16 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020annual mutating strain, anywhere be -
tween 10,000 and 80,000 die from sea-
sonal influenzas, mostly the elderly or
chronically sick. In addition, given the
easy ability to weaponize diseases in labs,
and especially given the recent spread
abroad of the sophisticated Western sci-
ences of bacteriology and virology to
first-generation high-technological
and authoritarian societies—China in
particular—the idea of a historic pan-
demic is not always fanciful.
The great plague at Athens (430–
B.C.) that broke out in the second year of
the Peloponnesian War, according to the
historian Thucydides, wiped out as
many as 80,000 people (a fourth of the
population of Athens), including rural
refugees from the Attic countryside.
Nothing, the historian claimed, did more
damage to Athens.
Some 2,500 years later, it remains a
parlor game among classicists to identify
the precise infectious culprit. Some form
of either typhus or typhoid seems most
likely. Most historians agree that the epi-
demic that killed Pericles was likely a
result of his policy of forced evacuation of
the Attic rural population from the coun-
try to inside the walls of Athens during the
Spartan invasion in late May 430 B.C. The
busy port at Piraeus was an incubator and
force multiplier of the disease.
Thucydides’ contemporary description
of the pestilence inaugurated a tradition in
Western historiography of envisioning
plagues as reflections on the pathologies
of contemporary society. He focuses not
just on the deaths and the demographic
swath of the disease but even more so on
the psychological and sociological dam-
age the disease wrought. In his view, such
natural and manmade calamities, like war
and revolution, by the nature of their
illogical violence and unpredictable may-
hem, eventually rip off the thin veneer of
civilization. They reduce people to their
animal essences. In their instinctual and
deadly competitive efforts to survive one
more day, the mob in extremis will do
almost anything—and blame almost any-
one and anything.
In the ancient world, then, plagues usu-
ally arrived in early summer from the
non-west (Egypt or Asia). They entered
European ports, usually in the south and
east, and accelerated through filthy and
densely populated cities. Pandemics trig-
gered debates on the value of the minority
scientific method—which focused onsymptomology, diagnoses, therapies, and
prognoses—versus the majority popular
embrace of religion and superstition,
which equated plagues with divine wrath
or hubris and therefore fixated on particu-
lar villains and customs that had provoked
such godly wrath.
After the Athenian plague, Athens
could still ward off a Spartan victory, but
it lacked the resources to vanquish the
Spartan empire and its growing number
of allies. In some sense, the grandiose
visions of imperial Athens ended with
the plague—even as a wider Greek inter-
est in both medical science and popular
religion increased.
Sophocles’ greatest play, Oedipus Rex,
was staged a year after the plague began
to wane. Its chief protagonist, Oedipus, a
good and wise man whose sin is to believe
that his haughty reason can defeat cosmic
fate, resembles in his arrogance the
recently deceased Pericles, the renais-
sance man with a worldly consort of
philosophers, libertines, and artists.
Again, it was the statesman’s strategy
of withdrawing tens of thousands of rural
Athenians into the city to ride out the
invasion of Spartan hoplites that ensured
that the city became the petri dish for the
plague. Of course, Pericles’ strategy, in
theory, might have worked, had his cele-
brated reliance on reason included
knowledge of the relationship between
sanitation and infection. In the end, even
the rationalist Pericles was reduced to
clutching amulets to ward off the plague.
The lifelong quest of the Byzantine
emperor Justinian (c. 482–565) focused
on reestablishing the lost Roman Empire
in the West under new Byzantine Greek
auspices. Over some 30 years of constant
campaigning, his brilliant marshals
Belisarius and Narses reconquered much
of southern Europe, North Africa, the
Balkans, and Asia Minor, while Justinian
dedicated the monumental church of
Hagia Sophia and codified Roman law.
But the bubonic plague of 541–42 soon
spread from the port capital at Constanti -
nople throughout the empire. The pan-
demic would go on to kill 500,
Byzantines and render the military agen-
das of Justinian—who also got the disease
but recovered—inert.
The chatty contemporary historian
Procopius, in Thucydidean fashion,
blamed the Egyptians for the pandem-
ic’s origins. He went on to describe the
disease as the catalyst for the sameM
OST preindustrial mass
plagues were bacterial,
causedby urban overcrowd-
ing and poor-to-nonexistent
garbage and sewage disposal. In the dis-
ruptive aftermath of pandemics, funda-
mental social and political change
sometimes followed—wars lost, govern-
ments ended, wealth and power reversed.
Of course, cheap antibiotics, modern
medical care, and sophisticated sewage
treatment and refuse collection have
mostly ended the epidemic threat of
typhus, typhoid, and bubonic plague.
Apparently, our trust in modern drugs is
such that we arrogantly do not even con-
sider the chance of pandemic danger posed
by 500,000 or so homeless Americans,
who live outside in harsh weather, amid
vermin, excrement, and rodents on our
major urban-center sidewalks.
Instead, in the modern age, viruses
have mostly replaced bacteria in posing
theoretical threats of mass infection, ill-
ness, and death. While modern Western
medicine, given enough time, can some-
times prevent many pandemic viral infec-
tions through mass vaccinations, they are,
unlike many bacterial illnesses, often
impossible, or at least difficult, to treat.
If bacterial plagues are far more
unlikely in our postmodern society,
globalization has still made the specter
of an epidemic of a viral disease—
Ebola, Middle East respiratory syn-
drome (MERS), severe acute respiratory
syndrome (SARS), and, most recently,
COVID-19—not impossible. The A and
B influenzas, despite mass inoculations,
infect about 20–30 million Americans
per year. Depending on the particularPlagues
And Panics,
Ancient and
Modern
The world’s reaction to the
coronavirus is disproportionate
to the threatBY VICTOR DAVIS
HANSON3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/4/2020 1:34 AM Page 16
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