What Plagues Can Teach: a view from ancient Rome
Abigail Buglass, Departmental Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature, Corpus Christi College.
Lucretius is one of the most captivating authors of antiquity. His epic poem describes a universe without gods, insisting instead that everything in the universe consists of atoms and void. Strict determinism is only avoided because the atoms are said to be subject to what Epicureans called the “swerve”. Such a radically materialist worldview has meant that the poem has provoked ambivalent reactions ever since its publication, and especially after its rediscovery in 1417. The poem has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years: the New Yorker recently published a piece on Lucretius by Stephen Greenblatt, author of the Pulitzer-winning book, The Swerve, which argues for the poet’s influence on modern thought. But Lucretius’s plague is a puzzling and abrupt ending to his poem. It is so utterly devastating that many believe that the poem was left incomplete; but what if it is the ending Lucretius intended? Some scholars argue that the poem’s deadly closure gives the reader a final ‘exam’ by requiring them to deal with the very un-Epicurean passion and pain it so vividly describes.
Lucretius’s poem connects the physical symptoms of an epidemic to moral questions about fear, anxiety, and connection to one’s neighbour. Connections between physical illness and personal and public moral values are by no means new. Plague stories have been used from antiquity up to modernity to explore philosophical and moral questions. What is virtue in a crisis? How can one live well, facing illness and potentially death? What can philosophy do to lessen the impact of physical discomfort and anguish? Can it help with the mental pain of a pandemic, the isolation and the grief for the lives we have lost? How should I live, if faced with the possibility that I may not live much longer? These questions are the sort that Lucretius deals with.
Disease has also long been associated with immorality: in art and literature plague appears as a consequence of sin or moral failing. The Greek tragedian Sophocles opens his most famous play, Oedipus Rex, with the citizens of Thebes describing the terrible effects of a plague that is affecting the city as a result of a miasma or moral curse: ‘The flaming god, the malign plague, has swooped upon us, and ravages the town’…‘Phoebus our lord clearly commands us to drive out the defilement which he said was harboured in this land, and not to nourish it so that it cannot be healed’ (R. Jebb’s translation). The cursed plague, it turns out, has been brought upon Thebes as a direct result of the sin committed by its king: Oedipus’ unwitting sexual relationship with and marriage to his own mother. Similarly, the book of Exodus in the Old Testament sees the ten plagues of Egypt as a response to Pharaoh’s taunt that he does not know Yahweh: ‘By this you shall know that I am the Lord’ (Exodus 7:17). This makes the plagues a kind of punishment for arrogance on the part of human beings.
In 1668–94 Jean de la Fontaine wrote in his moral fables about a plague that afflicts animals. The animals decide that it must have been their sins that have caused it, and agree that the only cure is to sacrifice the one who is most to blame. Oudry later painted a beautiful though sinister cartoon in 1731, choosing to fix on the dark moment in de la Fontaine’s story where the other animals all turn on the donkey.
Responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have been varied, ranging from weekly doorstop clapping and banging on pots in honour of NHS workers to people refusing to keep their distance from others and even allegedly seeking to infect others, as in the case of Belly Mujinga who died of Covid-19 shortly after a stranger coughed in her face. Essential workers have kept us fed, clothed, emptied our bins, and looked after the sick; friends have checked on each other, neighbourhood schemes have kept the vulnerable connected with those around them, and people have put teddy bears in windows for children to spot on their daily walks during the UK lockdown. On the other hand there are those who refuse to wear masks, citing infringement of their personal rights. More broadly, some have objected to a lockdown or even quarantining restrictions as limitations on personal freedom, mentioning their concerns over civil liberties. There have been frequent and heated discussions on mainstream and social media platforms as to the balance between personal freedom and public safety.
Plague is timeless in the same way that the questions philosophers and poets have been asking for centuries are. While Thucydides claimed not to know the causes of the Athenian plague of 430–29 BC, Lucretius begins his own plague story with various options for the causes of the disease, including airborne viruses (which Covid-19 is) where “seeds of disease” hang in the air. In his 1942 novel The Plague, Albert Camus, who had Lucretius’s poem at the back of his mind, writes (in S. Gilbert’s translation), ‘we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe.’ Here Camus takes the infection of others as an indication of a person’s moral fibre. Similarly when we wear masks now, we are to be considered less as protecting ourselves than those around us. In Camus’ novel, plague is a metaphor for human failing, and some scholars have related the narrative to Camus’ rejection of capital punishment as an immoral practice.
During this pandemic, we have learned that people can only cope with anxiety about public health for so long. After a first phase of fear and excitement among doctors treating coronavirus patients, detachment and desensitisation set in; people get tired of being tired. Camus knew this too: ‘All the rest — health, integrity, purity (if you like) — is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague.’ This kind of feeling has led to many wanting to get back to ‘normal’ life and resisting the precautions that scientists and doctors advise, such as wearing masks and frequent hand-washing. But the pandemic has also meant that we have thought about those who live alone, whose loneliness is exacerbated by the difficulty of visiting others and of having friends and family in their homes. We have learned not only about the social and mental repercussions of loneliness, but also that isolation has physical effects, rendering the body more susceptible to illness.
Lucretius hints at the physical effects of the despair brought on by plague:
But the most pitiful, miserable thing of all was that when someone realised that he was involved in the plague, he would lie there miserably as if he had a death sentence, losing all heart, thinking only about death and giving up on life there and then. (6.1230–4).
The poet describes the desperate anxiety attending physical symptoms: ‘these unbearable pains had as their constant companion the torture of anxiety, and moans mixed with groans’ (6.1158–9). He even recounts, as Thucydides before him tells us too, how those suffering with the plague amputated body parts, including genitals, to escape death… ‘so deeply had the sharp terror of death invaded them’ (6.1212). Indeed, the anxiety was sometimes worse than the physical symptoms of the disease (something he surely experienced himself). It is hard to claim that mental pain of this period living with Covid-19 has been worse than the physical nature of the illness, especially for those who have suffered acutely with it; but there is a point to be made about how far we might work to lessen the mental anguish felt by everybody learning to live with plague.
Ancient poets and thinkers knew that plagues brought with them challenges to society as a whole as well as the individual; and we are learning about these challenges for ourselves, apparently for the first time. So how can we bring the lessons from the past into our lives now, learning from them, and using them to adapt to the challenges presented to us in the present day? The primary challenge of Covid-19 seems to be that we need to think less of ourselves and more of others, less of individual benefit and more of the safety of the wider public. Lucretius knew this and drew attention to the personal conflicts inherent in looking after others during an epidemic:
If anyone avoided visiting their own sick, destructive Neglect would punish them shortly afterwards for their extreme lust of life and terror of death, with horrible, dreadful death, all alone and with no help. The ones who stayed close by died from disease and the work which shame had forced them to meet head on, and the gentle sounds of the weary mixed with the sounds of moaning. The best characters met deaths like this. (6.1239–46).
Collective thought, consideration, and trust in others is not a way of life that we have become accustomed to. It is something we will need to adapt to if we are to learn to live with the virus, and eventually to outlive it. Lucretius’ timeless poem sends the message that we must learn not only to live with this pandemic, but to live well.
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