Alexandra, listen to her sandals echoing on the cobbles, running down the narrow side streets of the Agora.
They mingled with the sounds of the campfires of the Spartan enemy. She could hear not far from the Dippin Gates.
It was Resh could hear herself think these days, let alone her own footsteps.
Since the siege began, halted, crowded into Athens and space to move around.
We even had live in had become impossible.
As she walked into the panic Panasonic make way she could see people from the outlying villages crammed up against the walls,
their makeshift tents, doing their best to contain what little they brought with them.
Not that anyone had much now. Food was scarce, and the street traders were demanding half your life's work for even a platter of olives.
And the smell? As she made her way towards the Acropolis, the throngs became denser and denser.
And she began to push on the smells of the banks around her, leaning into the bodies with her shoulders.
There was something else here, too,
scattered around the crowd as loud as the footsteps or the noise of the enemies outside the distant sound of coughing.
From the old man next to her. Over there.
And the young girl being carried on her father's shoulders by the trader trying to force his way along the wall.
All coughing, spluttering, resonating around the streets.
And it was then in the heat of the sunlit city that her head started to spin and her full head began to burn.
Welcome to Athens in the fifth century B.C. and the third season of the Future Makers podcast.
I'm Professor Peter Milliken. And over the next 10 years, I'd like you to join me on a journey through the history of pandemics.
We'll be looking at 10 major outbreaks from the plague of Athens to the West African Ebola outbreak by the Black Death.
Cholera small asking how these outbreaks have shaped society.
What we may be able to learn from them today and where we might be today.
We join a crowded city in the midst of a scene where my colleague, Professor Tim Rood, picks up our story.
The Peloponnesian War was fought between four, three, one and four or four B.C. between the Athenians and the Spartans and the allies on both sides.
The Athenians were a great naval power.
They ruled over many islands in the Aegean, whereas the Spartans and their health vision allies were a great land.
The Athenians were adopting a very unusual tactic. Their leader, Heraklion, their most powerful politician,
had a policy where he was gathering together all of the people from the territory of
Ataca within the city walls of Athens and not resisting these invasions by land.
So he was letting the enemy roam through Athenian territory and destroy agricultural land.
He was relying on Athens as a naval power to bring in supplies and to to to
survive to to show that Athens could win through against these land invasions.
The result of this was that the city of Athens was much more packed with people than would usually have been the case.
There would have been people spread over the city. There are people living in what the normally sacred areas.
So it was a much more packed environment than usual.
And so particularly hospitable for the onset of plague.
In my own studies of postoffice, ascertaining the validity of historical records as often proved to be a challenge.
So I asked him how accurate is our source for this area?
Our main source for the politicians war is vicinities. This was an Athenian.
He was perhaps about 30 years old when the war started. He was from an upper strata sort of of Athenian society.
He became general, a strategic goals.
In the early stages of the war and was subsequently exiled by Athens owing to some misfortunes during his period of command.
So he was writing a contemporary history of a war which was going on in which he himself had taken part.
And he, in a sense, our whole vision of the Peloponnesian War rests on him.
This series has always been incredibly highly regarded as a historian.
He made this incredibly bold claim in his introduction that he was writing this history not as some kind of competition piece for the moment,
for immediate hearing, but as a possession forever, a possession that could be used at any time in the future.
And he had a view of a sort of universal human nature where similar kind of events could happen in the future.
And his account would enable readers to understand, if not perhaps prevent those events.
And that interest in the recurrence of events is also very pertinent for his view of the plague,
because he also imagines the recurrence of a disease of that sort in the future.
Denise mentions the onset of the plague in the second year of the war.
His narrative is divided up just by seasons, winter's summers years under that and the beginning of the second year that the plague arrives.
He describes rumours that has come down from Ethiopia through Africa,
cities through Egypt and across the territory of the Persian Empire, the island of Lemnos in the Aegean.
And then it hits Athens in the port of Piraeus and travels up from there towards the main city around the Acropolis.
So he describes it as a very sudden onset, which has an immense affect at Athens.
It coincides with one of the helipad visions, annual invasions, the sir, the second of their invasions.
And there are some.
Rumours, he reports that the Palestinians have somehow poisoned wells in the press and have caused this disease a sort of conspiracy theory.
But mainly he he stresses the suddenness,
the actual the very word he uses to describe the onset of the plague is that it strikes down on the city a bit like a lightning bolt.
So it's a real sudden event and it falls on the city from outside.
There's a lot of debate as to whether this outbreak was a plague at all, which we'll discuss later.
But I wondered how our author, a few cities, describes the disease that hit his city.
He offers a single account of the plague where he gives them the kind of the symptoms,
the bodily symptoms people in perfect health suddenly began to have burning.
Their eyes became red flame inside their mouths was eating from the throat and tongue, and the breath became a natural, unpleasant.
The next symptoms were sneezing and hoarseness of voice. And before long, the pain settled on the chest and was accompanied by coughing.
Next. The stomach was affected with stomach pains and with vomiting every kind of bile that has been given a name by the medical profession.
All this being a company, a great pain and difficulty. He describes how it starts in the head with a fever, with inflamed eyes.
It travels down the throat, becomes bloody. The breath becomes foul.
People sneeze. They've there's hoarseness, hits their chests.
They cough, their stomachs become upset. They retch.
And he describes the external symptoms on their body.
There are sores. They feel not hot to touch on the outside, but inside they feel a fever.
And few cities doesn't know this only by observing others, but from his own personal experience.
So when this disease says that he's going to describe what sort of disease it was so that people could recognise it in the future.
He says that he's gone off on a cat, having himself fallen sick from the disease and also having seen other people suffering it.
And that's all that he says. So he doesn't describe what was particular to him.
He simply says he caught the disease,
but he is clearly making his account more authoritative by appealing to this notion that he had himself suffered it.
We don't know how badly he had it. We didn't know what the lasting effect on him was.
The problem with this elitist description of the symptoms is they're similar to many
different diseases and there's been long debate about what disease it could be.
It's possible both the diseases have changed over time. There's also, of course, question about how one defines a plague.
I mean, clearly, this disease means by this very bad kind of disease.
He's clearly not you know, we have an idea of a plague like the people like plague.
We have other other diseases, typhus, typhoid, smallpox.
There've been all sorts of attempts to explain what disease this was. There's also, of course,
the possibility that the citizen is describing the symptoms of more than one
disease that could have been one main disease and another illnesses as well.
At least the cities are just grouping all of these together under this one label.
And he, in a sense, is not so much interested in the question of how you label this disease, even in terms of his account of the symptoms of it.
At one stage, he refers to all the different sorts of bile that are named by doctors,
and he uses Ataturk as a kind of shorthand to refer to this much more specialist type of discussion
where doctors pin down names on particular bodily fluids or basically bodily emissions.
So he's not interested in so much in that, isn't it, portraying this as a single overpowering illness that fell on Athens?
And in describing the consequences rather than in the particular naming or peculiar causes of this disease?
Medical researchers today are also sceptical as to whether this was a plague at all.
Hi, I'm Dr. Boneshaker. I work at the University of Oxford at the Oxford vaccine.
Great as a clinical research fellow and I'm also an academic clinical fellow, infectious diseases.
The big reference was estimated to have killed around a hundred thousand people.
There are about 30 different pathogens that are thought to have caused the symptoms during this outbreak.
The symptoms were fever, redness and inflammation in the eyes, coughing, vomiting, sometimes loss of voice, sneezing, pustules and ulcers on the body.
Extreme thirst, which is quite unusual in some here and some cases diarrhoea.
These are all quite non-specific and the main candidate pathogens that it could have been typhus,
typhoid and bioterror, Arctic sea there, such as Ebola.
Smallpox is also something that has been brought up mainly because of the pustules on the body.
And Yul says. Also measles because of the rash.
However, none of the hallmarks of treat.
They are caused by Yersinia pestis and really mentioned a lot in the literature, such as the buboes, which are quite iconic.
And so a lot of scholars don't believe that the your testis was the cause of the plague of vaccines.
And now Professor Brian Angus, the director of the Oxford Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine and Global Health, talking about the plague of Athens.
Smallpox certainly could be something because these viral infections move very rapidly amongst people.
Typhus tends to be more related to still outbreaks in war and refugee situations.
And we still see that, particularly in East Africa and even with some of the refugee people coming into Europe.
We can still see cases of typhus,
but it's usually related to a lack of hygiene and ability to access clean water and clean clothes and things like that for the classic epidemic.
Tight-Fisted. So I think cricket's get traumas HCI and it's usually spread by lice.
And in fact, I was at a conference of entomologists who are really interesting people.
They started the conference by saying Couhig checked their bed last night to see if there any bedbugs.
And everyone to cheque their bed for bed bugs switched at the address.
So what they described is that lice and fights are diseases of clothes so that the eggs are in the clothes and it's the clothing.
That's the thing that helps to transmit it. You very rarely find the lice on the body.
They come in Ft. But then they go back to the clothes again and the lady acts of socks.
So you're thinking about the epidemiology and how these things spread.
Smallpox, you would expect from a spread person to person who very, very infectious and perhaps the person where is something like typhus.
Probably to be an intermediate. And it may be related to to contact with contaminated clothing.
But smallpox, I think, would be fairly well described. I don't think smallpox and typhus, I really think, again, is a fairly well described disease.
And I don't it doesn't say in particular typhus either.
One of the things that crossed my mind quite a lot is that Ebola certainly would fit the description even for the plague of Athens.
And I think one of the readings I had was that it seemed to be related to spread with funerals.
And again, funeral practises seemed to be quite a niche for epidemics to really take off.
And, of course, with Ebola, that was certainly the case that it was the washing of bodies of people who died of Ebola.
That was leading to outbreaks in the families.
And then, of course, someone else would die, which would lead to further funeral, which lead to further propagation of the disease.
A lot of the signs and symptoms do sound Laurell. I just don't feel like a viral haemorrhagic fever.
Could just cause all of this or I think the damage would have been a lot a lot worse.
But then again, the estimations of the number of people that died. Hardly likely to be accurate.
You do wonder? I think as I say, I think it's one of the reasons I just said it seems to be spread by funerals, the plague of Athens.
And again, from the kind of investigation point of view, these sort of RNA viruses, these little viruses are quite unstable.
So trying to find something like Ebola in even Boden's things from that time would be very difficult.
You wouldn't expect it to possibly show up. You know, people would have spotted these things if there was a water supply was contaminated.
Do you to describe those things? And I don't think they did. It did seem to be very much kind of person to person.
And Ebola is that is the classic thing.
The viral haemorrhagic fevers are very much transmissible and transmissible to health care personnel, which is why we get so uptight about it.
In my reading about this outbreak, I've been fascinated by the way the role of doctors was described.
And I asked this him and then Nicolette D'Angela, a classicist at Oxford specialising in ancient medicine,
to tell me more about how medical practise would have worked.
At this time, the fifth century saw the rise of what we call the Hippocratic School of Medicine, named after a doctor Epocrates of costs.
And so we know that there were many doctors who travelled in the Greek world.
We have some of their writings. They offered detailed descriptions of disease.
So we have a treatise called The Epidemics, for example, which describe individuals symptoms on a day by day basis.
We know that these doctors also describe the causes of disease.
So they looked at features like climate changes of seasons, the importance of changes of hot and cold elements within the body, for example.
So there was a lot of speculative medicine in the fifth century.
There was no advance health service. There were no great public hospitals or anything like this.
This was very much just private doctors advertising themselves, promoting themselves as people who could offer cures.
Few Sudanese presumably knew the writings of some of these doctors.
But he states that in the plague itself, that doctors had no cure.
They died themselves because of their ignorance of the nature of the disease.
At the beginning, the doctors were quite incapable of treating the disease because of their ignorance of the methods.
In fact, mortality amongst the doctors was the highest level since they came more frequently in contact with the sick.
Nor was any other human art or science of any help at all.
He also makes a broader point about the people who cared for sufferers dying in particularly strong numbers.
This is part of his presentation. There's nothing is of any use against this overpowering disease.
So some people to him, the doctors, other people to the gods, and they offer sacrifices.
None of this is of any use. Nothing is of any use. Well, the doctors were professionals in the same way that we professionalised doctors.
There definitely were no assembly appointed positions, especially in the large cities.
You kind of get the idea when you're reading the properties that there wasn't really a shortage of doctors and anything.
There was actually intense competition. And during an anatomical demonstration or a rhetorical display of your prowess,
which you would be doing as a way to kind of cool off business for yourself before you would do like a home visit.
You know, there was this idea that a rival could sabotage you and it was kind of the survival of the fittest.
So there are definitely no doctors around the degree to which doctors were legitimate
or not kind of dependent on this idea and public perception of celebrity. But there's some evidence that, you know, the people of, you know,
large polis like Athens would have to we'd have to vote someone like a public doctor into into office,
let's say, even though there's not the same level of,
you know, let's say an academic examination, a key word ideologically that can help us understand this is the word techni,
which in ancient Greek is a very complicated word that has no direct translation into English.
You could say the arch, the science, the skill, the craft.
If you say something like the arch of medicine, that kind of conveys the meaning.
And especially Hippocratic doctors had this conception of the technique as almost of the time,
the tonic form of medicine itself, which position slowly but surely grasping in their training in practise.
There's that very thing he's saying. The art is long. Life is short and opportunity is fleeting, normally translated into Latin as hours long to me.
I was basically this technique or art was it was central to the identity and self concept
of physicians in a profound way and definitely set them apart from who they used to be.
Charlatans and sophist is, you know, not all doctors were created equal in this time,
but that doesn't mean that it's set the technium medicine away from the techni of, you know, any other thing at this time.
So there's the technique of poetry. There's the technique of woodworking.
And all of these techniques kind of are seen to, you know, philosophically, especially in,
well, tronic dialogues, proceed along similar premises of expertise and mastery.
So I would say that that distinction between art and science.
Well, it definitely emerges eventually. It's kind of one of the roadblocks of the modern mind, I think, from fully understanding ancient medicine.
And I would say this relates to the plague of Athens because people have a tendency to view, you know,
the first hand account of subsidies, who himself experienced the plague, as he describes it, the history of pop music.
Or, you know, people view that as kind of like the cultural, historical, soft account of the disease.
And then they look to something like the Hippocratic Trace's or other medical explanations as being the heart or objective or,
you know, medical explanations. But, you know, stupidities cities himself talks quite a lot about doctors in his account.
He also says, you know, neither were doctors able to help, nor did any human tacheny do any better.
So there's this idea in the kind of complete failure of society that medicine is not really a privilege.
You know, it's not really a privileged explanation for what's going on in the way that we would consider, although Cities is writing, you know,
explicitly so that people in the future might be able to learn something from his account in some of
those people might well be doctors or they might be laypeople in the context of our own pendent,
surrounded as we all are by frequent news coverage around themes like contagion, immunity and mortality rate.
I was fascinated to hear more about how our source described these concepts at the time.
There are two features of facility's account which offer in some ways a departure from anything we find in the contemporary doctors.
One of those is recognition of contagion.
And I've mentioned that already in the sense that people who cared for sufferers and doctors themselves were more likely to catch the disease.
The other feature that he notes is what we would call acquired immunity.
He notes that those people who had caught the plague never got it again in a dangerous way.
At least he doesn't say that they were immune from it in future, but they never got ill again in a bad way from this disease.
He doesn't offer a total figure for the number of people who died from the plague.
When he returns to it at a later stage in the war, he says it hit first of all, lasted for two years.
Then those are remission for a year and then it returned.
And at that point, he gives a figure for the number of dead, but he doesn't have a figure for the total number of the Athenian people.
Precisely because he says he couldn't find that out. It's very much a sort of class based type of figure.
He gibs of the wealthiest people, the so-called the cavalry.
Three hundred of them died, 4000 of the hoplites, people who had the wealth to arm themselves with weapons and strong shields and armour.
But he says it's impossible to discover the total number of people who died. He doesn't.
One states say that in one of the Athenians armies, not at Athens, but elsewhere in the Greek world.
Potter there in northern Greece. At one stage, within 40 days, 1050 out of 4000 hoplites died.
So that's just one example from his figures. People who would normally thought that perhaps a quarter of the Athenian population died or the
population of Ataca at that time would have been in the order of 250 to 300 thousand people,
probably in a pandemic today. There's been a huge amount of societal impact.
I was keen to discuss further with Tim and Nicolet how life in Athens changed during this outbreak
due to these moves on from giving his detailed description of the bodily symptoms of the plague.
He offers a sort of sociological analysis of the effect of the plague, in a sense, on what we would call the body politic.
He describes an increase in lawlessness.
The catastrophe was so overwhelming that men not knowing what would happen next to them became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law.
And he's first of all, of four specific examples of this in terms of burial practises.
So he says that burial customs began to be disregarded.
So people if they had a corpse, if they saw a pyre that was prepared for someone,
they would just put the corpse they had on that and set light to the fire.
And even he says if they saw a pile up with a corpse burning on it, they would just throw the body they had on it.
So this is what he's he's describing all this as a sort of sign of the collapse of standards in Athens.
All of it set in contrast with the very kind of orderly image of Athens that he's presented
through the account of the funeral oration and the public burial of the war dead.
The real fear in that text is your neighbour almost disability's describes how people who potentially could have been cured and who were almost
seemingly responsive to treatment died because they really want it shut up in their homes because people were too afraid to go and see them.
Now, I think a lot of people who would be eager to say that, you know, the ancients knew more about pathogens that they lived on,
would say, oh, look, they knew that something like a plague is spread by contact.
I think there is a bit of an inkling that awareness and it actually shows us a limitation of medicine at the time,
because the reticence of the Hippocratic material to talk about the plague,
this they cannot fully explain it, especially they can't fully explain the cause means there's never really speculation.
Whereas you said it is is this kind of sceptic. He says, you know, well, let's I'll let people in a later time explain what happened.
But I at least could see that doctors died in a larger concentration because they were around patients,
people who were shut up during the hottest time of the year, who were in close quarters, died at large concentrations because presumably eye contact.
I think we actually see a very proximal sort of fear as we all become ever more aware
of the broad range of effects a pandemic can have on the physical and mental health,
even of those not directly infected. I was curious as to whether an ancient author would have tup on these effects as well.
Besides offering that specific example about burial, he offers a kind of psychological portrait on the effect it had on people's attitudes.
Most terrible thing of all was the despair into which people fell when they realised that they caught a plane,
they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness.
And by giving in in this way would lose their powers of resistance because people no longer had confidence in how long they were going to live,
because people had they looked around, saw these extreme sudden changes of fortune, rich people would suddenly die.
Poor people would suddenly inherit the fortunes of those wealthy people.
No one had any sort of security. They no longer, he says, kept to their previous sense of honour.
They just began to turn to pleasure to live for the moment while they were alive.
It's a very drastic type of vision. It's something which is we can't really see borne out by any other source.
As you look at the contemporary comedies, for example,
he wouldn't really have a sense of this total kind of subversion of morality that this of these describes.
It does play to his overarching theme of why Athens loses the war.
He sees a collapse in Athens is political leadership of that during the war as they move away from Pericles,
who always put the city first to later leaders who supposedly were much more
self-interested than Pericles himself and began taking risks on their own behalf.
They began risking the city's well-being for their personal motives.
This got me thinking. But many philosophers have drawn an analogy between bodily health and the health of a society.
Perhaps most famously, Plato in his republic suggests that just as a well-ordered mind should be governed by reason with spirit and appetite,
subordinate to so well-ordered society should be divided into three classes governed by philosopher guardians.
Plato himself was born in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. And he sets the republic at that time.
So I wondered if you cities in a similar sort of way saw any analogy between the Athenian plagues,
impact on the health of individual and its impact on the health of the society.
The Greeks had a common imagery of sick and healthy cities.
And this is this is appealing to this in his whole sort of analysis of the effects
of the plague and then the kind of parallels he draws between how the plague
disturbs the internal life cities and his later account of how civil war within
cities affects the well-being of cities throughout the whole Greek world.
So he offers these two parallel analysis of the disruption created in during the war.
On the one hand, there is the plague which falls from outside.
On the other hand, there is civil war, what he calls statis, which he talks about in terms of showing the constant features of human nature.
So that that is something which happens to humans from within the where's the plague falls from without.
But both of these are sort of diseases which fall on the cities and disturb the health and well-being of those cities.
So this really brings us into the heat of the plague of Athens.
I think which terminal logically in ancient Greece was called a loincloths.
And now that is a word that technically in classical scholarship would be translated as petulance.
But, you know, for our purposes, we could just say plague.
This word is very important and very different from the terms like epidemic and pandemic news today,
despite the fact that both those words are Greek drive and melodically.
What's first remarkable about loincloths is that it seems like a really general term to me.
You know, it's used by people like Vicinities who witnessed or survived the disease much like us today,
who did not know what the disease was, where it came from, what caused it, what cures it.
So in this way, alignment's is a general word that carries with it both the sense of uncertainty and in in the broad strokes,
but also a sense of precision and context.
It kind of reminds me how, you know, when you say Hoeben 19, I mean something very specific to us in this moment.
And there are, of course, symptoms associated with it. But that does not mean we understand at all.
And I found that sometimes you're talking to someone and you're talking about, you know, the pandemic and milieus like really vague phrases.
You know, they'll say, oh, I was supposed to go visit my family until all of this happened.
Everything going on in the way, gotten the away or, oh, you know,
the things going on with the virus when obviously we know from viruses, not the only virus.
It's very general. It's not the same thing. But I see a sort of parallel in terms of how the Greeks used Lioy Mass with kind of a sense
of humility in the way that we use general phrases about things that we don't quite grasp.
So because of this kind of sense of uncertainty and also a religious association which we'll get into in the medical material of the period,
especially in the Pratik Corpus to the word loincloths is pretty infrequent.
And most scholars say rightly that the end of a long lost four hundred year perspective can only really be brought about by driving out miasma,
which means pollution, defilement.
It kind of comes from an image of a blood staining, and that's why it's probably most frequent in tragedy of any genre.
And so basically to drive out the miasma there is kind of implied a religious process of purification that would have to occur.
And well, I said earlier that in the Hippocratic material, there is a sense of the sacred and every disease.
They definitely did not want to be limited to thinking that diseases were only sacred and that only purifications could cause healing.
Nonetheless, I think it's interesting to look at maybe a passage where miasma is use and regret and we must know our use in Hippocratic Corpus because
over time we see it kind of assimilated from the religious and legal to the medical context means something about how the air is polluted.
And I think that's pretty,
pretty similar to something that we might talk about when we're talking about fears of catching prone virus from someone else.
Some of these uses for the plague. On the one hand, the word Knossos, which is the ordinary Greek word.
For disease or sickness. So that is a kind of much milder word.
He also uses a stronger word, Loihi Moss, which is a stronger word for plague.
It's the word which Homer uses in the Iliad for the disease, which Apollo sends on the key and camp at Troy.
It's a word which is interesting because he mentions an oracle that some of the people remembered during the plague.
And this was an oracle that at some point there would be a story in the war that is a war against the Dorians.
The spa stands. And along with this war, there would be a lawyer Mosse a plague.
And the reason for it is mentions this as if these people thought that this oracle was being fulfilled in the war.
Just as some people now look back to novels people wrote 20 to 25 years ago where they predicted some great contagion.
But this is these comments that that there are two different versions of this oracle.
In one, it had did the word Momose plague. In another, it had the word Lee, which means famine.
And so he says that if at some point there was a war and a famine happened, people would remember the oracle differently.
So this is kind of appealing to his kind of psychological interest in how people's whole perceptions,
even their memory, are affected by their circumstances.
So is few cities our only source for this event? I checked with Tim on what other written information we might be able to gather from this.
In addition to the cities, we have mainly second hand later sources.
Writers like Plutarch, who was writing lives of some of the powerful politicians at the time, including Pericles and Plutarch,
does report for us some important additional bits of information which are not found in this as these.
It is only from Plutarch, for instance, that we learn that parallelise himself died of the plague, apparently.
And then there are a number of other later historians who are mainly, as I say,
second hand historians who don't really add that much to what Ethnicity's says.
There are, in addition, contemporary comic plays written by surviving plays by writers,
Aristophanes in particular, which give us some idea of the state of Athens in the course of the war.
But Aristophanes doesn't really doesn't mention the plague at all.
Probably it was a topic which is not really suitable for the type of play he was writing comedies.
We also have surviving tragedies.
But these tragedies took as their subjects the material episodes from the heroic past, what we view as kind of Greek myth.
And so they naturally don't treat the plague, except they do use plague as an image, as a metaphor.
So, for example, in Sophocles is famous play the Oedipus Serranos or Oedipus Rex.
There is a plague at Thebes right at the beginning, described right at the beginning of the play.
A result of the pollution in the land caused by Oedipus.
It's no surprise that the disease had a pretty devastating impact on the people of Athens in the year 429.
And for some time afterwards, there were there Longer-Term Consequences.
And can we learn anything from them relevant to our situation today?
I first asked him and then Nicolet for their thoughts. It's hard to tell from Phyllis's exactly what the sort of consequences are.
Yes, we know from the latest sources that Hockley's seemingly died of the plague Hockley's
his death was calamitous for Athens because later leaders on his view were less good.
This is also described how during the plague there was a reaction against power
in terms of people blaming him so that whereas in the first year of the war,
people were blaming Heracles for not leading them out to fight the Spartans, not defending their land in the second year.
They're beginning to blame him for the fact that they're at war at all and and that they are cooped up in the city and suffering from this plague.
And he describes them as pushing for peace there.
And they're wanting to send the Spartans there, wanting to make peace with Sparta.
And Poli's is standing up on Sydney's portrayal against this very irrational wavering by the Athenians.
So this is this has a portrayal of the Athenian masses as kind of being very variable,
as giving in to circumstances, whereas parallelise, in a sense stands above those.
And Pericles has already, at the beginning of the war, predicted that people might.
Changed their views about Tim. But he has always said that he himself keeps to the same policy that they need to resist the Peloponnesian War.
So in a sense,
this is this is portrayed portraying parallelise as a model of a kind of strong leadership that is standing up to the emotions of the people,
whereas the later leaders on in his representation much more give in to the whims of the people and don't lead them so much as being led by them.
So the plague is important for the citizens view of Pokey's and Pokey's is leadership.
It is the Kirklees addresses. It has. That's the big single kind of unexpected thing that has hit Athens during the war.
Heraklion is presented both of these as being full of foresight. He can anticipate things.
But this is the one thing that he cannot anticipate. I don't think one can go beyond that and draw any real comparisons with modern leadership,
just as I think one can't really go beyond city's description and compare the
social effects of the diseases with the social effects of the current pandemic.
I think we're dealing with really very different worlds of these is portraying people as a result of the plague,
doing things they normally wouldn't have done. They're breaking the new normal social barriers,
whereas at most what we've seen in the current pandemic are isolated instances of people doing what they normally like to do.
But what they've been told by their leader, not clearly Athans,
that a reduction in the number of soldiers who are available, but we don't really have any precise sort of figures.
And in terms of the sort of strategy Athens was pursuing, it didn't make so much difference,
given that what happened was mainly doing was trying to just survive in this war and resist the Peloponnesian attack.
So they given that they were they weren't going out to face the Athenians. And in fact, paradoxically, we do see a few years after the plague,
we see a sort of recovery when Athens is able to capture a number of Spartan soldiers.
And that has a real important effect on the course of the war.
And at that stage in Athens, even resists an offer of peace from the Spartans in 45 B.C.
So Athens, in the sense, was able to carry on.
And as the series portrays it, got carried away and began becoming too aggressive and becoming too expansionist in the long term.
Ethnicity's tells us that the world that Athens did finally begin to make up some of the losses in the plague.
But he tells us this just in the moment when Athens is launching its most disastrous foreign effort of all, which is its attack on Sicily in 415 B.C.
And at that stage, he says it happens. We have now recovered from the plague.
And he tells us this because Athens is just about to squander that through what proved to be the most disastrous episode in the war.
But for the most part,
it's actually it's quite hard to piece together in a particularly clear way the kind of sise consequences of the plague for the course of the war.
People lately are kind of finding a bit more hope where his deal seems to be kind of challenging a sense of invulnerability in Athens,
the idea that their exceptional asset class, especially the citizens there, which might be called Ristic Dewsbury word.
So the question of how we remember a pandemic to me seems kind of more interesting than how bad it was,
because in the large scheme of things, obviously, there will be another one.
There will be another. Now we'll get through cities. It seems kind of it almost seems kind of short term.
I mean, obviously, as much as a third of the Athenian population, though, that's just the citizen population.
Those are the people are accountable at this time.
Since you died there, there's this really interesting discussion of how people you know, you put this part earlier.
People started kind of living for the now. They saw a rich people die and lose all of their property.
So what to do? It's not just that poverty while you're still alive, which then you might die on someone else.
There is this Wheel of Fortune idea. But, you know, the system's falling apart and other cities is not what we're seeing in our time.
You know, we see billionaires making huge power grabs with, you know,
those where we're entering the US having become collectively like 650 billion dollars richer over the past few months as unemployment.
Through the roof. So, you know, the lawlessness of what happens in three cities.
I find it interesting because there it almost seemed permanently short term where in our society,
especially in the West, I feel like though the coronavirus originally was sold as a great equaliser moment.
A lot of people were poised to gain, according to social customs, saying exactly how the old ones were.
You know, the system functioning as it was meant to. So I think we'll always remember this time.
And it will be interesting to see, you know, thousands of years from now how people talk about us and to how we're having this conversation about,
you know, if something happened like 100 years ago.
But I hope people point out that distinction that we will be seeing long turns, event effects of this rhinovirus because of the,
you know, the perseverance of our our of our institutions, always of life, as opposed to the breakdowns.
Next time on Future Makers,
we travel nearly a thousand years forwards to the reign of Justinian first for what many consider to be, in fact, the earliest.
I hope you can join us then to the second stage of our journey through the history.
And then. I'm Peter Milliken, and you've been listening to Future Makers.
Feature makers was created in-house at the University of Oxford and presented by Professor Peter Milliken from Harvard College.
A voice actor today was shown Emery Latchman, the score for the series was designed and created by Richard Watts.
The series is written and produced by Steve Pritchard and me and Howard. Thank you.
On behalf of the whole thing for listening to the history of Pandemic's.