Stark (1996, 84–85) brings in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian
War,although from a much earlier period (the Athenian plague of 431 BCE),
as evidence of a Greco-Roman tendency for persons to avoid helping the sick
during a plague. There are problems, however, with Stark’s treatment of
Thucydides’ text. Stark quotes portions of the text which support his the-
sis, but omits other sections that do not, and he misinterprets yet other parts.
Admittedly, Thucydides notes the ineffectiveness of both medicine and
religion in coping with the plague, but this rhetorical statement is intended
to prove the assertion (so typical of ancient plague accounts) that “no pesti-
lence of such extent nor any scourge so destructive of human lives is on
record anywhere” (2.47). In other words, Thucydides is more concerned
with making a dramatic point than with critiquing the failure of medicine
or religion, as Stark would have it. Stark then quotes from a section of
Thucydides (2.51) which describes how people who were afraid of conta-
gion abandoned the sick. The result was that they died with no one to look
after the sick. What Stark has left out of this excerpt is that Thucydides is
describing a Catch-22 scenario, in which many notable persons who had
made a point of visiting their sick friends also lost their lives to the plague—
an example of the aforementioned counterproductive side of altruism. The
text in full reads:
they became infected by nursing one another and died like sheep. And
this caused the heaviest mortality; for if, on the one hand, they were
restrained by fear from visiting one another, the sick perished uncared
for, so that many houses were left empty through lack of anyone to do
the nursing; or if, on the other hand, they visited the sick, they per-
ished, especially those who made any pretensions to goodness. For these
made it a point of honour to visit their friends without sparing them-
selves at a time when the very relatives of the dying, overwhelmed by
the magnitude of the calamity, were growing weary even of making
their lamentations. (Thucydides, Hist. 2.51)In addition, Stark quotes, from the same section, some lines that seem to
state that people had stopped worshipping the gods. But Thucydides is not
saying that out of despair the people absolutely rejected the gods. Rather,
Thucydides relates how people, in the extremity of crisis, became careless
of certain socio-religious conventions, such as burial customs, public deco-
rum, and self-restraint. Part of the problem is that the English translation
Stark uses narrowly renders sebeinas “worship.” The Loeb edition translates
this word as “piety” (performance of traditional acts honouring the gods),
which gives a meaning more fitting to the sense of the passage. Stark also
ignores a passage (Thucydides, Hist.2.52) that describes corpses piled up
“Look How They Love One Another” 223