![]() Hindsight suggests that Athens, under siege – its population swollen with refugees, everyone living in unsanitary conditions – was at risk of contagion in a way the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, clearly wasn’t. Soon afterwards, Sparta’s enemies started dying of the plague. ![]() The Spartans had cannily supplicated the god and he in return had promised victory. Thucydides, the Athenian historian, has a simple explanation for the epidemic: Apollo. Seven centuries later a plague struck Periclean Athens, killing a quarter of the city’s population and setting the city-state on a path to military defeat at the hands of Sparta. Dean Koontz's novel 'The Eyes of Darkness' (1981) made reference to a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” When the Greeks make amends and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured. ![]() The plague lasts nine days, brief by modern epidemiological standards. The god manifests his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greeks disrespect one of Apollo’s priests. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |