We may never know the actual disease known as the Plague of
Athens. It struck that city in the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430
BCE), and wiped out an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 of the people who had
crowded within the walls for protection against the Spartan besiegers.
Symptoms were reported (by the historian Thucydides) to include
fever, coughing, sore throats, sneezing, vomiting, diarrhea and extreme thirst.
Which might be accounted for by typhus, smallpox, typhoid or some flavor of
viral hemorrhagic fever. Or it could have been something that died out and is
waiting under layers of dirt and rubble for someone to dig up and unleash on
the modern world.
Whatever the cause, the plague devastated Athens. Thucydides and
others describe the societal effects—deaths were so numerous that survivors
couldn’t properly perform the rites, and dumped corpses on the funeral pyres of
others. Or they just appropriated pyres to cremate their own dead. The hardest
hit were those who cared for the afflicted, so people abandoned the ill and
dying. And no amount of propitiation of the gods seemed to do any good, so
people abandoned them as well.
The Roman poet Lucretius devotes a good chunk of Book VI of De
rerum naturae (On the Nature of Things) to really graphic descriptions
of the symptoms. You can read some of it here,
if you really want to. I have a fairly strong stomach, but even I draw the line
somewhere, and I’m going with Sophocles.
Though set in Thebes, the plague that sets off the plot of Oedipus
Rex probably draws on the Athenian situation. The play opens with the
people of Thebes, through their spokesman the Priest, beseeching the king to
guide them through this calamity. He’d become king through answering the riddle
of the monster Sphinx, and sitting on the throne of their murdered king Laius.
So they reckon he’s just the man who can solve the problem of this monstrous
disease that leaves both the fields and women of the city barren.
Here’s some of what the Priest says:
So now, Oedipus, our king, most powerful
in all men’s eyes, we’re here as suppliants,
all begging you to find some help for us,
either by listening to a heavenly voice,
or learning from some other human being.
For, in my view, men of experience
provide advice which gives the best results.
So now, you best of men, raise up our state.
Act to consolidate your fame, for now,
thanks to your eagerness in earlier days,
the city celebrates you as its saviour.
Don’t let our memory of your ruling here
declare that we were first set right again,
and later fell. No. Restore our city,
so that it stands secure. In those times past
you brought us joy—and with good omens, too.
Be that same man today. If you’re to rule
as you are doing now, it’s better to be king
in a land of men than in a desert.
An empty ship or city wall is nothing
if no men share your life together there.
Notice the appeal—“best of men”; “consolidate your fame”; you
saved us once, but what have you done for us lately? Oedipus can’t refuse—under
the assumption that the gods sent the plague in retribution for the unsolved
murder of Laius, he sets out to bring the regicide(s) to justice.
Well—as we know, Oedipus himself is the plague, and the cause, having
(unknowingly) killed Laius and subsequently begetting a whole family with his
mother Jocasta. It is a Greek tragedy, after all, and the blame for the ills of
the world is not divine or natural, it’s the hubris of man.
The play ends with Oedipus blinding himself in remorse (Jocasta
has committed suicide in shame) and setting off into exile. It’s somewhat
facile, but Sophocles was writing for a different time. However, the final word—from
the Chorus—are still valid today:
You residents of Thebes, our native land,
look on this man, this Oedipus,
the one
who understood that celebrated riddle.
He was the most powerful of men.
All citizens who witnessed this man’s wealth
were envious. Now what a surging tide
of terrible disaster sweeps around him.
So while we wait to see that final day,
we cannot call a mortal being happy
before he’s passed beyond life free from pain.
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