1 00:00:05,060 --> 00:00:11,810 Alexandra, listen to her sandals echoing on the cobbles, running down the narrow side streets of the Agora. 2 00:00:11,810 --> 00:00:18,050 They mingled with the sounds of the campfires of the Spartan enemy. She could hear not far from the Dippin Gates. 3 00:00:18,050 --> 00:00:23,570 It was Resh could hear herself think these days, let alone her own footsteps. 4 00:00:23,570 --> 00:00:27,590 Since the siege began, halted, crowded into Athens and space to move around. 5 00:00:27,590 --> 00:00:30,410 We even had live in had become impossible. 6 00:00:30,410 --> 00:00:36,890 As she walked into the panic Panasonic make way she could see people from the outlying villages crammed up against the walls, 7 00:00:36,890 --> 00:00:40,850 their makeshift tents, doing their best to contain what little they brought with them. 8 00:00:40,850 --> 00:00:48,230 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. 9 00:00:48,230 --> 00:00:54,620 And the smell? As she made her way towards the Acropolis, the throngs became denser and denser. 10 00:00:54,620 --> 00:00:59,810 And she began to push on the smells of the banks around her, leaning into the bodies with her shoulders. 11 00:00:59,810 --> 00:01:01,820 There was something else here, too, 12 00:01:01,820 --> 00:01:08,750 scattered around the crowd as loud as the footsteps or the noise of the enemies outside the distant sound of coughing. 13 00:01:08,750 --> 00:01:10,820 From the old man next to her. Over there. 14 00:01:10,820 --> 00:01:16,130 And the young girl being carried on her father's shoulders by the trader trying to force his way along the wall. 15 00:01:16,130 --> 00:01:20,120 All coughing, spluttering, resonating around the streets. 16 00:01:20,120 --> 00:01:30,040 And it was then in the heat of the sunlit city that her head started to spin and her full head began to burn. 17 00:01:30,040 --> 00:01:37,560 Welcome to Athens in the fifth century B.C. and the third season of the Future Makers podcast. 18 00:01:37,560 --> 00:01:47,830 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. 19 00:01:47,830 --> 00:01:55,450 We'll be looking at 10 major outbreaks from the plague of Athens to the West African Ebola outbreak by the Black Death. 20 00:01:55,450 --> 00:02:00,790 Cholera small asking how these outbreaks have shaped society. 21 00:02:00,790 --> 00:02:06,940 What we may be able to learn from them today and where we might be today. 22 00:02:06,940 --> 00:02:14,800 We join a crowded city in the midst of a scene where my colleague, Professor Tim Rood, picks up our story. 23 00:02:14,800 --> 00:02:26,980 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. 24 00:02:26,980 --> 00:02:31,270 The Athenians were a great naval power. 25 00:02:31,270 --> 00:02:40,630 They ruled over many islands in the Aegean, whereas the Spartans and their health vision allies were a great land. 26 00:02:40,630 --> 00:02:48,460 The Athenians were adopting a very unusual tactic. Their leader, Heraklion, their most powerful politician, 27 00:02:48,460 --> 00:02:55,000 had a policy where he was gathering together all of the people from the territory of 28 00:02:55,000 --> 00:03:02,140 Ataca within the city walls of Athens and not resisting these invasions by land. 29 00:03:02,140 --> 00:03:10,510 So he was letting the enemy roam through Athenian territory and destroy agricultural land. 30 00:03:10,510 --> 00:03:17,470 He was relying on Athens as a naval power to bring in supplies and to to to 31 00:03:17,470 --> 00:03:24,250 survive to to show that Athens could win through against these land invasions. 32 00:03:24,250 --> 00:03:31,600 The result of this was that the city of Athens was much more packed with people than would usually have been the case. 33 00:03:31,600 --> 00:03:39,220 There would have been people spread over the city. There are people living in what the normally sacred areas. 34 00:03:39,220 --> 00:03:42,940 So it was a much more packed environment than usual. 35 00:03:42,940 --> 00:03:47,470 And so particularly hospitable for the onset of plague. 36 00:03:47,470 --> 00:03:55,040 In my own studies of postoffice, ascertaining the validity of historical records as often proved to be a challenge. 37 00:03:55,040 --> 00:04:00,190 So I asked him how accurate is our source for this area? 38 00:04:00,190 --> 00:04:05,020 Our main source for the politicians war is vicinities. This was an Athenian. 39 00:04:05,020 --> 00:04:13,780 He was perhaps about 30 years old when the war started. He was from an upper strata sort of of Athenian society. 40 00:04:13,780 --> 00:04:17,080 He became general, a strategic goals. 41 00:04:17,080 --> 00:04:27,460 In the early stages of the war and was subsequently exiled by Athens owing to some misfortunes during his period of command. 42 00:04:27,460 --> 00:04:35,080 So he was writing a contemporary history of a war which was going on in which he himself had taken part. 43 00:04:35,080 --> 00:04:41,330 And he, in a sense, our whole vision of the Peloponnesian War rests on him. 44 00:04:41,330 --> 00:04:46,450 This series has always been incredibly highly regarded as a historian. 45 00:04:46,450 --> 00:04:56,680 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, 46 00:04:56,680 --> 00:05:04,420 for immediate hearing, but as a possession forever, a possession that could be used at any time in the future. 47 00:05:04,420 --> 00:05:12,940 And he had a view of a sort of universal human nature where similar kind of events could happen in the future. 48 00:05:12,940 --> 00:05:20,590 And his account would enable readers to understand, if not perhaps prevent those events. 49 00:05:20,590 --> 00:05:27,100 And that interest in the recurrence of events is also very pertinent for his view of the plague, 50 00:05:27,100 --> 00:05:33,910 because he also imagines the recurrence of a disease of that sort in the future. 51 00:05:33,910 --> 00:05:39,820 Denise mentions the onset of the plague in the second year of the war. 52 00:05:39,820 --> 00:05:48,550 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. 53 00:05:48,550 --> 00:05:55,090 He describes rumours that has come down from Ethiopia through Africa, 54 00:05:55,090 --> 00:06:02,740 cities through Egypt and across the territory of the Persian Empire, the island of Lemnos in the Aegean. 55 00:06:02,740 --> 00:06:13,990 And then it hits Athens in the port of Piraeus and travels up from there towards the main city around the Acropolis. 56 00:06:13,990 --> 00:06:21,280 So he describes it as a very sudden onset, which has an immense affect at Athens. 57 00:06:21,280 --> 00:06:28,870 It coincides with one of the helipad visions, annual invasions, the sir, the second of their invasions. 58 00:06:28,870 --> 00:06:29,460 And there are some. 59 00:06:29,460 --> 00:06:39,480 Rumours, he reports that the Palestinians have somehow poisoned wells in the press and have caused this disease a sort of conspiracy theory. 60 00:06:39,480 --> 00:06:42,120 But mainly he he stresses the suddenness, 61 00:06:42,120 --> 00:06:50,640 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. 62 00:06:50,640 --> 00:06:55,470 So it's a real sudden event and it falls on the city from outside. 63 00:06:55,470 --> 00:07:00,510 There's a lot of debate as to whether this outbreak was a plague at all, which we'll discuss later. 64 00:07:00,510 --> 00:07:06,090 But I wondered how our author, a few cities, describes the disease that hit his city. 65 00:07:06,090 --> 00:07:11,350 He offers a single account of the plague where he gives them the kind of the symptoms, 66 00:07:11,350 --> 00:07:18,450 the bodily symptoms people in perfect health suddenly began to have burning. 67 00:07:18,450 --> 00:07:29,100 Their eyes became red flame inside their mouths was eating from the throat and tongue, and the breath became a natural, unpleasant. 68 00:07:29,100 --> 00:07:37,890 The next symptoms were sneezing and hoarseness of voice. And before long, the pain settled on the chest and was accompanied by coughing. 69 00:07:37,890 --> 00:07:46,020 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. 70 00:07:46,020 --> 00:07:57,830 All this being a company, a great pain and difficulty. He describes how it starts in the head with a fever, with inflamed eyes. 71 00:07:57,830 --> 00:08:02,630 It travels down the throat, becomes bloody. The breath becomes foul. 72 00:08:02,630 --> 00:08:06,500 People sneeze. They've there's hoarseness, hits their chests. 73 00:08:06,500 --> 00:08:10,400 They cough, their stomachs become upset. They retch. 74 00:08:10,400 --> 00:08:14,680 And he describes the external symptoms on their body. 75 00:08:14,680 --> 00:08:20,360 There are sores. They feel not hot to touch on the outside, but inside they feel a fever. 76 00:08:20,360 --> 00:08:27,050 And few cities doesn't know this only by observing others, but from his own personal experience. 77 00:08:27,050 --> 00:08:35,570 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. 78 00:08:35,570 --> 00:08:44,630 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. 79 00:08:44,630 --> 00:08:49,460 And that's all that he says. So he doesn't describe what was particular to him. 80 00:08:49,460 --> 00:08:51,350 He simply says he caught the disease, 81 00:08:51,350 --> 00:08:59,840 but he is clearly making his account more authoritative by appealing to this notion that he had himself suffered it. 82 00:08:59,840 --> 00:09:06,630 We don't know how badly he had it. We didn't know what the lasting effect on him was. 83 00:09:06,630 --> 00:09:11,670 The problem with this elitist description of the symptoms is they're similar to many 84 00:09:11,670 --> 00:09:15,930 different diseases and there's been long debate about what disease it could be. 85 00:09:15,930 --> 00:09:23,010 It's possible both the diseases have changed over time. There's also, of course, question about how one defines a plague. 86 00:09:23,010 --> 00:09:27,870 I mean, clearly, this disease means by this very bad kind of disease. 87 00:09:27,870 --> 00:09:33,060 He's clearly not you know, we have an idea of a plague like the people like plague. 88 00:09:33,060 --> 00:09:38,280 We have other other diseases, typhus, typhoid, smallpox. 89 00:09:38,280 --> 00:09:42,240 There've been all sorts of attempts to explain what disease this was. There's also, of course, 90 00:09:42,240 --> 00:09:46,290 the possibility that the citizen is describing the symptoms of more than one 91 00:09:46,290 --> 00:09:50,700 disease that could have been one main disease and another illnesses as well. 92 00:09:50,700 --> 00:09:55,920 At least the cities are just grouping all of these together under this one label. 93 00:09:55,920 --> 00:10:07,170 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. 94 00:10:07,170 --> 00:10:12,210 At one stage, he refers to all the different sorts of bile that are named by doctors, 95 00:10:12,210 --> 00:10:17,880 and he uses Ataturk as a kind of shorthand to refer to this much more specialist type of discussion 96 00:10:17,880 --> 00:10:25,500 where doctors pin down names on particular bodily fluids or basically bodily emissions. 97 00:10:25,500 --> 00:10:33,540 So he's not interested in so much in that, isn't it, portraying this as a single overpowering illness that fell on Athens? 98 00:10:33,540 --> 00:10:40,620 And in describing the consequences rather than in the particular naming or peculiar causes of this disease? 99 00:10:40,620 --> 00:10:45,960 Medical researchers today are also sceptical as to whether this was a plague at all. 100 00:10:45,960 --> 00:10:51,000 Hi, I'm Dr. Boneshaker. I work at the University of Oxford at the Oxford vaccine. 101 00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:56,550 Great as a clinical research fellow and I'm also an academic clinical fellow, infectious diseases. 102 00:10:56,550 --> 00:11:00,660 The big reference was estimated to have killed around a hundred thousand people. 103 00:11:00,660 --> 00:11:06,600 There are about 30 different pathogens that are thought to have caused the symptoms during this outbreak. 104 00:11:06,600 --> 00:11:16,670 The symptoms were fever, redness and inflammation in the eyes, coughing, vomiting, sometimes loss of voice, sneezing, pustules and ulcers on the body. 105 00:11:16,670 --> 00:11:21,720 Extreme thirst, which is quite unusual in some here and some cases diarrhoea. 106 00:11:21,720 --> 00:11:29,250 These are all quite non-specific and the main candidate pathogens that it could have been typhus, 107 00:11:29,250 --> 00:11:33,270 typhoid and bioterror, Arctic sea there, such as Ebola. 108 00:11:33,270 --> 00:11:39,450 Smallpox is also something that has been brought up mainly because of the pustules on the body. 109 00:11:39,450 --> 00:11:43,800 And Yul says. Also measles because of the rash. 110 00:11:43,800 --> 00:11:46,890 However, none of the hallmarks of treat. 111 00:11:46,890 --> 00:11:54,930 They are caused by Yersinia pestis and really mentioned a lot in the literature, such as the buboes, which are quite iconic. 112 00:11:54,930 --> 00:12:00,900 And so a lot of scholars don't believe that the your testis was the cause of the plague of vaccines. 113 00:12:00,900 --> 00:12:11,850 And now Professor Brian Angus, the director of the Oxford Centre for Clinical Tropical Medicine and Global Health, talking about the plague of Athens. 114 00:12:11,850 --> 00:12:21,030 Smallpox certainly could be something because these viral infections move very rapidly amongst people. 115 00:12:21,030 --> 00:12:27,810 Typhus tends to be more related to still outbreaks in war and refugee situations. 116 00:12:27,810 --> 00:12:34,530 And we still see that, particularly in East Africa and even with some of the refugee people coming into Europe. 117 00:12:34,530 --> 00:12:36,330 We can still see cases of typhus, 118 00:12:36,330 --> 00:12:46,020 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. 119 00:12:46,020 --> 00:12:50,740 Tight-Fisted. So I think cricket's get traumas HCI and it's usually spread by lice. 120 00:12:50,740 --> 00:12:55,680 And in fact, I was at a conference of entomologists who are really interesting people. 121 00:12:55,680 --> 00:13:00,990 They started the conference by saying Couhig checked their bed last night to see if there any bedbugs. 122 00:13:00,990 --> 00:13:05,250 And everyone to cheque their bed for bed bugs switched at the address. 123 00:13:05,250 --> 00:13:13,260 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. 124 00:13:13,260 --> 00:13:17,730 That's the thing that helps to transmit it. You very rarely find the lice on the body. 125 00:13:17,730 --> 00:13:22,290 They come in Ft. But then they go back to the clothes again and the lady acts of socks. 126 00:13:22,290 --> 00:13:25,410 So you're thinking about the epidemiology and how these things spread. 127 00:13:25,410 --> 00:13:33,780 Smallpox, you would expect from a spread person to person who very, very infectious and perhaps the person where is something like typhus. 128 00:13:33,780 --> 00:13:39,660 Probably to be an intermediate. And it may be related to to contact with contaminated clothing. 129 00:13:39,660 --> 00:13:48,160 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. 130 00:13:48,160 --> 00:13:51,950 And I don't it doesn't say in particular typhus either. 131 00:13:51,950 --> 00:13:59,100 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. 132 00:13:59,100 --> 00:14:04,310 And I think one of the readings I had was that it seemed to be related to spread with funerals. 133 00:14:04,310 --> 00:14:13,300 And again, funeral practises seemed to be quite a niche for epidemics to really take off. 134 00:14:13,300 --> 00:14:19,850 And, of course, with Ebola, that was certainly the case that it was the washing of bodies of people who died of Ebola. 135 00:14:19,850 --> 00:14:22,730 That was leading to outbreaks in the families. 136 00:14:22,730 --> 00:14:29,990 And then, of course, someone else would die, which would lead to further funeral, which lead to further propagation of the disease. 137 00:14:29,990 --> 00:14:39,320 A lot of the signs and symptoms do sound Laurell. I just don't feel like a viral haemorrhagic fever. 138 00:14:39,320 --> 00:14:47,200 Could just cause all of this or I think the damage would have been a lot a lot worse. 139 00:14:47,200 --> 00:14:53,350 But then again, the estimations of the number of people that died. Hardly likely to be accurate. 140 00:14:53,350 --> 00:14:58,960 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. 141 00:14:58,960 --> 00:15:08,530 And again, from the kind of investigation point of view, these sort of RNA viruses, these little viruses are quite unstable. 142 00:15:08,530 --> 00:15:16,010 So trying to find something like Ebola in even Boden's things from that time would be very difficult. 143 00:15:16,010 --> 00:15:25,040 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. 144 00:15:25,040 --> 00:15:31,820 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. 145 00:15:31,820 --> 00:15:34,150 And Ebola is that is the classic thing. 146 00:15:34,150 --> 00:15:43,990 The viral haemorrhagic fevers are very much transmissible and transmissible to health care personnel, which is why we get so uptight about it. 147 00:15:43,990 --> 00:15:50,280 In my reading about this outbreak, I've been fascinated by the way the role of doctors was described. 148 00:15:50,280 --> 00:15:56,890 And I asked this him and then Nicolette D'Angela, a classicist at Oxford specialising in ancient medicine, 149 00:15:56,890 --> 00:15:59,710 to tell me more about how medical practise would have worked. 150 00:15:59,710 --> 00:16:10,330 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. 151 00:16:10,330 --> 00:16:15,040 And so we know that there were many doctors who travelled in the Greek world. 152 00:16:15,040 --> 00:16:19,870 We have some of their writings. They offered detailed descriptions of disease. 153 00:16:19,870 --> 00:16:27,430 So we have a treatise called The Epidemics, for example, which describe individuals symptoms on a day by day basis. 154 00:16:27,430 --> 00:16:31,250 We know that these doctors also describe the causes of disease. 155 00:16:31,250 --> 00:16:41,950 So they looked at features like climate changes of seasons, the importance of changes of hot and cold elements within the body, for example. 156 00:16:41,950 --> 00:16:47,140 So there was a lot of speculative medicine in the fifth century. 157 00:16:47,140 --> 00:16:53,410 There was no advance health service. There were no great public hospitals or anything like this. 158 00:16:53,410 --> 00:17:02,390 This was very much just private doctors advertising themselves, promoting themselves as people who could offer cures. 159 00:17:02,390 --> 00:17:07,570 Few Sudanese presumably knew the writings of some of these doctors. 160 00:17:07,570 --> 00:17:12,910 But he states that in the plague itself, that doctors had no cure. 161 00:17:12,910 --> 00:17:18,040 They died themselves because of their ignorance of the nature of the disease. 162 00:17:18,040 --> 00:17:24,610 At the beginning, the doctors were quite incapable of treating the disease because of their ignorance of the methods. 163 00:17:24,610 --> 00:17:32,590 In fact, mortality amongst the doctors was the highest level since they came more frequently in contact with the sick. 164 00:17:32,590 --> 00:17:38,750 Nor was any other human art or science of any help at all. 165 00:17:38,750 --> 00:17:46,220 He also makes a broader point about the people who cared for sufferers dying in particularly strong numbers. 166 00:17:46,220 --> 00:17:53,330 This is part of his presentation. There's nothing is of any use against this overpowering disease. 167 00:17:53,330 --> 00:17:59,270 So some people to him, the doctors, other people to the gods, and they offer sacrifices. 168 00:17:59,270 --> 00:18:07,910 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. 169 00:18:07,910 --> 00:18:13,700 There definitely were no assembly appointed positions, especially in the large cities. 170 00:18:13,700 --> 00:18:18,530 You kind of get the idea when you're reading the properties that there wasn't really a shortage of doctors and anything. 171 00:18:18,530 --> 00:18:25,100 There was actually intense competition. And during an anatomical demonstration or a rhetorical display of your prowess, 172 00:18:25,100 --> 00:18:31,070 which you would be doing as a way to kind of cool off business for yourself before you would do like a home visit. 173 00:18:31,070 --> 00:18:35,280 You know, there was this idea that a rival could sabotage you and it was kind of the survival of the fittest. 174 00:18:35,280 --> 00:18:42,190 So there are definitely no doctors around the degree to which doctors were legitimate 175 00:18:42,190 --> 00:18:49,910 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, 176 00:18:49,910 --> 00:18:56,330 large polis like Athens would have to we'd have to vote someone like a public doctor into into office, 177 00:18:56,330 --> 00:18:59,620 let's say, even though there's not the same level of, 178 00:18:59,620 --> 00:19:10,070 you know, let's say an academic examination, a key word ideologically that can help us understand this is the word techni, 179 00:19:10,070 --> 00:19:16,520 which in ancient Greek is a very complicated word that has no direct translation into English. 180 00:19:16,520 --> 00:19:20,750 You could say the arch, the science, the skill, the craft. 181 00:19:20,750 --> 00:19:25,880 If you say something like the arch of medicine, that kind of conveys the meaning. 182 00:19:25,880 --> 00:19:34,450 And especially Hippocratic doctors had this conception of the technique as almost of the time, 183 00:19:34,450 --> 00:19:40,020 the tonic form of medicine itself, which position slowly but surely grasping in their training in practise. 184 00:19:40,020 --> 00:19:49,430 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. 185 00:19:49,430 --> 00:19:55,400 I was basically this technique or art was it was central to the identity and self concept 186 00:19:55,400 --> 00:20:00,110 of physicians in a profound way and definitely set them apart from who they used to be. 187 00:20:00,110 --> 00:20:05,180 Charlatans and sophist is, you know, not all doctors were created equal in this time, 188 00:20:05,180 --> 00:20:14,000 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. 189 00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:18,320 So there's the technique of poetry. There's the technique of woodworking. 190 00:20:18,320 --> 00:20:24,700 And all of these techniques kind of are seen to, you know, philosophically, especially in, 191 00:20:24,700 --> 00:20:32,030 well, tronic dialogues, proceed along similar premises of expertise and mastery. 192 00:20:32,030 --> 00:20:37,370 So I would say that that distinction between art and science. 193 00:20:37,370 --> 00:20:46,260 Well, it definitely emerges eventually. It's kind of one of the roadblocks of the modern mind, I think, from fully understanding ancient medicine. 194 00:20:46,260 --> 00:20:51,980 And I would say this relates to the plague of Athens because people have a tendency to view, you know, 195 00:20:51,980 --> 00:20:58,480 the first hand account of subsidies, who himself experienced the plague, as he describes it, the history of pop music. 196 00:20:58,480 --> 00:21:04,910 Or, you know, people view that as kind of like the cultural, historical, soft account of the disease. 197 00:21:04,910 --> 00:21:13,000 And then they look to something like the Hippocratic Trace's or other medical explanations as being the heart or objective or, 198 00:21:13,000 --> 00:21:21,890 you know, medical explanations. But, you know, stupidities cities himself talks quite a lot about doctors in his account. 199 00:21:21,890 --> 00:21:30,140 He also says, you know, neither were doctors able to help, nor did any human tacheny do any better. 200 00:21:30,140 --> 00:21:38,920 So there's this idea in the kind of complete failure of society that medicine is not really a privilege. 201 00:21:38,920 --> 00:21:48,800 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, 202 00:21:48,800 --> 00:21:55,070 explicitly so that people in the future might be able to learn something from his account in some of 203 00:21:55,070 --> 00:22:01,250 those people might well be doctors or they might be laypeople in the context of our own pendent, 204 00:22:01,250 --> 00:22:09,750 surrounded as we all are by frequent news coverage around themes like contagion, immunity and mortality rate. 205 00:22:09,750 --> 00:22:15,780 I was fascinated to hear more about how our source described these concepts at the time. 206 00:22:15,780 --> 00:22:24,690 There are two features of facility's account which offer in some ways a departure from anything we find in the contemporary doctors. 207 00:22:24,690 --> 00:22:29,010 One of those is recognition of contagion. 208 00:22:29,010 --> 00:22:39,590 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. 209 00:22:39,590 --> 00:22:46,220 The other feature that he notes is what we would call acquired immunity. 210 00:22:46,220 --> 00:22:52,550 He notes that those people who had caught the plague never got it again in a dangerous way. 211 00:22:52,550 --> 00:23:00,770 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. 212 00:23:00,770 --> 00:23:08,240 He doesn't offer a total figure for the number of people who died from the plague. 213 00:23:08,240 --> 00:23:14,480 When he returns to it at a later stage in the war, he says it hit first of all, lasted for two years. 214 00:23:14,480 --> 00:23:18,440 Then those are remission for a year and then it returned. 215 00:23:18,440 --> 00:23:27,880 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. 216 00:23:27,880 --> 00:23:34,610 Precisely because he says he couldn't find that out. It's very much a sort of class based type of figure. 217 00:23:34,610 --> 00:23:39,770 He gibs of the wealthiest people, the so-called the cavalry. 218 00:23:39,770 --> 00:23:50,510 Three hundred of them died, 4000 of the hoplites, people who had the wealth to arm themselves with weapons and strong shields and armour. 219 00:23:50,510 --> 00:23:54,650 But he says it's impossible to discover the total number of people who died. He doesn't. 220 00:23:54,650 --> 00:24:00,620 One states say that in one of the Athenians armies, not at Athens, but elsewhere in the Greek world. 221 00:24:00,620 --> 00:24:10,880 Potter there in northern Greece. At one stage, within 40 days, 1050 out of 4000 hoplites died. 222 00:24:10,880 --> 00:24:22,040 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 223 00:24:22,040 --> 00:24:29,210 population of Ataca at that time would have been in the order of 250 to 300 thousand people, 224 00:24:29,210 --> 00:24:35,150 probably in a pandemic today. There's been a huge amount of societal impact. 225 00:24:35,150 --> 00:24:41,400 I was keen to discuss further with Tim and Nicolet how life in Athens changed during this outbreak 226 00:24:41,400 --> 00:24:46,970 due to these moves on from giving his detailed description of the bodily symptoms of the plague. 227 00:24:46,970 --> 00:24:56,360 He offers a sort of sociological analysis of the effect of the plague, in a sense, on what we would call the body politic. 228 00:24:56,360 --> 00:24:59,750 He describes an increase in lawlessness. 229 00:24:59,750 --> 00:25:09,200 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. 230 00:25:09,200 --> 00:25:15,110 And he's first of all, of four specific examples of this in terms of burial practises. 231 00:25:15,110 --> 00:25:19,580 So he says that burial customs began to be disregarded. 232 00:25:19,580 --> 00:25:24,350 So people if they had a corpse, if they saw a pyre that was prepared for someone, 233 00:25:24,350 --> 00:25:28,280 they would just put the corpse they had on that and set light to the fire. 234 00:25:28,280 --> 00:25:35,450 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. 235 00:25:35,450 --> 00:25:41,930 So this is what he's he's describing all this as a sort of sign of the collapse of standards in Athens. 236 00:25:41,930 --> 00:25:46,790 All of it set in contrast with the very kind of orderly image of Athens that he's presented 237 00:25:46,790 --> 00:25:52,580 through the account of the funeral oration and the public burial of the war dead. 238 00:25:52,580 --> 00:26:04,850 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 239 00:26:04,850 --> 00:26:13,460 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. 240 00:26:13,460 --> 00:26:22,790 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, 241 00:26:22,790 --> 00:26:28,340 would say, oh, look, they knew that something like a plague is spread by contact. 242 00:26:28,340 --> 00:26:36,920 I think there is a bit of an inkling that awareness and it actually shows us a limitation of medicine at the time, 243 00:26:36,920 --> 00:26:40,510 because the reticence of the Hippocratic material to talk about the plague, 244 00:26:40,510 --> 00:26:46,460 this they cannot fully explain it, especially they can't fully explain the cause means there's never really speculation. 245 00:26:46,460 --> 00:26:53,460 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. 246 00:26:53,460 --> 00:26:59,750 But I at least could see that doctors died in a larger concentration because they were around patients, 247 00:26:59,750 --> 00:27:10,190 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. 248 00:27:10,190 --> 00:27:17,060 I think we actually see a very proximal sort of fear as we all become ever more aware 249 00:27:17,060 --> 00:27:22,100 of the broad range of effects a pandemic can have on the physical and mental health, 250 00:27:22,100 --> 00:27:29,870 even of those not directly infected. I was curious as to whether an ancient author would have tup on these effects as well. 251 00:27:29,870 --> 00:27:38,980 Besides offering that specific example about burial, he offers a kind of psychological portrait on the effect it had on people's attitudes. 252 00:27:38,980 --> 00:27:46,420 Most terrible thing of all was the despair into which people fell when they realised that they caught a plane, 253 00:27:46,420 --> 00:27:50,150 they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness. 254 00:27:50,150 --> 00:28:00,340 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, 255 00:28:00,340 --> 00:28:07,420 because people had they looked around, saw these extreme sudden changes of fortune, rich people would suddenly die. 256 00:28:07,420 --> 00:28:11,710 Poor people would suddenly inherit the fortunes of those wealthy people. 257 00:28:11,710 --> 00:28:20,530 No one had any sort of security. They no longer, he says, kept to their previous sense of honour. 258 00:28:20,530 --> 00:28:26,860 They just began to turn to pleasure to live for the moment while they were alive. 259 00:28:26,860 --> 00:28:35,290 It's a very drastic type of vision. It's something which is we can't really see borne out by any other source. 260 00:28:35,290 --> 00:28:38,360 As you look at the contemporary comedies, for example, 261 00:28:38,360 --> 00:28:46,970 he wouldn't really have a sense of this total kind of subversion of morality that this of these describes. 262 00:28:46,970 --> 00:28:52,400 It does play to his overarching theme of why Athens loses the war. 263 00:28:52,400 --> 00:28:59,930 He sees a collapse in Athens is political leadership of that during the war as they move away from Pericles, 264 00:28:59,930 --> 00:29:06,140 who always put the city first to later leaders who supposedly were much more 265 00:29:06,140 --> 00:29:12,110 self-interested than Pericles himself and began taking risks on their own behalf. 266 00:29:12,110 --> 00:29:17,910 They began risking the city's well-being for their personal motives. 267 00:29:17,910 --> 00:29:25,690 This got me thinking. But many philosophers have drawn an analogy between bodily health and the health of a society. 268 00:29:25,690 --> 00:29:35,950 Perhaps most famously, Plato in his republic suggests that just as a well-ordered mind should be governed by reason with spirit and appetite, 269 00:29:35,950 --> 00:29:45,100 subordinate to so well-ordered society should be divided into three classes governed by philosopher guardians. 270 00:29:45,100 --> 00:29:51,490 Plato himself was born in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. And he sets the republic at that time. 271 00:29:51,490 --> 00:29:58,390 So I wondered if you cities in a similar sort of way saw any analogy between the Athenian plagues, 272 00:29:58,390 --> 00:30:03,610 impact on the health of individual and its impact on the health of the society. 273 00:30:03,610 --> 00:30:08,680 The Greeks had a common imagery of sick and healthy cities. 274 00:30:08,680 --> 00:30:13,720 And this is this is appealing to this in his whole sort of analysis of the effects 275 00:30:13,720 --> 00:30:18,340 of the plague and then the kind of parallels he draws between how the plague 276 00:30:18,340 --> 00:30:24,880 disturbs the internal life cities and his later account of how civil war within 277 00:30:24,880 --> 00:30:31,570 cities affects the well-being of cities throughout the whole Greek world. 278 00:30:31,570 --> 00:30:39,010 So he offers these two parallel analysis of the disruption created in during the war. 279 00:30:39,010 --> 00:30:42,610 On the one hand, there is the plague which falls from outside. 280 00:30:42,610 --> 00:30:52,810 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. 281 00:30:52,810 --> 00:30:58,420 So that that is something which happens to humans from within the where's the plague falls from without. 282 00:30:58,420 --> 00:31:06,760 But both of these are sort of diseases which fall on the cities and disturb the health and well-being of those cities. 283 00:31:06,760 --> 00:31:10,330 So this really brings us into the heat of the plague of Athens. 284 00:31:10,330 --> 00:31:14,380 I think which terminal logically in ancient Greece was called a loincloths. 285 00:31:14,380 --> 00:31:20,650 And now that is a word that technically in classical scholarship would be translated as petulance. 286 00:31:20,650 --> 00:31:24,370 But, you know, for our purposes, we could just say plague. 287 00:31:24,370 --> 00:31:29,710 This word is very important and very different from the terms like epidemic and pandemic news today, 288 00:31:29,710 --> 00:31:33,460 despite the fact that both those words are Greek drive and melodically. 289 00:31:33,460 --> 00:31:38,860 What's first remarkable about loincloths is that it seems like a really general term to me. 290 00:31:38,860 --> 00:31:44,890 You know, it's used by people like Vicinities who witnessed or survived the disease much like us today, 291 00:31:44,890 --> 00:31:48,870 who did not know what the disease was, where it came from, what caused it, what cures it. 292 00:31:48,870 --> 00:31:57,220 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, 293 00:31:57,220 --> 00:31:59,050 but also a sense of precision and context. 294 00:31:59,050 --> 00:32:05,670 It kind of reminds me how, you know, when you say Hoeben 19, I mean something very specific to us in this moment. 295 00:32:05,670 --> 00:32:09,920 And there are, of course, symptoms associated with it. But that does not mean we understand at all. 296 00:32:09,920 --> 00:32:18,240 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. 297 00:32:18,240 --> 00:32:22,960 You know, they'll say, oh, I was supposed to go visit my family until all of this happened. 298 00:32:22,960 --> 00:32:26,710 Everything going on in the way, gotten the away or, oh, you know, 299 00:32:26,710 --> 00:32:32,440 the things going on with the virus when obviously we know from viruses, not the only virus. 300 00:32:32,440 --> 00:32:40,150 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 301 00:32:40,150 --> 00:32:45,490 of humility in the way that we use general phrases about things that we don't quite grasp. 302 00:32:45,490 --> 00:32:54,670 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, 303 00:32:54,670 --> 00:32:58,240 especially in the Pratik Corpus to the word loincloths is pretty infrequent. 304 00:32:58,240 --> 00:33:06,850 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, 305 00:33:06,850 --> 00:33:09,770 which means pollution, defilement. 306 00:33:09,770 --> 00:33:18,900 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. 307 00:33:18,900 --> 00:33:26,990 And so basically to drive out the miasma there is kind of implied a religious process of purification that would have to occur. 308 00:33:26,990 --> 00:33:32,740 And well, I said earlier that in the Hippocratic material, there is a sense of the sacred and every disease. 309 00:33:32,740 --> 00:33:42,400 They definitely did not want to be limited to thinking that diseases were only sacred and that only purifications could cause healing. 310 00:33:42,400 --> 00:33:52,150 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 311 00:33:52,150 --> 00:34:02,050 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. 312 00:34:02,050 --> 00:34:03,880 And I think that's pretty, 313 00:34:03,880 --> 00:34:10,320 pretty similar to something that we might talk about when we're talking about fears of catching prone virus from someone else. 314 00:34:10,320 --> 00:34:17,220 Some of these uses for the plague. On the one hand, the word Knossos, which is the ordinary Greek word. 315 00:34:17,220 --> 00:34:23,100 For disease or sickness. So that is a kind of much milder word. 316 00:34:23,100 --> 00:34:28,140 He also uses a stronger word, Loihi Moss, which is a stronger word for plague. 317 00:34:28,140 --> 00:34:37,470 It's the word which Homer uses in the Iliad for the disease, which Apollo sends on the key and camp at Troy. 318 00:34:37,470 --> 00:34:44,790 It's a word which is interesting because he mentions an oracle that some of the people remembered during the plague. 319 00:34:44,790 --> 00:34:51,210 And this was an oracle that at some point there would be a story in the war that is a war against the Dorians. 320 00:34:51,210 --> 00:34:58,080 The spa stands. And along with this war, there would be a lawyer Mosse a plague. 321 00:34:58,080 --> 00:35:05,490 And the reason for it is mentions this as if these people thought that this oracle was being fulfilled in the war. 322 00:35:05,490 --> 00:35:14,430 Just as some people now look back to novels people wrote 20 to 25 years ago where they predicted some great contagion. 323 00:35:14,430 --> 00:35:19,050 But this is these comments that that there are two different versions of this oracle. 324 00:35:19,050 --> 00:35:26,490 In one, it had did the word Momose plague. In another, it had the word Lee, which means famine. 325 00:35:26,490 --> 00:35:34,560 And so he says that if at some point there was a war and a famine happened, people would remember the oracle differently. 326 00:35:34,560 --> 00:35:39,540 So this is kind of appealing to his kind of psychological interest in how people's whole perceptions, 327 00:35:39,540 --> 00:35:44,010 even their memory, are affected by their circumstances. 328 00:35:44,010 --> 00:35:53,580 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. 329 00:35:53,580 --> 00:35:59,490 In addition to the cities, we have mainly second hand later sources. 330 00:35:59,490 --> 00:36:07,830 Writers like Plutarch, who was writing lives of some of the powerful politicians at the time, including Pericles and Plutarch, 331 00:36:07,830 --> 00:36:15,210 does report for us some important additional bits of information which are not found in this as these. 332 00:36:15,210 --> 00:36:23,360 It is only from Plutarch, for instance, that we learn that parallelise himself died of the plague, apparently. 333 00:36:23,360 --> 00:36:27,210 And then there are a number of other later historians who are mainly, as I say, 334 00:36:27,210 --> 00:36:34,500 second hand historians who don't really add that much to what Ethnicity's says. 335 00:36:34,500 --> 00:36:42,720 There are, in addition, contemporary comic plays written by surviving plays by writers, 336 00:36:42,720 --> 00:36:48,660 Aristophanes in particular, which give us some idea of the state of Athens in the course of the war. 337 00:36:48,660 --> 00:36:53,250 But Aristophanes doesn't really doesn't mention the plague at all. 338 00:36:53,250 --> 00:36:59,500 Probably it was a topic which is not really suitable for the type of play he was writing comedies. 339 00:36:59,500 --> 00:37:01,740 We also have surviving tragedies. 340 00:37:01,740 --> 00:37:10,470 But these tragedies took as their subjects the material episodes from the heroic past, what we view as kind of Greek myth. 341 00:37:10,470 --> 00:37:16,950 And so they naturally don't treat the plague, except they do use plague as an image, as a metaphor. 342 00:37:16,950 --> 00:37:22,860 So, for example, in Sophocles is famous play the Oedipus Serranos or Oedipus Rex. 343 00:37:22,860 --> 00:37:30,060 There is a plague at Thebes right at the beginning, described right at the beginning of the play. 344 00:37:30,060 --> 00:37:34,260 A result of the pollution in the land caused by Oedipus. 345 00:37:34,260 --> 00:37:41,620 It's no surprise that the disease had a pretty devastating impact on the people of Athens in the year 429. 346 00:37:41,620 --> 00:37:46,620 And for some time afterwards, there were there Longer-Term Consequences. 347 00:37:46,620 --> 00:37:51,120 And can we learn anything from them relevant to our situation today? 348 00:37:51,120 --> 00:38:01,410 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. 349 00:38:01,410 --> 00:38:07,080 Yes, we know from the latest sources that Hockley's seemingly died of the plague Hockley's 350 00:38:07,080 --> 00:38:15,330 his death was calamitous for Athens because later leaders on his view were less good. 351 00:38:15,330 --> 00:38:19,880 This is also described how during the plague there was a reaction against power 352 00:38:19,880 --> 00:38:25,140 in terms of people blaming him so that whereas in the first year of the war, 353 00:38:25,140 --> 00:38:33,960 people were blaming Heracles for not leading them out to fight the Spartans, not defending their land in the second year. 354 00:38:33,960 --> 00:38:41,160 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. 355 00:38:41,160 --> 00:38:45,790 And he describes them as pushing for peace there. 356 00:38:45,790 --> 00:38:49,320 And they're wanting to send the Spartans there, wanting to make peace with Sparta. 357 00:38:49,320 --> 00:38:58,260 And Poli's is standing up on Sydney's portrayal against this very irrational wavering by the Athenians. 358 00:38:58,260 --> 00:39:04,770 So this is this has a portrayal of the Athenian masses as kind of being very variable, 359 00:39:04,770 --> 00:39:09,860 as giving in to circumstances, whereas parallelise, in a sense stands above those. 360 00:39:09,860 --> 00:39:16,340 And Pericles has already, at the beginning of the war, predicted that people might. 361 00:39:16,340 --> 00:39:24,560 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. 362 00:39:24,560 --> 00:39:25,430 So in a sense, 363 00:39:25,430 --> 00:39:37,130 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, 364 00:39:37,130 --> 00:39:49,970 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. 365 00:39:49,970 --> 00:39:56,180 So the plague is important for the citizens view of Pokey's and Pokey's is leadership. 366 00:39:56,180 --> 00:40:04,190 It is the Kirklees addresses. It has. That's the big single kind of unexpected thing that has hit Athens during the war. 367 00:40:04,190 --> 00:40:08,990 Heraklion is presented both of these as being full of foresight. He can anticipate things. 368 00:40:08,990 --> 00:40:19,430 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, 369 00:40:19,430 --> 00:40:24,140 just as I think one can't really go beyond city's description and compare the 370 00:40:24,140 --> 00:40:31,520 social effects of the diseases with the social effects of the current pandemic. 371 00:40:31,520 --> 00:40:39,710 I think we're dealing with really very different worlds of these is portraying people as a result of the plague, 372 00:40:39,710 --> 00:40:46,040 doing things they normally wouldn't have done. They're breaking the new normal social barriers, 373 00:40:46,040 --> 00:40:55,040 whereas at most what we've seen in the current pandemic are isolated instances of people doing what they normally like to do. 374 00:40:55,040 --> 00:40:58,990 But what they've been told by their leader, not clearly Athans, 375 00:40:58,990 --> 00:41:07,160 that a reduction in the number of soldiers who are available, but we don't really have any precise sort of figures. 376 00:41:07,160 --> 00:41:13,340 And in terms of the sort of strategy Athens was pursuing, it didn't make so much difference, 377 00:41:13,340 --> 00:41:20,420 given that what happened was mainly doing was trying to just survive in this war and resist the Peloponnesian attack. 378 00:41:20,420 --> 00:41:27,590 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, 379 00:41:27,590 --> 00:41:33,830 we see a sort of recovery when Athens is able to capture a number of Spartan soldiers. 380 00:41:33,830 --> 00:41:36,920 And that has a real important effect on the course of the war. 381 00:41:36,920 --> 00:41:43,460 And at that stage in Athens, even resists an offer of peace from the Spartans in 45 B.C. 382 00:41:43,460 --> 00:41:45,890 So Athens, in the sense, was able to carry on. 383 00:41:45,890 --> 00:41:57,880 And as the series portrays it, got carried away and began becoming too aggressive and becoming too expansionist in the long term. 384 00:41:57,880 --> 00:42:07,220 Ethnicity's tells us that the world that Athens did finally begin to make up some of the losses in the plague. 385 00:42:07,220 --> 00:42:19,160 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. 386 00:42:19,160 --> 00:42:22,880 And at that stage, he says it happens. We have now recovered from the plague. 387 00:42:22,880 --> 00:42:30,530 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. 388 00:42:30,530 --> 00:42:31,340 But for the most part, 389 00:42:31,340 --> 00:42:41,840 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. 390 00:42:41,840 --> 00:42:52,130 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, 391 00:42:52,130 --> 00:43:00,800 the idea that their exceptional asset class, especially the citizens there, which might be called Ristic Dewsbury word. 392 00:43:00,800 --> 00:43:08,210 So the question of how we remember a pandemic to me seems kind of more interesting than how bad it was, 393 00:43:08,210 --> 00:43:11,540 because in the large scheme of things, obviously, there will be another one. 394 00:43:11,540 --> 00:43:17,900 There will be another. Now we'll get through cities. It seems kind of it almost seems kind of short term. 395 00:43:17,900 --> 00:43:24,170 I mean, obviously, as much as a third of the Athenian population, though, that's just the citizen population. 396 00:43:24,170 --> 00:43:27,020 Those are the people are accountable at this time. 397 00:43:27,020 --> 00:43:37,490 Since you died there, there's this really interesting discussion of how people you know, you put this part earlier. 398 00:43:37,490 --> 00:43:44,570 People started kind of living for the now. They saw a rich people die and lose all of their property. 399 00:43:44,570 --> 00:43:50,960 So what to do? It's not just that poverty while you're still alive, which then you might die on someone else. 400 00:43:50,960 --> 00:44:02,030 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. 401 00:44:02,030 --> 00:44:06,620 You know, we see billionaires making huge power grabs with, you know, 402 00:44:06,620 --> 00:44:16,250 those where we're entering the US having become collectively like 650 billion dollars richer over the past few months as unemployment. 403 00:44:16,250 --> 00:44:22,220 Through the roof. So, you know, the lawlessness of what happens in three cities. 404 00:44:22,220 --> 00:44:30,110 I find it interesting because there it almost seemed permanently short term where in our society, 405 00:44:30,110 --> 00:44:37,220 especially in the West, I feel like though the coronavirus originally was sold as a great equaliser moment. 406 00:44:37,220 --> 00:44:45,290 A lot of people were poised to gain, according to social customs, saying exactly how the old ones were. 407 00:44:45,290 --> 00:44:50,900 You know, the system functioning as it was meant to. So I think we'll always remember this time. 408 00:44:50,900 --> 00:44:58,480 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, 409 00:44:58,480 --> 00:45:00,590 you know, if something happened like 100 years ago. 410 00:45:00,590 --> 00:45:11,680 But I hope people point out that distinction that we will be seeing long turns, event effects of this rhinovirus because of the, 411 00:45:11,680 --> 00:45:20,130 you know, the perseverance of our our of our institutions, always of life, as opposed to the breakdowns. 412 00:45:20,130 --> 00:45:22,200 Next time on Future Makers, 413 00:45:22,200 --> 00:45:33,330 we travel nearly a thousand years forwards to the reign of Justinian first for what many consider to be, in fact, the earliest. 414 00:45:33,330 --> 00:45:38,400 I hope you can join us then to the second stage of our journey through the history. 415 00:45:38,400 --> 00:45:47,580 And then. I'm Peter Milliken, and you've been listening to Future Makers. 416 00:45:47,580 --> 00:45:54,420 Feature makers was created in-house at the University of Oxford and presented by Professor Peter Milliken from Harvard College. 417 00:45:54,420 --> 00:46:01,050 A voice actor today was shown Emery Latchman, the score for the series was designed and created by Richard Watts. 418 00:46:01,050 --> 00:46:06,120 The series is written and produced by Steve Pritchard and me and Howard. Thank you. 419 00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:10,632 On behalf of the whole thing for listening to the history of Pandemic's.