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.