular embrace of religion and superstition. The majority equated plagues with divine wrath or hubris, and there-fore fixated on particular villains and customs that must have provoked such godly wrath.
After the Athenian plague, Athens could still ward off a Spartan victory, but it lacked the resources to vanquish the Spartan empire and its growing number of allies. In some sense, the grandiose visions of imperial Athens ended with the plague—even as a wider Greek interest in both medical science and popular religion increased.
Sophocles’s greatest play, Oedipus Rex, was staged a year after the plague began to wane. Its chief protagonist, Oedipus, a good and wise man whose sin is to believe that his haughty reason can defeat cosmic fate, resembles in his arrogance the recently deceased Pericles, the renaissance man with a worldly consort of philosophers, libertines, and artists.
Again, it was the statesman’s strategy of withdrawing tens of thousands of rural Athenians into the city to ride out the invasion of Spartan hoplites that ensured that the city became the petri dish for the plague. Of course,Pericles’s strategy, in theory, might have worked, had his celebrated reliance on reason included knowledge of the relationship between sanitation and infection. In the end, even the rationalist Pericles was reduced to clutching amulets to ward off the plague.
The lifelong quest of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (c. 482–565) focused on re-establishing the lost Roman empire in the West under new Byzantine Greek auspices. Over some thirty years of constant campaigning, his brilliant marshals Belisarius and Narses reconquered much of Southern Europe, North Africa, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, while Justinian dedicated the monumental church of Hagia Sophia and codified Roman law. But the bubonic plague of 541–42 soon spread from the port capital at Constantinople throughout the empire. The pandemic would go on to kill a half million Byzantines and render the military agendas of Justinian—who also got the disease but recovered—inert.
The chatty contemporary historian Procopius, in Thucydidean fashion, blamed the Egyptians for the pandemic’s origins. He went on to describe the disease as the catalyst for the same uncivilized behavior so chillingly described nearly a millennium earlier by Thucydides: the crasstreatment of the unburied, the avoidance of the infected, the desperation to live wildly in the expectation of impending death,and an equally pernicious outbreak of nihilism, superstition, and self-pity.
PALE HORSE
The medieval outbreak in Europe of the Black Plague (1347–51) probably killed more than the Athenian and Justinian plagues combined, perhaps eventually half of the European population, or somewhere around fifty mil-lion to eighty million people. Like prior bacterial plagues, it too was believed to have spread from the east and entered Mediterranean ports. It went ballistic in the heavily populated, fetid, and numerous cities of Europe.
In The Decameron, his brilliant collection of novellas, Giovanni Boccaccio follows the same Western tradition of describing the symptoms, collating the various religious and superstitious exegeses for the sudden arrival of mass death, and illustrating the general breakdown in popular mores. He toonotes that the stricken public believed they were shortly to perish and should therefore satisfy their appetites in the time they had left.
The modern world may be technologically savvy and medically sophisticated, but it has not escaped the rumor, panic, and hysteria that break out when unknown diseases strike, as Thucydides and Procopius so chillingly detailed. For all our millennia of scientific advancements, when Covid-19 broke out we knew about as much about the novel coronavirus as Sophocles and Thucydides knew about the Athenian plague.
How exactly does it spread differently from the flu? Are there unknown millions of infected who are not sure when, or even if, they became sick? How did Covid-19 originate—from bats, snakes, or pangolins in the open-air food markets of Wuhan? The Inter-net remains fervid with theories and rumors and known unknowns. It would take a gossipy Procopius to hunt them all down.
Modern people—unlike ancients, who were without effective medicines or vaccinations—apparently believe that the good life means that pandemics of any sort belong to another era and have no business popping up in their own.But in our blending of fear and speculation and blame, the more the world changes, the more its people certainly remain the same.
----------------------
Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush.
Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, history, Pale Horse, coronavirus To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
 |
| Dr. Victor Davis Hanson |
Thucydides’s contemporary description of the pestilence inaugurated a tradition in Western historiography of envisioning plagues as reflections on the pathologies of contemporary society. He focused not just on the deaths and the demographic swath of the disease but even more so on the psycho-logical and sociological damage the disease wrought. In his view,such natural and man-made calamities, like war and revolution, by the nature of their illogical violence and unpredictable mayhem, eventually rip off the thin veneer of civilization. They reduce people to their animal essences. In their instinctual and deadly competitive efforts to survive one more day, the mob in extremis will do almost anything—and blame almost anyone and anything.
Most preindustrial mass plagues were bacterial, caused by urban over-crowding and poor-to-nonexistent garbage and sewage disposal. In the disruptive aftermath of pandemics, fundamental social and political change sometimes followed—wars were lost, governments ended, wealth and power were reversed. Today, cheap antibiotics, modern medical care, and sophisticated sewage treatment and refuse collection have mostly ended the epidemic threat of typhus, typhoid, and bubonic plague. But our trust in modern drugs is such that we arrogantly overlook the chance of pandemic danger posed by a half million or so homeless Americans who live outside in harsh weather, amid vermin, excrement, and rodents on our major urban-center sidewalks.
In the modern age, viruses have mostly replaced bacteria in posing theoretical threats of mass infection, illness, and death. While modern Western medicine, given enough time, can sometimes prevent many pandemic viral infections through mass vaccinations, they are, unlike many bacterial illnesses, often impossible, or at least difficult, to treat.
Globalization has made possible the specter of a viral epidemic—Ebola,Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and, most recently, Covid-19. The A and B influenzas, despite mass inoculations, infect about twenty million to thirty million Americans every year. Depending on the particular annual mutating strain, between ten thousand and eighty thousand die from those seasonal influenzas, mostly the elderly or chronically sick. There are also fears that it may be possible to weaponize a disease in labs to spark a historic pandemic.
In the ancient world, plagues usually arrived in early summer from the non-west (such as Egypt or Asia). They entered European ports, usually int he south and east, and accelerated through filthy and densely populated cities. Pandemics triggered debates between those who focused on science—symptoms,diagnoses, therapies,and prognoses—and the majority with its popular embrace of religion and superstition. The majority equated plagues with divine wrath or hubris, and there-fore fixated on particular villains and customs that must have provoked such godly wrath.
After the Athenian plague, Athens could still ward off a Spartan victory, but it lacked the resources to vanquish the Spartan empire and its growing number of allies. In some sense, the grandiose visions of imperial Athens ended with the plague—even as a wider Greek interest in both medical science and popular religion increased.
Sophocles’s greatest play, Oedipus Rex, was staged a year after the plague began to wane. Its chief protagonist, Oedipus, a good and wise man whose sin is to believe that his haughty reason can defeat cosmic fate, resembles in his arrogance the recently deceased Pericles, the renaissance man with a worldly consort of philosophers, libertines, and artists.
Again, it was the statesman’s strategy of withdrawing tens of thousands of rural Athenians into the city to ride out the invasion of Spartan hoplites that ensured that the city became the petri dish for the plague. Of course,Pericles’s strategy, in theory, might have worked, had his celebrated reliance on reason included knowledge of the relationship between sanitation and infection. In the end, even the rationalist Pericles was reduced to clutching amulets to ward off the plague.
The lifelong quest of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (c. 482–565) focused on re-establishing the lost Roman empire in the West under new Byzantine Greek auspices. Over some thirty years of constant campaigning, his brilliant marshals Belisarius and Narses reconquered much of Southern Europe, North Africa, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, while Justinian dedicated the monumental church of Hagia Sophia and codified Roman law. But the bubonic plague of 541–42 soon spread from the port capital at Constantinople throughout the empire. The pandemic would go on to kill a half million Byzantines and render the military agendas of Justinian—who also got the disease but recovered—inert.
The chatty contemporary historian Procopius, in Thucydidean fashion, blamed the Egyptians for the pandemic’s origins. He went on to describe the disease as the catalyst for the same uncivilized behavior so chillingly described nearly a millennium earlier by Thucydides: the crasstreatment of the unburied, the avoidance of the infected, the desperation to live wildly in the expectation of impending death,and an equally pernicious outbreak of nihilism, superstition, and self-pity.
PALE HORSE
The medieval outbreak in Europe of the Black Plague (1347–51) probably killed more than the Athenian and Justinian plagues combined, perhaps eventually half of the European population, or somewhere around fifty mil-lion to eighty million people. Like prior bacterial plagues, it too was believed to have spread from the east and entered Mediterranean ports. It went ballistic in the heavily populated, fetid, and numerous cities of Europe.
In The Decameron, his brilliant collection of novellas, Giovanni Boccaccio follows the same Western tradition of describing the symptoms, collating the various religious and superstitious exegeses for the sudden arrival of mass death, and illustrating the general breakdown in popular mores. He toonotes that the stricken public believed they were shortly to perish and should therefore satisfy their appetites in the time they had left.
The modern world may be technologically savvy and medically sophisticated, but it has not escaped the rumor, panic, and hysteria that break out when unknown diseases strike, as Thucydides and Procopius so chillingly detailed. For all our millennia of scientific advancements, when Covid-19 broke out we knew about as much about the novel coronavirus as Sophocles and Thucydides knew about the Athenian plague.
How exactly does it spread differently from the flu? Are there unknown millions of infected who are not sure when, or even if, they became sick? How did Covid-19 originate—from bats, snakes, or pangolins in the open-air food markets of Wuhan? The Inter-net remains fervid with theories and rumors and known unknowns. It would take a gossipy Procopius to hunt them all down.
Modern people—unlike ancients, who were without effective medicines or vaccinations—apparently believe that the good life means that pandemics of any sort belong to another era and have no business popping up in their own.But in our blending of fear and speculation and blame, the more the world changes, the more its people certainly remain the same.
----------------------
Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush.
Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, history, Pale Horse, coronavirus To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
Posted by Bill Smith at 5:00 PM - Post Link
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home