CLASSICAL CORNER

247: PLAGUE-IARISM

Plagues came early in ancient life and literature. The Homeric god Apollo sent an army of lethal mice to harass the Achaean warriors besieging Troy. Their first victims were dogs and horses, along with their inconvenient gnawing through bow-strings.

Moving into ‘real history’, things get worse, and remain so, for humanity. Of the countless epidemics recorded in the sources, I here present a diseased triptych: one Greek, one Roman, one Byzantine. Each comports mammoth bibliography of books and articles. For readers preferring a general survey, RS Bray’s Armies of Pestilence: The Impact of Disease on History (2004) is a good bet.

In 430 BC, second year of the Peloponnesian (Civil) War, Athens was stricken with an epidemic whose death toll is modernly estimated at c. 75-100,000. It recurred twice, also touched the eastern Mediterranean. Significantly, the besieging Spartan army was unaffected, nor did it spread across Greece. Hellenes were no strangers to plagues. The lengthy Hippocratic treatise On Epidemics catalogues many, with details of symptoms and suggested remedies. Prime witness is historian Thucydides (bk2 chs47-54), himself a victim and survivor, unlike Athenian leader Pericles. Despite his notoriously difficult Greek, which often caused us schoolboys to dub him ‘The Plague of Athens’, he paints a memorable horripilatory account which for the usual spatial reasons I can only extract and paraphrase.

This disease surpassed all previous ones in its mysterious ferocity. Local doctors, whose proximity to patients caused them the highest mortality rate, had no foreknowledge or remedies. It originated overseas (plagues always do, in ancient historians), spreading from Egypt and Persia into Athens’s Piraeus dock area. Thucydides makes much of the fact that, pre-plague, Athens had been “remarkably free from other diseases”. The illness suddenly struck its victims. Preliminary symptoms were severe headaches, inflamed eyes, bleeding inside mouths and throats. Next came coughing and sneezing, hoarseness of voice, and chest pains. These were followed by violent stomach cramps and retching and vomiting. Though surprisingly free from feverish hotness and pallor, victims’ skin became reddish, with pustules and ulcers so burning that people jumped into fountains and cisterns seeking relief. All this lasted a week. Those who had survived so far were then afflicted with violent, usually fatal, diarrhoea. Those who survived this were then affected in fingers, toes, and genitals; in some cases, people went blind. Strangest of all, thought Thucydides, were those who recovered physically but succumbed to complete amnesia, not knowing who their friends, or indeed themselves, were.

Obviously, the question is: What was this disease? The Athenians were baffled. Modern medics have come up with at least 30 different pathogens as the culprit. In the 18th century, Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s benefactor and memorialist, concluded that the plague was Smallpox. Another influence, the European ‘Black Death’, spurred many to a bubonic conclusion. Nowadays, individual medical researchers have ranged from Ebola or Marburg to Viral Hemorrhagic Fever to Legionnaire’s Disease to Toxic Shock Syndrome, sometimes nicknamed for Thucydides. However, thanks to AW Gomme’s Commentary on Thucydides and a battery of Greek doctors, Typhus (if anything) emerges as the favourite, being powerfully supported in 1999 by the Fifth Annual University of Maryland Medical Conference, which was devoted to the mystery.

Moving forward to Rome, the Antonine Plague (named for emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus) broke out in 165, lasted until 180, causing at its peak 2,000 deaths per day, according to contemporary historian Dio Cassius. Modern extrapolations make this a death rate of 25 per cent, with total death toll of five million and devastation of both local populations and the Roman army. For the complete story, see JF Gilliam, American Journal of Philology 82 (1961), 225-50, online. As usual, blame is external: Roman soldiers bringing it back from Eastern campaigns. Later Roman historians give a pandemic picture, spreading into Gaul and along the Rhine frontier. As with Athens, the disease has not been identified to universal satisfaction; Measles and Smallpox lead the field.

Of coronavirus-related interest is the fact that, according to Chinese annals, there was a rampant epidemic at the same time in that country, with consequent disruption of Roman trade in Asia. An equally modern note is struck by popular quack prophet Alexander of Abonoteichos, who circulated a verse claiming to be a magic charm against infection, to be written in doorways. No doubt coronavirus will throw up similar charlatans.

Sailing to Byzantium, we meet the great outbreak of AD 542 in the reign of Justinian, who emulated Thucydides in surviving an attack. The major account is an eyewitness one by resident historian Procopius, also secretary to the crack general Belisarius: Histories, bk2 chs2233. Of modern studies, Lester Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity (2006) is worth a look.There is a putative problem with this. Like all Byzantine writers, his chief literary aim was to be mistaken for a classical model, in his case Thucydides, whose account was later much imitated by Byzantine historians describing the European ‘Black Death’. Thus, many of Procopius’s details and phraseology read like a crib, leading some modern editors and critics to underplay his veracity.

In brief, Procopius says the epidemic was world-wide, in Constantinople lasting four months, with a daily death toll rising to 10,000. Some caution needed here. Where could he obtain this or any firm statistic? Ancient historians routinely exaggerated military casualties; perhaps also medical ones. Same caveat might equally apply to modern accounts. Later sources speak of recurrences down to the eighth century, claiming a death toll of 25-50 million, equivalent to a quarter of the world’s population at that time. Various recent writers have indeed started to question such figures. Unlike the Athenian and Antonine ones, there is general agreement that this was a form of the Bubonic Plague, transported and spread by rats carrying plague-infested fleas.

“It was 20 years ago today…” that I wrote in FT136:22 about the variety of epidemics reported from first-century AD Rome by the Elder Pliny (Natural History, bk26 chs1-3), in particular Mentagra (Lichen), not lethal but so hideous that “any kind of death is preferable”. Imported to Rome by an unnamed civil servant from Asia (‘Patient Zero’), it caused facial lesions so severe they had to be cauterised down to the bone, leaving horrific scars. Odd thing was that women, slaves, and the ‘lower classes’ were unaffected. Only victims were aristocratic men, “infected through the fleeting contact of a kiss” – shades of Mononucleosis, once dubbed ‘the Kissing Disease’.