The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
© Photo public domainAmbrogio Lorenzetti 's Allegory of Bad Government (1338), fresco in the town hall of Siena, Italy.
Predictably eyeing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire, a serious academic debate is raging around the working hypothesis of historian
Kyle Harper, according to whom viruses and pandemics - especially the
Justinian plague in the 6
th century - led to the end of the Roman Empire.
Well, history actually teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers.Patrick Boucheron, a crack historian and a professor at the esteemed College de France, offers a very interesting perspective. Incidentally, before the onset of Covid-19, he was about to start a seminar on the Black Death medieval plague.
Boucheron's view of Boccaccio's
Decameron, written in 1350 and about young Florentine aristocrats who fled to the Tuscan countryside to tell stories, focuses on the plague's character as a "horrible beginning" that tears apart social liaisons, provokes a funerary panic and has everyone wallowing in anomie.
Then he draws a historical parallel with Thucydides writing about the
Athens plague in the summer of 430 BC. Pushing it to the limit, we may venture that Western literature actually
starts with a plague - described in Book 1 of the
Iliad by Homer.
Thucydides' description of the Great Plague - actually typhoid fever - is a literary tour de force as well. In our current setting, that's more relevant than the
"Thucydides trap" controversy - as it's idle to compare the context in ancient Athens with the current US-China hybrid war.
Both Socrates and Thucydides, incidentally, survived the plague. They were tough, and acquired immunity from their earlier exposure to typhoid. Pericles, the leading citizen of Athens, was not so lucky: he died at 66, a victim of the plague.
