Read Ebook: Plague and pestilence in literature and art by Crawfurd Raymond Henry Payne Sir

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 526 lines and 80742 words, and 11 pages

The Athenians also sent another fleet this same summer against Potidaea in Thrace, which was already undergoing a siege at the hands of an Athenian army. Pestilence worked fearful havoc in this supplementary force and spread from it to the troops who were already there, involving a mortality of 1,050 out of a total of 4,000 hoplites, so that the expedition was compelled to return and leave the siege to the troops that were there before them.

In their despair the Athenians vented their angry feelings on Pericles, just as persons in a delirium, says Plutarch, turn on their physician or their father. They urged that the pestilence was due to cooping up in the city in stifling huts a rural population accustomed to an open-air existence, so that they conveyed infection to one another. But popular resentment subsided as quickly as it arose. In a noble speech, which Thucydides reproduces at length, Pericles weaned them to a better mind. His own domestic sufferings may have stirred their sympathy. He lost of the pestilence his only two legitimate sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, his sister, and many relatives and friends. The death of his favourite son, Paralus, left him with no legitimate heir to maintain the family and the hereditary sacred rites. 'That blow', says Plutarch, 'crushed him to earth. He struggled indeed to preserve his wonted impassiveness and to maintain his serene composure. But, as he laid a wreath upon the body and looked upon his dead, the anguish of it all overwhelmed him, and he burst out wailing and sobbing bitterly--a thing which in all his life he had never before done.' The spectacle of this proud, reserved man, this man who had stood firm as a rock amid the rising tide of popular resentment, humbled before God, humiliated before man, as the iron seared his innermost soul, is one of the most moving pictures in all history and literature.

My God has bowed me down to what I am, My solitude and grief have brought me low.

The first outbreak of pestilence lasted for two years, from the spring of 430 B.C. to that of 428 B.C., then came a partial, but not complete, abatement for one and a half years, followed by another outbreak in 427 B.C. which lasted a year. 'To the power of Athens', says Thucydides, 'certainly nothing was more ruinous. Not less than 4,400 Athenian hoplites, who were on the roll, died, and also 300 horsemen, and an incalculable number of the common people', estimated by Diodorus Siculus at 10,000 freemen and slaves. Bury puts the total number of Athenian burghers at the commencement of the Peloponnesian War at 100,000, and this total was reduced by the pestilence to some 80,000 or less. The metic class and the slaves he estimates roundly at 30,000 and 100,000 respectively, but beyond the unreliable statement of Diodorus Siculus, we have no index of their reduction. In accepting the verdict of Thucydides on the disastrous effects of the pestilence on the power of Athens, we must not forget that there were other influences at work, conspiring to this same result, the consequences of which Pericles had pointed out clearly in his speech before the war. Had it not been for these, Athens would beyond doubt have rallied quickly from the blow, as we shall see that other cities have habitually done in like case with hers.

The circumstances under which the epidemic broke out a second time in Athens cannot have differed greatly from those prevailing at its first onset, for though it was winter and the Lacedaemonian army was not in the field, the surrounding country had been devastated, and most of the peasantry must still have been cooped up, in a state of overcrowding, within the walls. As the pestilence lingered on in Athens, superstition laid fast hold on the populace, under the stress of their protracted sufferings. On the advice of the oracle, they decided to purify the island of Delos, which formerly had been dedicated to Apollo, but latterly had been used as a burial-ground. All the dead were transferred to a neighbouring island Rhene, and a law was passed forbidding henceforth the burial of a corpse or the birth of a child in Delos. The neglected panegyric festival of Apollo was also revived in the island. No stone was left unturned to appease the god, who, the Athenians now were persuaded, had sent them the distemper.

Earthquakes and inundations lasted, as did the pestilence, throughout the summer of 426 B.C. Diodorus Siculus seems to suggest that the earthquakes were sent by Apollo, who had been duly propitiated, to divert the Lacedaemonians from the invasion of Attica. Actually they did effect this, for Agis, King of Sparta, though already arrived at the isthmus, accepted the omen and led his army back. Neither Thucydides nor Diodorus Siculus asserts any direct causal relation between the earthquakes and the pestilence--a belief, which if now vaguely foreshadowed, took definite form only at a later date.

The following is the full narrative of the pestilence, as given by Thucydides:

Such was the general nature of the disease: I omit many strange peculiarities which characterized individual cases. None of the ordinary sicknesses attacked any one while it lasted, or if they did, they ended in the plague. Some of the sufferers died from want of care, others equally who were receiving the greatest attention. No single remedy could be deemed a specific: for that which did good to one did harm to another. No constitution was of itself strong enough to resist or weak enough to escape the attacks: the disease carried off all alike and defied every mode of treatment. Most appalling was the despondency which seized upon any one who felt himself sickening: for he instantly abandoned his mind to despair and, instead of holding out, absolutely threw away his chance of life. Appalling too was the rapidity with which men caught the infection: dying like sheep if they attended on one another: and this was the principal cause of mortality. When they were afraid to visit one another, the sufferers died in their solitude, so that many houses were empty because there had been no one left to take care of the sick; or if they ventured they perished, especially those who aspired to heroism. For they went to see their friends without thought of themselves and were ashamed to leave them, even at a time when the very relations of the dying were at last growing weary and ceased to make lamentations, overwhelmed by the vastness of the calamity. But whatever instances there may have been of such devotion, more often the sick and the dying were tended by the pitying care of those who had recovered, because they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehension. For no one was ever attacked a second time, or with a fatal result. All men congratulated them, and they themselves, in the excess of their joy at the moment, had an innocent fancy that they could not die of any other sickness.

The crowding of the people out of the country into the city aggravated the misery; and the newly-arrived suffered most. For, having no houses of their own, but inhabiting in the height of summer stifling huts, the mortality among them was dreadful, and they perished in wild disorder. The dead lay as they had died, one upon another, while others hardly alive wallowed in the streets and crawled about every fountain craving for water. The temples in which they lodged were full of the corpses of those who died in them: for the violence of the calamity was such that men, not knowing where to turn, grew reckless of all law, human and divine. The customs which had hitherto been observed at funerals were universally violated, and they buried their dead each one as best he could. Many, having no proper appliances, because the deaths in their household had been so frequent, made no scruple of using the burial-place of others. When one man had raised a funeral pile, others would come, and throwing on their dead first, set fire to it; or when some other corpse was already burning, before they could be stopped would throw their own dead upon it and depart.

There were other and worse forms of lawlessness which the plague introduced at Athens. Men who had hitherto concealed their indulgence in pleasure now grew bolder. For seeing the sudden change--how the rich died in a moment, and those who had nothing immediately inherited their property--they reflected that life and riches were alike transitory, and they resolved to enjoy themselves while they could, and to think only of pleasure. Who would be willing to sacrifice himself to the law of honour when he knew not whether he would ever live to be held in honour? The pleasure of the moment and any sort of thing which conduced to it took the place both of honour and of expediency. No fear of God or law of man deterred a criminal. Those, who saw all perishing alike, thought that the worship or neglect of the Gods made no difference. For offences against human law no punishment was to be feared: no one would live long enough to be called to account. Already a far heavier sentence had been passed and was hanging over a man's head: before that fell, why should he not take a little pleasure?

Such was the grievous calamity which now afflicted the Athenians: within the walls their people were dying, and without, their country was being ravaged. In their troubles they naturally called to mind a verse which the elder men among them declared to have been current long ago:

A Dorian war will come and a plague with it.

A careful study, line upon line and word by word, of the description which Thucydides has given of the clinical features of the Athenian pestilence, viewing it on the one hand in the light of the medical knowledge of the time, and on the other in the light of the revelations of modern pathology, can hardly fail to bring home to an unbiased judgement the conviction that we have to do with typhus fever. It is true that it bears a close resemblance to Oriental plague, but whereas the objections to this diagnosis seem to us to be insuperable, we shall hope to show that those which hitherto have appeared obstacles to the diagnosis of typhus fever, are either artificial or based upon an incorrect interpretation of the text. The confusion of typhus fever and Oriental plague prevailed down to comparatively modern times even among medical writers; not only is there a striking resemblance in the clinical picture of the two diseases, but they have been constantly commingled in one and the same epidemic. This is no matter for surprise, when we remember that the flea is the chief agent in the propagation of one disease, and the body-louse of the other.

There is scarcely a single writer of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries on the subject of fevers, who has not commented on the concurrence of malignant fevers with epidemics of Oriental plague. It is true that they do not all identify the malignant fevers as typhus, simply because typhus, though distinguished as a morbid entity by Fracastorius as early as 1546, did not become generally recognized throughout Europe until the eighteenth century, and even then its identity was obscured under a multiplicity of synonyms. Ambroise Par?, in 1568, described a pestilential fever as prevailing in France along with true plague, in which the skin was marked with spots, like the bites of fleas or bugs. Vilalba says that on several occasions during the sixteenth century a spotted fever called Tabardiglio, which is now known to have been typhus, was rife in Spain at the same time as plague, and was much confused with it. According to Lotz a malignant spotted fever was present in London in 1624, which turned to plague in 1625, and back again to spotted fever in 1626. Similarly Sydenham states that the Great Plague of London was preceded and followed by a pestilent fever, which from his description was clearly typhus, and he remarks that it differed from the plague only in the milder character of its symptoms. According to Diemerbroeck spotted fever preceded plague in Holland in 1636, and its malignity increased progressively, until finally it became converted into true plague. The same is true of the plague of Marseilles in 1720, of the plague of Aleppo in 1760, and of the plague of Moscow in 1771. Hancock, in 1821, asserted that nearly all the most remarkable plagues of the last two centuries had been preceded by typhus. So much for the confusion of these two diseases, due to their concurrence.

Murchison, whose treatise on typhus stands out as a monument of acute and accurate observation, traces out in detail the resemblance of the two diseases. It is no matter only of a general clinical resemblance, such as is common to most acute infectious fevers, though that is striking enough, but beyond this there is a remarkable similarity in particular symptoms, in clinical course, and in complications. There is a tendency to regard buboes as a distinctive feature of plague, but these are found in a small moiety of cases of typhus fever. On the other side of the picture, the petechial eruptions of typhus, its most distinctive feature, are common enough in plague.

It is tempting to shirk the difficulty of a differential diagnosis by assuming that in Athens, as so often elsewhere, there was a simultaneous outbreak of typhus and plague, but the whole evidence points strongly to the presence of typhus, and typhus only. We will endeavour to present the evidence fairly and simply, so that every reader may form his own conclusion, by reference to the appended narrative of Thucydides.

Starting in Ethiopia rumour had it that the disease spread northwards to Egypt and Libya, and thence over the greater part of the Persian Empire, which at that time included almost all of Western Asia, then suddenly it swooped down upon Athens. The same disease was said to have previously attacked Lemnos and many other places, but with much less severity. With Lemnos Thucydides will have had close acquaintance, for it lay in the direct route to Thrace, where he owned property. He is careful to say that he gives this information as well as that of its starting-point and lines of extension only on hearsay evidence. If it were really part of one vast pandemic, it is surprising that he should have no more certain knowledge of its incidence. True, pestilence was raging this self-same year in Rome, but it must not be assumed that it was necessarily of the same character as that at Athens. All through the fifth century Rome was seldom without pestilence, and Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus record a succession of epidemics, some of several years' duration, following hard one upon another. If the origin in Ethiopia and the subsequent lines of advance are to be accepted, this would certainly constitute a weighty argument in favour of Oriental plague. Of late years an endemic focus of plague has been located in Central Africa, and in its spread the disease was following established routes of commerce, as has habitually been the case. Pandemicity too is an inherent tendency of plague. Typhus has followed for the most part the march of armies, and in the wake of famine, and has shown but little tendency to adhere to the beaten routes of commerce. Typhus has in some instances extended at one and the same time over a wide region, but for the most part it has been over contiguous tracts of land. Thus Hildebrand recorded an epidemic spreading to the whole of Germany, Galicia, Hungary and the Austrian crown-lands.

Thucydides has laid it down that the plague of Athens was an unknown disease. Now there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that bubonic plague was recognized, in its sporadic form, as a clinical entity at the time of Thucydides. The language of a passage in the 2nd Book of the Epidemics, a treatise of the Hippocratic school, seems hardly susceptible of any other interpretation: ?? ??? ??????? ??????? ?????, ???? ??? ????????, ??? ?? ??? ????????? ???????? ???????? . The allusions also to buboes in Aristophanes are so numerous as almost to preclude any other conclusion: and it cannot be argued that these were an aftermath of the epidemic, for Thucydides implicitly asserts the complete disappearance of the disease.

The outbreak of the pestilence first in the Piraeus suggests importation by sea. Sea-carriage is far more characteristic of plague than of typhus, though typhus has been imported often enough from Ireland into England, and was also brought back to England by the troops from Corunna, and to France by the French troops from the Crimea. On the other hand, it was in Piraeus chiefly that the displaced peasantry were crowded together promiscuously in small stifling habitations, affording just those conditions in which typhus has habitually arisen and become epidemic.

Among those epidemic diseases, that in past times have devastated beleaguered cities, typhus unquestionably holds pride of place. Granada in 1489, Metz in 1552, Montpellier in 1623, Reading in 1643, Genoa in 1799, Saragossa in 1808, Dantzig and Wilna in 1813, and Torgau in 1814 all tell the same tale. With our lately acquired knowledge of the transmission of typhus fever by the agency of body-lice, it is easy to understand the prevalence of the disease in epidemic virulence among a beleaguered and overcrowded garrison. Murchison, whose knowledge and experience of typhus were unequalled, unhesitatingly identified the plague of Athens as typhus, both because of this special circumstance of its occurrence and because of the clinical picture as a whole.

The passing remarks of Thucydides on the causation of the pestilence show him not only superior to the superstitious credulity of some of his fellow countrymen, but far in advance of the most enlightened medical opinion of his day. There were still some in Athens, who put their faith in supplications in temples and inquiries of oracles: but these measures were now weighed in the balance and found wanting. The stern probation of the Persian wars had taught the lesson, that victory was the reward of the strong, not the recompense of the devout; and with this knowledge perished the whole fabric of Greek polytheism. So now most of the populace ascribed the pestilence to natural causation: the Lacedaemonians surely had poisoned the wells. From this day onwards, right down to modern times, this phantom of poison dogs the footsteps of pestilence.

Thucydides leaves no doubt whatever as to his own views: he has done for good and all with supernatural causation, though he confesses his inability to identify the precise cause, leaving that for others to speculate about. He states and accepts without reserve contagion from man to man. In this his great contemporary, Hippocrates, lags far behind him. The mind of the Father of Medicine was still in bondage to the early Greek physicists. Conceiving disease to be caused in man by bodily disturbance, referable either to the character of the air inspired or of the food and drink ingested, it was inevitable that, in the causation of epidemic disease, Hippocrates should assign chief importance to changes in the atmosphere, to which all alike would be equally exposed. He does indeed recognize the possibility of its contamination with alien putrid effluvia, but for all that it is the mere physical changes in its constitution, which in his view are of paramount importance. Of contagion from man to man he had not the vaguest conception, and to him, as well as to Galen, and even to our own Sydenham, the sole criterion of epidemicity was the incidence of disease on a large number of persons at the same time.

To the student of the history of medicine it will be no matter for surprise that Thucydides should have seen with undimmed vision, what Hippocrates saw as yet only through a glass darkly. Medicine in every age has been the bond-servant of plausible preconceptions, and it is humiliating to professional self-complacency to scan the long array of lay writers from Thucydides onwards, who accepted contagion as a proven fact, before the scales fell from the eyes of obscurantist Science. Out of many we may enumerate Aristotle, Lucretius, Diodorus Siculus, Vergil, Ovid, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy, Seneca, Silius Italicus, the elder Pliny, and Plutarch: while not till Aretaeus of Cappadocia, in the second century after Christ, do we meet clear and unequivocal acceptance in any medical author. Science, untempered by letters, is apt to induce a mental myopia, and we men of medicine would do well to reflect on the story of Archimedes, who, while drawing mathematical figures in the sand, overlooked to the cost of his life the fact, that the city had fallen into the hands of the enemy.

Though Thucydides was the first of extant writers to enunciate clearly the doctrine of contagion, there is reason to think that Oriental medicine had already grasped the idea. The Levitical ordinances seem to recognize it in the case of leprosy. It is true that these had not reached their final recension till after the time of Thucydides, but at the same time they represent a body of much older tradition.

Thucydides is careful to state that the season was not a sickly one, for Hippocrates himself attributed pestilence to heat and south winds distempering the atmosphere, and following the example of Acron and Empedocles of Agrigentum, essayed to alter the constitution of the atmosphere, in a season of pestilence, by kindling large fires. Acron aimed only at reducing its humidity, but Hippocrates may have sought to destroy by fumigation putrid effluvia, engendered by the heat in the air. His example was scrupulously followed in the Plague of London in 1666, and in that of Marseilles in 1720. A comparison of Thucydides with Diodorus Siculus redounds but little to the credit of the latter. Diodorus submits three distinct agencies as producing the plague of Athens by their concerted action. First, that so much rain had fallen in the preceding winter, that the soil had become saturated and waterlogged: following upon this an unusually hot summer led to the exhalation from the soil of putrid effluvia, that contaminated the air. In fact pestilence was a product of the marsh miasma. Empedocles of Agrigentum was reputed to have delivered Selinus from a pestilence, in the fifth century B.C., by draining its marshes, and an extant coin commemorates the event: and Hippocrates clearly recognized the association of periodic fevers with marshes.

Secondly, he cites lack of good food as a contributory cause, for the rain had also damaged the grain. This was not an unreasonable proposition, for the prevalence of the ergot fungus in rye grain after a wet season has given rise to many and widespread epidemics of ergotism.

Thirdly, the Etesian winds did not blow, so that the air became superheated, inflaming men's bodies with all sorts of burning distempers. It is enough for Diodorus that Hippocrates, Lucretius, and others had postulated these causes of pestilence, to secure for them acceptance in the sober record of his history. Thucydides declines even to discuss such vague hypotheses, and chooses for himself the better part of describing the actual symptoms of the disease, as he had experienced them in his own person, and witnessed them in the sufferings of others, so that any one familiar with them might be able to recognize the disorder at once, in the event of its reappearance.

To Thucydides then is due the credit not only of the first detailed description of an actual visitation of pestilence, but of a description that breathes in every line the true spirit of history, the recording of past events as a medium for the surer forecasting of the future--the spirit that animates him in all his historical writing to give 'a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things'--the whole duty of the historian, which not even Herodotus had recognized to the full before him. So anxious is he that his readers shall see things as he saw them, and learn the same lessons from them as he has learnt, that he is willing on occasion to manipulate his narrative, as when he brings forward the great Funeral Speech of Pericles into immediate juxtaposition to the narrative of the pestilence, assuredly so as to heighten the dramatic effect. So vivid and so forcible is his picture of the plague, that it is difficult to believe that some ten years had elapsed before he set pen to paper, and some thirty or more before the whole attained its present form. It is no matter for surprise that Lucretius, Procopius, Boccaccio, and Froissart should have paid the homage of conscious imitation to this virile narrative.

Thucydides was the first to draw a picture of the demoralization of society in the presence of pestilence--a theme that became a commonplace with later historians of plague. The futility of the physicians, the merciless march of the pestilence, the sufferings of the sick, the neglect of the dead, the pollution of temples, the sacrilegious funeral rites, these scenes and the like throng the kaleidoscope of human misery. The sacred ties of kinship yielded under the cruel emotion of fear. Lawlessness prevailed everywhere, for men seeing the uncertainty of life and riches resolved to enjoy themselves, while they could. Those who saw all perishing alike thought that worship or neglect of the gods made no difference.

Pausanias regards the romantic temple of Apollo at Bassae as a memorial of the deliverance of Phigalia from an offset of this plague of 430 B.C. He seems to infer this from the dedication of the temple to Apollo, under his surname the Helper . On the other hand, we know from Thucydides that the plague scarcely touched Peloponnesus. It is unlikely also that an Athenian architect, Ictinus, who as Pausanias says built it, would have worked for the Peloponnesians during the war with Athens.

The same doubt attaches to the attribution of the temple of Apollo the Helper at Elis, and that of Pan the Deliverer in Troezen, and the tradition appears in each case to be referable to the surname of the god, coupled with the dates at which they were erected.

Pausanias says that a statue of Apollo, Averter of Evil , by Calamis, was erected in Athens as a memorial of deliverance from the plague, but this cannot be the case, as Calamis was dead before the plague commenced.

Such dedications were, however, common enough. When Epimenides freed Athens from pestilence he cleansed the city and set up a shrine to the Eumenides, and the people of Tanagra similarly showed their gratitude to Hermes the Ram-bearer by entrusting to Calamis the erection of a statue in his honour.

Poussin painted a 'Plague of Athens', a much cherished picture now in the gallery of Sir Frederick Cook at Richmond. It is a dull wooden composition, and compares most unfavourably with his 'Plague of Ashdod', in spite of the close similarity of incident and episode that it depicts.

FOOTNOTES:

Tr. L. Campbell.

Tr. W. R. Frazer.

xii. 58.

ii. 48 end.

The discussion of clinical details has been relegated to an Appendix, as they are rather of medical than of literary or artistic interest. They are, nevertheless, essential to a full appreciation of the merits of the description that Thucydides gives of the pestilence.

viii. 41. 7.

ii. 54.

i. 3. 3.

Pausanias, ix. 22. 1.

Unlike Greece, young Rome was subject to repeated pestilence: plagues punctuate the pages of her history. We shall see how deep an imprint they left on the nascent religion, literature, and art of Rome.

At first these plagues must needs have been endemic, and bred no doubt in the extensive swamps that lay within the city and around it for many miles, for Rome was not then a commercial city. Her corn she derived from Italy and Sicily, and held little or no intercourse with Egypt, until after the conquest of Carthage. Yet, in spite of the numerous records of her pestilences that have survived, there is not one the nature of which can be identified before the true Plague of Gregory the Great.

In later years the Salii figure as colleges of priests, dedicated first to the worship of Mars, and later of Quirinus as well. The transformation served to obscure their true origin, which Plutarch asserts and which there is every reason to accept. Mars was not originally a god of war, but an agricultural god, and, like Apollo, a guardian of the crops. Coincidently with the transformation the ritual assumed a more martial character, the Salii performing the war-dance in full fighting panoply, as the procession moved through the city twice a year, in March and October. The beginning and end of the season of pestilence had faded insensibly into the beginning and end of the campaigning season. Horace recounts the aldermanic magnificence of their festive repast.

The hymn of the Salii was written in archaic Saturnian verse, fragments of which have come down to us. Quintilian says that, by the first century B.C. the primitive language, passed down with verbal exactitude from generation to generation, had become unintelligible to those who ceremoniously recited it. One fragment is instructive in its significance:

Cum? tonas, Leuc?sie, prae tet tremonti, Quom tibei cunei dextum?m ton?rent.

Pestilence was in Rome again just before the death of Tullus Hostilius in 640 B.C. Tullus himself fell ill, and in his illness revived every superstitious usage, though when in health he had affected to scorn religion. The people also cherished the conviction that only by obtaining pardon of the gods would they be rid of the pestilence. So Tullus consulted the commentaries of Numa, and finding that certain sacrifices should have been paid to Jupiter Elicius , he set about their performance. But as he failed to conduct them in due form, he not only failed of his purpose, but so roused the anger of Jupiter, that he struck him with lightning and reduced him and his whole household to ashes. Livy's story of Tullus illustrates well the relation of a Roman to his god: it was a practical, not a spiritual relation, a bargain, not an act of grace. If the Roman paid all his dues of worship to the god he had a claim to repayment in full. Again and again, under the stress of pestilence, failure of the god to honour his bond drove the Roman to try his luck with alien gods. This is the spirit in which Tarquinius Superbus, during another plague, in 514 B.C., sent his sons to Greek Delphi to inquire of the god how to be rid of it. Pestilence, in this manner, was destined to forge many a link in the chain that bound Rome to Greece.

In the fifth century B.C., Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus record a constant succession of plagues in Rome. Eight visitations, at least, are mentioned, and as some of these lingered over several years, Rome, in the fifth century, can seldom have been free from pestilence. And yet all this time she was not only growing, but actually sending out colonies.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet