Praxilla

     Every artifact made by our species is shaped by our nature, inevitably recording human tastes and beliefs as well as needs and desires in the most subtle and precise detail. Thus not only the economy but much of the religion of the Proto-Indo-European peoples has been reconstructed largely through the tracing of the mere ghosts of words in linguistic roots. Poetry is the most densely information-bearing form of code. Every line holds the potential for expanding waves of significance that fade to silence at the margins of the reader’s or listener’s persistence with no clearly defined end.
     The reader wishing to understand the female poets of ancient Greece faces a paucity, though not an absence, of textual data. The twenty-first century knows of the existence, at least, of twenty-nine ancient Greek women who were celebrated in their own era, but of some of them nothing remains beyond the name and, perhaps, a few tatters of legend. The oeuvre of others has diminished to a few indirect mentions or a couple of phrases cited by grammarians to illustrate an unusual dialectical or grammatical usage.
     In antiquity some of these women were among the most highly honored of writers. They appear in vase-paintings and busts as well as in public tributes like statues and coins. Around the time of Christ Antipater of Thessalonika, who was sufficiently a part of the power structure to be appointed a local governor by the Romans, praised nine female poets as earthly Muses providing with their lyrics for “the undying delight of mortals.” They possess, he says, “divine tongues.” [1] The durability of these poets’ reputations is suggested by the fact that Antipater wrote his tribute roughly three hundred years after Nossis, the most recent writer on his list, and roughly six hundred years after Sappho, the earliest.
     Among these nine, Sappho has survived the loss of all but a few pages of her poetry and has today numerous admirers and translators, while the others remain little more than names. While we properly lament the disappearance of so much of the writing of antiquity, the work of women in particular, it is salutary also to make the fullest use of what remains. A close examination of the most fragmentary phrases might reveal unexpected beauty, like the delicate limbs of insects trapped in amber. Even a body of work consisting of only a few words might, like the pinhole lens of a camera obscura, project an entire world-view.
     The first poet Antipater mentions, perhaps because he thought her most eminent, is Praxilla of Sikyon, a poet of the fifth century BCE of whom only five fragments and three brief paraphrases remain from a once substantial body of work. Evidence of her onetime prestige includes the fact that she was honored with a statue by Lysippos, by a portrait and a few words of verse on a pot, and by allusions in Aristophanes. Even in the second century CE, she was popular enough for Tatian to denounce her and for Zenobius to record a proverbial usage making fun of one of her lines. [3]
     The bits and pieces attributed to Praxilla seem to fall into two unlike genres. The dithyramb is a pious public choral song accompanied with dance, sometimes by troupes of fifty, performed on cult or civic occasions. Dithyrambs in their original form were devoted to Dionysos, though they developed from cult usage to literary adaptation, most significantly, according to Aristotle, as the source from which tragic drama grew. Skolia, while also associated with wine, are social songs, sung by individuals at private parties, often passing the lyre around and sometimes “capping” each other’s verses. Though casual and occasional in this original usage, they became a polished genre in the hands of poets like Alcaeus, Anacreon, Sappho, and Pindar, and their characteristic meter was eventually used for more formal compositions praising gods and heroes. The identification of several of Praxilla’s fragments as skolia has suggested to some critics that she must have been a ἑταίρα or concubine as women were not ordinarily included in symposia. [4]

     A single line is all that remains from a dithyramb on Achilles.

i.
But never could I reach your heart inside.


     One can only speculate on the dramatic context, but the words alone suggest a conflict between Achilles’ subjective truth and what may be a well-intentioned advisor. Though the circumstances are unclear, the single line implies the hero’s brooding and sensitivity, his vulnerability to his own sometimes self-destructive moods. [5] The line, though, is nearly identical to passages in the Odyssey referring to Odysseus’ resistance to the perilous charms of Calypso and Circe creating a doubled-edged meaning poised between obduracy and fidelity. [6] Odysseus’ enduring affection for his mate and Achilles’ egotistical pique are both impressive in their heroic strength. This line suggests the ambiguous role of passion in shaping action and the misunderstanding that all but inevitably exists between one human and another.


ii.
O friend, let Admetus teach you to love
the good -- keep clear of thankless craven men.


     Though skolia are drinking songs performed at private parties, they need not have Dionysian or even convivial themes. Athenaeus cites Praxilla’s comment on Admetus as an example of the form, so it is clear that prudential wisdom of the sort found in maxims also appeared in such songs. (Though such content is unlikely in an American pop song, it is common in, for instance, such West African tunes as Prince Nico Mbarga’s “Aki Special.”)
     Admetus is a deeply ambiguous figure. Known as a just king, his role among the Argonauts and as a hunter of the Calydonian boar is clearly heroic. Euripedes’ chorus praises his piety and generous hospitality [7] and he is favored by both Apollo (in late antiquity called Admetus’ lover) [8] and Heracles. Yet to Praxilla he is despicable, so fearful of death that he was, in effect the killer of his own wife. [9] His name signifies “untamed” which might be taken as a heroic boast equivalent to unvanquished, but might also suggest one who had failed to control his own nature. In Euripedes’ Alcestis his father Pheres calls him hubristic and his wife is repeatedly described as outstanding (άριστος) while the epithet is never used of Admetus, yet the chorus continues to praise him to the end when Alcestis returns to the world thanks to Heracles as deus ex machina.
     The ambivalence is dramatized on the divine level. Though aided by Apollo, he is opposed by Artemis whose boar he had helped to kill. [10] On the occasion of his wedding, Admetus had neglected to sacrifice to Artemis who retaliated by filling his bridal chamber, which could represent the harmonizing of male and female, with hostile snakes. Artemis, Praxilla, and his wife’s partisans join in denunciation of the king of Pherae, though Alcestis herself is too loyal to criticize him.


iii.
Take care, my friend, a scorpion lurks under every stone.


     In this cautionary skolion the proverbial metaphor works as well literally as figuratively. The first impression enjoining caution in the natural and presumably the human realm as well, is complicated in the dialectical dance of mythology by a web of associations. Scorpion deities were well-known in the ancient Near East, nearly all of them goddesses. [11] In Greece Orion the hunter is sometimes said to be Artemis’ companion and a scorpion is the instrument of Artemis’ revenge against him. [12] Thus the scorpion is not only potentially arachnid or human, as a beast it is also associated with the same Artemis who was inimical to Admetus. He and Orion are both mortals pursued by the same virgin goddess.


iv.
You look so fine through window frame,
a girl’s fresh face, below a bride.


     The verb ἐμ-βλέπω, “to look,” “look at,” is often used in erotic contexts, and the words παρθένος (“girl” or “virgin”) and νύμφη (“bride,” “recently married”) are definitely sexual. The modern reader might take this skolion, a drinking song at a men's party, as as unkind satire, characterizing a "girl-next-door" type who already possesses experience "below," that is, "below the best." Though the Anthology contains ample misogyny, I find no parallel for such a poem there. A recent critic has made a good case that the fragment is part of an epithalamium, a rite of passage celebrating the transition from girl to married woman, a likelier reading, particularly given  the female author, all the more probable as Sappho is known to have written an entire book of epithalamia. [13]
     The three paraphrased references to Praxilla’s verse do little to clarify the influence of the sympotic setting. All relate to pederasty, one concerns the story of Zeus carrying of Chrysippus (whose rape is usually attributed to Laius) in Athenaeus [14] in a discussion of the origins of homoerotic love and the other two mentioning Canus (or Carneius), the seer who became Apollo’s eromenos.
     The three lines that remain from Praxilla’s dithyramb on Adonis the dying and reborn god of whom Frazer made so much in The Golden Bough are her best-known fragment. [15] Here, however, Adonis speaks not as a semi-divine legendary hero but rather as any mortal might, reflecting on what he most regretted leaving behind in life. To me it seems that ancient Greek poetry generally inhabits this palpable world and rests on perceptions and physical experience. The love for life, for wine and sex and sunshine, is always tinged with the sensualist’s regretful admission that all experience, even life itself, is transient, for all that it may be lit with pleasure and, perhaps in addition, with the glow of some fine abstraction from above. Praxilla begins with bidding farewell to the sun, a conventional way of speaking of death, but she then introduces a surprising trope.


v.
Most lovely I leave -- the light of the sun,
next, the luminous stars and the face of the moon,
then, too, cucumbers in season, and apples, and pears.


     The light of the heavenly bodies is a conventional sign of numinous glory, a glimpse of the divine available to anyone who gazes upwards, but the last line began to sound strange not long after its composition. In Zenobius’ book of proverbs, he records the phrase “more foolish than Praxilla’s Adonis,” presumably because of bathos of fruit following after semi-divine heavenly bodies, and, in particular the mention of one more often featured in salads than lyrics. [16] I think upon reading it of the many catalogues in the dedicatory book of the Greek Anthology which list specific objects – tools, toys, in one case a single quince [17] – that were significant for an individual. For a mystic, any object if considered deeply might be uplifting, and, for an agricultural people, a deep attachment to produce seems quite natural. At any rate, Praxilla’s Adonis expresses an immense affection for the things of this world and the tragic incongruity of mortal attachments.
     Surveying the scanty remains of Praxilla’s poetry, one would look in vain for a dramatic new vision or stylistic innovation (though there is the one original meter, the praxilleion), still less for an anachronistic feminism (though she did have an affinity with Artemis and took Alcestis’ part against Admetus). She has more in common with the didactic proverbialism of Theognis than with the sensual intensity of Sappho. No high-wire juggler of myth like Pindar, she represents for the most part the norms and received ideas of her time, no mean achievement itself. Skolia were popular at the symposia, thus she composed many, very likely on popular themes, including the prudential monitory lines that have been preserved.
     That marvelous cucumber of Adonis stands out, with every reading providing a delightful frisson of surprise. Just as the expected sun and stars do not vanish into insignificance with the mention of the surprising produce, the detailing of wholly conventional Greek beliefs remains richly meaningful, all the more significant due to accumulated tradition. Celebrating marriage and extramarital affairs alike, while also fussing over the imperfection of marriage and friendship, warning about betrayal with the voice of experience, these are all-too-human and very Greek. The most powerful image of Praxilla, though, on which her reader is likeliest to linger is surely her Adonis who loved both the large and small marvels of life. Neither the necessity of eventual farewells nor the sure sweet pain of clinging to the evanescent can dissuade this Adonis, or, presumably, Praxilla from a passionate love for this world.





1. Greek Anthology 9.26. The Greek phrases are “θνατοῖς ἄφθιτον εὐφροσύναν” and “θεογλώσσους . . . γυναῖκας.”

2. See Thesmophorizusae, 528 Wasps, 1238,

3. Against the Greeks, 33 says her “poems contain nothing useful.” In the same passage he calls Sappho “a lewd, love-sick female [who] sings her own wantonness.” He indicts as well a number of other female poets, claiming that Christian women in contrast are “are chaste, and the maidens at their distaffs sing of divine things more nobly than that damsel of yours.” Tatian notes scornfully fourteen women honored by Greek cities with statues. For Zenobius see note 6 below.

4. Wilamowitz was horrified at the idea of a proper lady writing skolia. Some have even suggested the existence of two Praxillas, one more respectable than the other. A somewhat more likely proposal is that Praxilla may have been, not a courtesan, but a sort of professional entertainer, like some of the Troubadours. Other critics have surmised that the skolia were falsely ascribed to Praxilla after her death.

5. Kleist’s Achilles in Penthesilea is dramatically more extreme, almost always in an erotic furor.

6. Speaking of Calypso: ἀλλὰ τοῦ οὔ ποτε θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ἔπειθεν: “yet she could never persuade the heart in his breast,” Odyssey XXIII, 337. Similarly, VII, 258 and IX, 33 referring to Circe.

7. ὃσιος 553 (pious or in accord with nature).

8. See Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 934; Tibullis, Elegies 2.3; Callimachus Hymn 2.47-49; and Rhianus fr. 10 P.

9. The semantic range of the word δειλός extends from cowardly to base, worthless and miserable, unhappy, implying that courage is essential for a good character and that good character is a prerequisite for happiness.

10. In fact the story of the hunt includes on the human level the gender opposition of the gods. Atalanta, a virgin huntress like Artemis, was the first to wound the boar, but her prize, though allowed by Melagar, was taken by other men, jealous of her recognition. (Ovid Metamorphoses, VIII, 425-0450).

11. Among them were the Egyptian Serket (also Hedetet and Ta-Bitjet), the Hurrian and Hittite Ishhara (sometimes identified with Ishtar), and, some dikstance further afield, the Hindu Chelamma. A rare exception are the scorpion men Aqrabuamelu attested in reliefs and described in the Akkadian Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish but these are, after all, creatures of the goddess Tiamat.

12. Odyssey 5.121 ff. The same tradition appears in Hesiod (fragment 4 - Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Catast. fr. xxxii ). According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 25 Artemis killed him either for challenging her to a discus competition or for conceiving another love interest.

13. Vanessa Cazzato, “Glancing Seductively through Windows: The Look of Praxilla fr. 8 (PMG 754) in The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual: Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, vol. 1, edited by Vanessa Cazzato and André Lardinois. Sappho is known to have written many epithalamia.

14. Athenaeus 13.603a.

15. Among the parallels Frazer cites are Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Dionysus, and Jesus. For others see Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature A192 and A193.

16. Zenobius, Proverbs 4.21. Zenobius wrote in the second century CE. Many critics have offered justifications. Smyth in Greek Melic Poets, for example, suggests the poet was characterizing Adonis’ naivete. In addition cucumber (σίκυος) is surely a play on her city’s name Sikyon (Σικυών).

17. Greek Anthology VI, 252.

Kleist’s Zoroaster

Gebet des Zoroaster (Heinrich von Kleist, 1810)

Prayer of Zoroaster

(From an Indian manuscript, discovered by a traveler in the ruins of Palmyra)

O God, my father in heaven! You have given to humanity a free, marvelous, and abundant life. Powers of endless sorts, divine and animal, play together in his breast, enough to make him king over the earth. Nevertheless, overcome by unseen spirits, he lies for some astonishing and incomprehensible reason in chains and fetters. Misled by error, he abandons the highest and sets off toward wretchedness and nihilism, stricken with blindness. Yet, he likes himself in his condition; and, if the people of earlier times had never been and the holy songs that tell of it had vanished, we would have no idea of what peaks, o lord!, one may look about. Now and then you allow the scales to fall from the eyes of one of your sons that he whom you have chosen may glimpse the foolishness and error of his kind. You prepare him with the quiver of speech so that he, fearless and loving, may go among them with arrows, some sharp, some gentle, with which to wake them from the fabulous somnolence in which they lie. I, too, o lord, in your wisdom you have chosen, though unworthy for this work, and I can only follow orders. Penetrate me head to foot with the feeling of misery to which this age has sunken and with insight into all wretchedness, half-measures, deceit, and hypocrisy that are the consequences. Steel me with the ready strength to draw the bow of judgement and to choose the arrow with prudence and discernment, such that I encounter each individual appropriately: to cast down the fame of the transitory and incurable, to frighten the vicious and warn the erring, to tease the fools with the mere sound far over their heads. And teach me to weave a wreath with which I might crown in my own way those who please you. More than anything, o lord, may love awaken for you without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.



Zoroaster in German Romanticism


     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Gebet des Zoroaster” (“Zoroaster’s Prayer”) was published as the lead article in the first issue of his extraordinary short-lived daily periodical the Berliner Abendblätter. Almost a manifesto, it suggests the passion and ambition he brought to the first newspaper of Berlin. More broadly, it provides a succinct statement of Kleist’s Romantic sensibility. Zoroaster himself, the Persian prophet, has virtually nothing to do with Kleist’s cri de coeur and serves primarily as the poet’s mouthpiece, yet the choice of persona is nonetheless significant.
     The rise in trade and the assertion of imperial domination by European powers stimulated the vogue for chinoiserie in decorative arts and design. European writers in the eighteenth century, like more recent science fiction writers, used the perspective of the Other to provide new and critical perspectives on their own societies. [4] Among the many examples are Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), Voltaire’s Zadig subtitled Histoire Orientale (1747), and Beckford’s Vathek, first published as An Arabian Tale (1786).
     Apart from profit, fashion and social criticism, Asia also drew the attention of philosophers, including many who were dissatisfied with the Enlightenment faith in reason. In Germany and France such writers as Hamann and Herder have in recent years been considered to constitute a Counter-Enlightenment movement, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term. Only at the end of the eighteenth century were Europeans able to begin reading translations of major non-Christian works of spirituality, some by Christian missionaries interested in effectively combating the idolatry of the heathens, but others by Europeans who found profound wisdom in the East. [5]
     Interest in Zoroaster himself was surprisingly widespread. Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote an opera Zoroastre (1749). Guillaume Alexandre de Méhégan published a similarly titled novel in 1751 (claiming to be a translation from the "Chaldaean") in which Zoroaster was a wise ruler. Johann Friedrich Kleuker translated Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s 1771 French version of the Avesta into German in 1776 as Zend-Avesta, Zoroasters Lebendiges Wort. Voltaire not only made his Zadig a Zoroastrian, he also wrote the article “Zoroastre” (based in part on Thomas Hyde’s life of Zoroaster) in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) in which he declares Zoroaster “the first of men after Confucius.” [6] Yet Voltaire also reacted against the supernatural and mythic stories of the prophet concluding “One cannot read two pages of the abominable rubbish attributed to this Zoroaster without pitying human nature.” [7]
     Writers who valorized emotion and imagination joined Voltaire in his criticism of the sociopolitical order, but some found his rational Deism spiritually wanting. Many sought wisdom in the unconscious, the child, the uneducated, the “primitive,” and the exotic. Such privileging did not begin with Rousseau nor did it end with nineteenth century realism. Yeats’ use of elements of Theosophical lore, Isherwood’s of Vedanta, and Ginsberg’s of Buddhism are likewise examples of Western literary appropriation of Asian cultural materials, with varying mixtures of the traditional and the novel. Blake revered the “ancient Poets” without specifying any in particular because their position in the childhood of humanity was enough to lend them authority. With the same Romantic bias some Americans think that the practices of native people must exemplify a mysterious greater wisdom.
     The praying persona has only the name of Zoroaster, which served Kleist as an empty tablet on which to write what he wished, but his use of the “Oriental” name entailed a weighty load of association. Like Blake in England, he seeks to restore a sense of the divine lost in the Enlightenment. His own crisis of faith is associated by most critics with his reading of Kant which led him to conclude that “dass hienieden keine Wahrheit zu finden ist” (“truth is not to be found here below”). [2]
     Zoroaster’s name allowed Kleist, not to convey information about the ancient prophet or his followers, but to express himself. By claiming to produce a translation of a non-Christian document, he might address the divine as he chose without danger of rebuke from the pious. He could fiercely denounce his own society with less worry about the censors.
     “Zoroaster’s Prayer” is driven by a passion which clearly is that of its author, though generalized and conventionalized. Inspired by what can only be called faith, it opens with an address to God the Father, and proceeds to enthusiastic praise of humans as kings of the earth, given marvelous powers. Though Zoroastrianism is a radically dualistic vision like the later Manichaeism, the origin of suffering and wickedness is here unspecified except as the result of error to which people have become habituated, even perversely attached. Correction can come according to the prayer, not through reasoning, but through a sort of grace that grants rhetorical skills to prophets who are chosen by God, the “quiver of speech,” “bow of judgement,” and well-chosen convincing “arrows” of argument. The speaker concludes by extolling love “without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your [God’s] empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.” [3] The speaker s recommends the specifically non-rational values of faith and love, though he is rather foggy about the basis and the character of that belief, there is no doubt about his dissatisfaction with the spirit of the age.
     German Romantics sought in a variety of ways to register dissatisfaction with rationalism as a sufficient means of investigating the world. The Schlegel brothers did important philological work on Asian texts and linguistic study while seeking the novelty of a non-European perspective as well as founding the house organ of German Romanticism the Athenaeum in 1798. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck praised medieval and Renaissance art over that of their own day primarily for its perceived greater emotion. Herder and Schelling expounded a Naturphilosophie based in the subjective, while to Scheleiermacher religion was “essentially an intuition or a feeling.” [8] Like Novalis whose “blue flower” represented a novel and similarly vague sort of mysticism, Kleist spoke for a revolution in sensibility in which Asian spirituality played an oppositional role recognizable to those who recall the popularity over a period of years of books like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923), Black Elk Speaks (1932), the Richard Wilhelm/Cary Baynes I Ching (1950), and the Coleman Barks version of Rumi (We Are Three 1987 and a great many more publications since). Zoroaster might repeat his prayer today with little loss of relevance. He would surely find readers sufficiently Romantic still in the twenty-first century to feel its resonance. After all, others both before and since Heinrich von Kleist have declared with him that “all you need is love.”




1. Berliner Abendblätter, 1stes Blatt., den 1sten October 1810. The journal not only took an unusually independent political stance under censorship, it published Achim von Arnim , Clemens Brentano , Wilhelm Grimm , and Friedrich Schleiermacher among others as well as informed articles on scientific developments. It lasted only six months; eight months after the journal’s demise, Kleist killed himself.

2. Letter to Wilhelmine March 22, 1801. A substantial discussion of the philosophic influences is available in D. F. S. Scott, “Heinrich von Kleist's Kant Crisis,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 1947), pp. 474-484. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3716801?seq=11#metadata_info_tab_contents

3. One might have thought that God’s empire already extended through all space and time.

4. See Jürgen Osterhammel (trans. Robert Savage), Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia.

5. To give only two examples Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil du Perron, who translated the Avesta in 1771 after long study with Parsi scholars and divines and Charles Wilkins, translator of the Bhagavad Gita (1785). Blake did a painting of Wilkins and the pandits on the occasion of the Gita’s publication; it is unfortunately lost.

6. “Zoroastre était le premier des hommes après Confucius.”

7. “On ne peut lire deux pages de l’abominable fatras attribué à ce Zoroastre sans avoir pitié de la nature humaine.”

8. In his Addresses on Religion 1799. The German title is significant: Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Lectures to the Sophisticated among its Despisers).

Pestilential Times

These are drafts of brief talks I was invited to prepare on literary responses to epidemics for an online library program. I venture to point out a few comparisons with our present situation and on this excuse have indexed this with politics. The quotations from Defoe are, scholars will notice, from an edition with modernized capitalization conventions.


I. Thucydides’ account of the plague in Athens

     There can be no good time for a pestilence, but the citizens of ancient Athens had reason to feel that the disease which spread in 430 BCE was peculiarly unlucky. The city was well into the Second Peloponnesian War with Sparta when, as Thucydides tells us, its citizens were suddenly struck by a greater plague than any had ever before experienced.
     Physicians of the day had no effective treatment. Thucydides notes that, as they were caring for the stricken, a great many doctors died. Magical recourse such as “supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth” likewise proved of no value. Ultimately the disease (experts dispute the diagnosis) killed a hundred thousand people, a good third of the population of Athens. Thucydides, himself a survivor of the illness, describes the progress of physical symptoms in agonizing detail, but he regards the most horrifying effects to be psychological.


"But the greatest misery of all was the dejection of mind in such as found themselves beginning to be sick (for they grew presently desperate and gave themselves over without making any resistance), as also their dying thus like sheep, infected by mutual visitation, for the greatest mortality proceeded that way."


     He notes a detail that will not surprise Americans in 2020. The suffering of those on their deathbeds was increased by isolation. “For if men forebore to visit them for fear, then they died forlorn.”
     Even the healthy began behaving irresponsibly. As the number of victims grew, people began to neglect first proper burial rites and then “grew careless both of holy and profane things alike.” Those with money spent it profligately, thinking they might have but few days left. Licentiousness ruled ranging from rudeness to outright crime as social bonds dissolved. Many Athenians reacted to their own fear by descending into semi-savagery. They neglected the bonds of cooperation that joined them to their fellows. The social fabric that had produced Classical Greece was unraveling.
     Thucydides’ memorable depiction of this critical scene in Greek history is considerably heightened in drama and significance due to the fact that it is immediately preceded in his history by the celebrated account of Pericles’ funeral oration for the dead of the first year of the Second Peloponnesian War. Every nation commemorates its war dead as martyrs to the national values, and the society Pericles praises has much in it that we might yet admire. The ideals he celebrates are meaningful despite the facts that ancient Athens stood on the shoulders of slaves, that women were excluded from much of public life, that oligarchs and cliques regularly out-muscled majority rule, and that greed often motivated both foreign and domestic policy. The Athenians felt considerable pride in Hellenic superiority to “Asian” despotism.
     The single word in which Pericles sums up what is good about his city is liberty. He says, “our ancestors have handed down to us a free country.” He says the government “favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” When he celebrates their practice of equality under the law and claims that people might there advance through individual merit in spite of low birth, he sounds very like an American.
     Pericles goes on to discuss what we might today call lifestyle issues, recommending a broadly liberal tolerance and consistent civility. “We do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.” In contrast to what he saw as the gloomy rigor of the Spartan garrisons, Athenians, he says, enjoy life. “Our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please.” For a civilized person, Pericles thought, that embraces the pursuit of pleasure. “Further, we provide plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business. We celebrate games and sacrifices all the year round, and the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish the spleen.”
     He claims that such apparent casualness brings with it no weakness. “This ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens.” “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners” out of fear that they may be spying, trusting in “the native spirit of our citizens” to protect the city when necessary. In sum he says Athenians “are just as ready [as those under tyrannical regimes] to encounter every legitimate danger.”
     Pericles is clear that to him freedom, democracy, liberality, and tolerance make the land stronger than regimentation by encouraging every citizen to live as an individual while fully engaging in community life. The cohesiveness that comes from mutual respect and the joy that arises from the collective pursuit of the good life will, he feels, allow his people to defeat any despot’s challenge. Athens had, after, led the successful resistance to the Persians.
     The glorious ideal, however, was shredded by the plague. Patriotism had always concealed contradictions. Following the victory over Persia, Athens had been high-handedly manipulating the Delian League to allow itself ever greater benefits, establishing a sort of empire over other Greeks. This was, in fact, the cause of the war with Sparta. With the physical and psychological damage of the epidemic weighing against them, Athens lost, and a puppet regime, the Thirty Tyrants, was imposed over them. Socrates refused what he considered an unjust order from the Tyrants to arrest a certain Leon of Salamis. According to Plato’s Apology, he would have been killed for his defiance if the government had not fallen just in time. (It was a few years later, under so-called democracy, that he was, in fact, executed.) The Athenian system never recovered its strength, and not so very long after, Alexander subjugated not only Greece but much of the world to autocratic rule.
     No nation presently threatens the United States as Sparta did Athens, but we would do well to bear other parallels in mind. The fear of the Other in American racism and xenophobia, the appeal of a militarized economy, disrespect for the values of others, and the lure to some of an all-knowing tyrant who will relieve everyone else of the need to make decisions, all of these, I think, weaken America. They are likely to attract more people as fearfulness and anxiety increase in times of crisis.
     American society has long valued openness, freedom, tolerance, and liberality as ideals, however imperfectly they have been realized. The reader of Thucydides will surely conclude that, even under an epidemic, a society that loses these values may never recover them. America had been stressed by terrorism, economic inequality, and bad actors among other nation states, and the addition of a frightening illness only adds another potential catalyst for irrational decisions. The fact is that people who have a stake in their society, who believe in it, who have some control over their own lives, will be better citizens, both in peace and in war, than those who have been coerced into obedience.
     Ancient Athens offers a cautionary example. Frightened by the very real danger of illness and death, they gave up their commitment to each other and fell into fragmented isolation, chasing after individual ends. I have never seen such a danger of fascism as looms over the United States today. For the future of the American experiment to be bright, the right course can only be to redouble our cooperation and reinforce a sense of community that includes everyone. The yahoos holding demonstrations against pandemic precautions resemble the Athenians who panicked and abandoned what they believed in. Those who demonstrate against racism, the medical workers, the teenagers who are stocking grocery shelves, the people delivering our mail, these are the upholders of true American values. There is no easy way out, and people are daily dying, but the United States might still save its soul.



II. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year


     Since the Black Death ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century, bubonic plague regularly took English victims, but in the days before antibiotics and antipyretics, many diseases might prove as fatal. The plague had broken out in London in 1592, 1603, 1625 and 1636. However, it returned in 1665 with a severity unseen for centuries. The best eyewitness account of this epidemic was written by Daniel Defoe in spite of the fact that he was only five years old when the disease killed a hundred thousand of his fellow citizens, nearly equaling within the city the staggering mortality rates that had occurred three hundred years earlier throughout Europe. Defoe’s book A Journal of the Plague Year, though it was published fifty years later, provides excellent and detailed reportage, full of both statistics and journalistic anecdotes, that allows the reader today to understand the experience of Londoners and to evaluate the public health measures with which the government sought to cope with the unfolding devastation.
     His book appeared in 1722, over fifty years after the events it describes, but at a time people were talking about the disease which had recently broken out anew in Marseille. Before publishing the Journal Defoe had tested the market with reportage about the disease in southern France and the release of his Due Preparations for Plague as well for Soul as for Body. His new book found plenty of readers. It sold well when first out, it has been consistently reprinted, and in March of 2020 Amazon reported that the popular Penguin edition had sold out. It is considered by many historians the best single account of the time, more useful than such contemporary publications as Hodge’s Loimologia or Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City or even Pepys’s diary.
     Apart from the topicality of the continuing danger of plague, as a professional author, Defoe doubtless saw a potential best-seller in the horrifying and sensational details he collected from a number of sources including the journal of an uncle with whose initials he signed the manuscript. The narrator cannot stay away from the giant corpse pit dug in the churchyard of St. Aldgate. We hear the voices of rumor and gossip. There were reports, Defoe tells us, of the dying sometimes leaping into the pit alive out of despair. A certain piper, he claims, was passed out drunk and mistakenly put on the dead-cart. As they proceeded toward the church, he stirred, causing one of the attendants to exclaim, “Lord, bless us! There’s somebody in the cart not quite dead!” eliciting the response, “I an’t dead though, am I?” which “made them laugh a little, though . . . they were heartily frighted at first.” Defoe records rumors of nurses who killed patients in their care, as well as “mothers murdering their own children in their lunacy, some dying of mere grief as a passion…others frightened into idiotism.” At times the cries of the afflicted seemed to fill the city and could be heard by anyone walking the streets. “ I wish I could repeat the very sound of those groans and of those exclamations that I heard from some poor dying creatures when in the height of their agonies…and that I could make them that read this hear, as I imagine I now hear them, for the sound seems still to ring in my ears.”
     When the plague struck, King Charles II and his notoriously pleasure-loving court along with many aristocrats promptly moved out of town, going first to Hampton Court in Salisbury, but then, when cases emerged there, on to Oxford. So many wealthy commoners (including the better class of physicians) left town in their wake that for days the streets were jammed with moving wagons. Among the affluent who remained, it was possible for Samuel Pepys, at least, to multiply his fortune fourfold and to write “I have never lived so merrily (besides that I never got so much) as I have done this plague time.” And Pepys was a man, we know, who fancied his wine and women.
     In contrast to the king and his circle, Lord Mayor John Lawrence, a middle-class businessman, announced that he, the aldermen, and the sheriffs would remain to combat the disease and ensure order. He issued plague regulations that included hiring doctors for the poor at public expense as well as “searchers,” older women in all neighborhoods, to report where deaths had occurred, and watchmen to oversee homes where victims, their families, and servants were sequestered. Some may find parallels between the utter neglect of duty by the crown and the responsible and aggressive action by lower authorities during the seventeenth century and today’s United States in which the would-be American king keeps minimizing the present pandemic, leaving it up to state officials with greater respect for science to take effective action to protect citizens.
     Just as today, simply purchasing food was a risky business. Though homes in which plague had been detected were locked down, depending on the watchman assigned to keep them in to run errands such as buying provisions, the symptomless continued to circulate about the streets. “And here I must observe again,” Defoe notes, “that this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city; for the people catched the distemper, on these occasions, one of another.” He vividly recreates the experience of shoppers. “The butcher refused to hand the cook a cut of meat; she had to take it off the hook herself. And he wouldn’t touch her money; she had to drop her coins into a bucket of vinegar.”
     The mayor’s decisive action was not universally applauded. Defoe says, “The shutting up of houses was a subject of great discontent, and I may say indeed the only subject of discontent among the people at that time.” The poor suffered the most. Living in cramped quarters, with hardly the means of subsistence in normal times, it is little wonder that some refused to confine themselves. “What must I do?” he quotes one man as saying, “I can’t starve. I had as good have the plague as perish for want.” Today the news features armed protestors in Michigan invading the state capitol demanding an end to the state’s pandemic precautions. They have a good deal in common with those of whom Defoe said (with, admittedly, a certain classism), “But it was impossible to beat anything into the heads of the poor. They went on with the usual impetuosity of their tempers, full of outcries and lamentations when taken, but madly careless of themselves, foolhardy and obstinate, while they were well.” Defoe comments that the greater damage occurred when people thought the crest of the threat had passed and they prematurely moved to resume normal life.
     We might certainly echo Defoe’s observation that the illness stimulated extremes of both irresponsibility and duty. While the city government did its best to protect the people and some risked their own lives in tending to loved ones or total strangers, others behaved recklessly, going abroad into the city and out of it while carrying the disease. People evaded those appointed to guard them and keep them in their homes and were rumored even sometimes to have killed the watchmen.
     Then as now, quack nostrums proliferated. Our president has pushed remedies ranging from the semi-plausible (hydroxychloroquine) to the utterly preposterous (injections of bleach), and anxious patients have grasped after every straw. At a time when it seemed everyone was dying and medical science had little effective remedy for infections of any kind, such frauds are not surprising. Defoe has little patience with magic remedies. “But it was impossible to make any impression upon the middling people and the working labouring poor. Their fears were predominant over all their passions, and they threw away their money in a most distracted manner upon those whimsies.” Charms and amulets such as “Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid” were sold to anxious buyers.
     Many interpreted the plague as a divine judgement and those who could attended services, some featuring Dissenting preachers in pulpits belonging to the Church of England from which the priests had fled. Street ministries flourished as well in what seemed to many apocalyptic times.


"In March, early in the plague, he was out on a warm morning, puffy clouds above in the blue sky, and saw a crowd surrounding a woman who was carrying on about a giant angel in the clouds pointing a sword at London. She gestured upward, calling on all to see. “Yes, I can see it all plainly,” said a member of the crowd. Another “saw (the angel’s) very face and cried out what a glorious creature he was.” The narrator was having none of this; he told the crowd only clouds bathed in sunshine were above. The crowd became agitated, the visionary woman angry. She blasted the narrator, screaming God’s judgment was approaching, “and despisers ... should wander and perish.” The narrator, sensing trouble in this world if not the next, moved on."


     In a passage that has proved finely ironic, Defoe attacks those who considered the disease a “stroke from Heaven,” against which it would be impious to struggle, reminding moderns of the leaders of Southern megachurches who refuse to halt their mass gatherings. Yet he goes on to comment on the “manifest ignorance” of those “who talk of infection being carried on by the air only, by carrying with it vast numbers of insects and invisible creatures.” And the persona of the Journal decides to remain in the city only after opening his Psalms randomly to a passage he takes as a sign from above.
     To him the epidemic represented an intensification of the general human dispensation rather than an example of special Providence. “A near view of death would soon reconcile men of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing to our easy situation in life, and our putting these things far from us, that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued, prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union so much kept and so far carry'd on among us, as it is: another plague year would reconcile all these differences, a close conversing with death, or the diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes, than those which we look'd on things with before.”
     We might well wish for such an outcome ourselves, having progressed little toward enlightenment in the last three centuries. America can only hope that our own comparatively bearable privations and the deaths of so many fellow citizens, though proportionally so much less than those of the seventeenth century, might sweeten our temperaments and heighten our realization that cooperation is essential to our survival and, indeed, is what makes us human. Now, as we hear new mortality figures daily, some have taken this point to heart, but it seems that the twenty-first century pandemic has only caused others to cling more obstinately to selfishness and ignorance.