When Oliver Taplin called attention to the likelihood that tragic and comic performances continued in Athens right through the pandemic in the early years of the Peloponnesian War (See my blog post of 15 Novemner), I started thinking again about Thucydides’ account of that pandemic. He paints a picture of Athens so devastated by the disease that it is hard to imagine civic life gong on with any semblance of normalcy.
Did Thucydides misrepresent the pandemic? Certainly not entirely, for we now have evidence of one mass grave very likely tied to the pandemic. There may well have been others. And he cites figures showing a high death rate among men on a military expedition. Yet we can compile a long list of Athenians who were still alive fter the pandemic - Pericles, Sophocles, Socrates, Aristophanes, Euripides, Xenophon, Lysias, the infant Plato and Thucydides himself- in fact almost everyone we can name from Athens of this period.
Thucydides description of the pandemic can best be understood not as misrepresentation but as a habit of mind or guiding principle: If you want t understand something intense, look at the extreme, not the mean. The average experience will tell you very little; at the extreme, when the chips are down and the pressure is on, you can see what people are really like. That’s when ; you can understand anthropeia physis really is, not a jumble of foibles and weaknesses as our translation “human nature” might suggest, but a proclivity to savagery. That’s why Thucydides pays so much attention t the civil strife in Corcyra, the slaughter of school children at Mycalessus, and the brutal end of the Sicilian expedition. He won’t fall into the trap if saying “Oh well, those were just exceptions t the rule.” No, these extreme cases show what we are capable of as human beings. And since war is itself an intense extreme, then by examining it at its worst, one should be able better understand what sort of creature we are. The Greej tragedians, I believe, would totally agree,
Did Thucydides misrepresent the pandemic? Certainly not entirely, for we now have evidence of one mass grave very likely tied to the pandemic. There may well have been others. And he cites figures showing a high death rate among men on a military expedition. Yet we can compile a long list of Athenians who were still alive fter the pandemic - Pericles, Sophocles, Socrates, Aristophanes, Euripides, Xenophon, Lysias, the infant Plato and Thucydides himself- in fact almost everyone we can name from Athens of this period.
Thucydides description of the pandemic can best be understood not as misrepresentation but as a habit of mind or guiding principle: If you want t understand something intense, look at the extreme, not the mean. The average experience will tell you very little; at the extreme, when the chips are down and the pressure is on, you can see what people are really like. That’s when ; you can understand anthropeia physis really is, not a jumble of foibles and weaknesses as our translation “human nature” might suggest, but a proclivity to savagery. That’s why Thucydides pays so much attention t the civil strife in Corcyra, the slaughter of school children at Mycalessus, and the brutal end of the Sicilian expedition. He won’t fall into the trap if saying “Oh well, those were just exceptions t the rule.” No, these extreme cases show what we are capable of as human beings. And since war is itself an intense extreme, then by examining it at its worst, one should be able better understand what sort of creature we are. The Greej tragedians, I believe, would totally agree,
