Abstract
This article examines the moral crisis inherent in medicine’s attempt to sideline traditional religious—that is to say, moral—interpretations of the cause of disease in late fifth-century Athens. Using the case study of the Athenian plague, it argues that the appeal in so-called ‘rational’ approach to disease presented in two prominent Hippocratic texts was in large part the opportunity such an approach afforded Athenians to evade the moral perspective on the cause of disease concomitant with traditional religious explanations, and therefore also any moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions in choosing to wage war and to do so as Pericles advised.
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Notes
- 1.
See now Irwin (2018b).
- 2.
The reading below is compatible with a growing awareness of the need for a ‘dismemberment of the Corpus’, and a consideration of each text on its own terms: see most recently van der Eijk (2016) (whose phrase this is), along with the other papers collected in Dean-Jones and Rosen (2016) and Craik (2015): ‘Introduction’ (esp. xx-xxiv).
- 3.
On the idea of double determinism—the idea of causation on divine and human level—the locus classicus (dealing with fate) is Herodotus’ Croesus logos; cf. Plut. Per. 6.3–4, discussed below. On the subject of the Hippocratics and the sacred see Jouanna (2012a).
- 4.
All translations will be from the most recent Loeb editions (‘Hippocrates’: Jones; Plutarch: Perrin; Diodorus Siculus: Oldfather; Plato: Lamb; Thucydides: Smith) unless otherwise specified.
- 5.
Cf. ch. 5 (2 Littre): τὸ δὲ νούσημα τοῦτο οὐδέν τί μοι δοκέει θειότερον εἶναι τῶν λοιπῶν, ἀλλὰ φύσιν μὲν ἔχει ἣν καὶ τὰ ἄλλα νουσήματα, καὶ πρόφασιν ὅθεν ἕκαστα γίνεται: φύσιν δὲ τοῦτο καὶ πρόφασιν ἀπὸ ταὐτοῦ τὸ θεῖον γίνεσθαι ἀφ᾽ ὅτου καὶ τἄλλα πάντα. On the treatment of diseases ‘called sacred’ in the Hippocratic texts see Jouanna (2012a): 99–105, and on Sacred Disease specifically, 99–102.
- 6.
As is clear from the text’s last line. The whole introduction of the text attacks these traditional, religious healers, portraying them paradoxically as guilty of true impiety in contrast to the author’s genuine piety (chs. 3–4): ‘Yet in my opinion their discussions show, not piety, as they think, but impiety rather, implying that the gods do not exist, and what they call piety and the divine is, as I shall prove, impious and unholy’. On this competition, and its limits, see e.g. Jouanna (2012a): esp. 103–134. Scholars debate whether this is true religious feeling on the part of the author, but it is equally plausible to understand these expressions as the rhetoric of a sophist attempting to quell the anxieties of his listeners at the impiety of his proposal that the gods have nothing to do with disease; few patients would feel entirely confident with a doctor who set himself explicitly at odds with the gods. The moral high ground created vis-à-vis piety in this text bears similarities with the rhetoric of the nurse of Euripides’ Hippolytus (474–475); cf. Jouanna (2012a): 108–109.
- 7.
One might even see complementarity in the two texts in terms of the scale of disease they address: Airs focuses on diseases that are likely to be collective (which is where we see its arguments deployed—see below Diod. 12.58) as arising from a shared physical and cultural climate, while the Sacred Disease, though common to all mankind (cf. Hdt. 3.33), afflicts individuals independent of one another.
- 8.
Van der Eijk (1991).
- 9.
Cf. ch, 16, esp. 40–46, and ch. 21; cf. Jouanna (2012a): 109–111 on the use of theion in Prognostic.
- 10.
For reflection of concerns with geography, weather, and seasons in other Hippocratic texts see Kosak (2000): 36–39, citing Regimen II and Epidemics, esp. IV.
- 11.
- 12.
On the manufacture of authority in the Sacred Disease, see Laskaris (2002): 74: ‘[I]t is clear that the polemic against the magico-religious healers was…intended…to attract students and patients to the author by demonstrating the “technical” inferiority of his opponents’ methods and explanations.’
- 13.
- 14.
Cf. On the Ancient Art 1 on the problem of audience’s capacity to verify what they hear which has some relevance here, even if the writer contrasts medicine with those subjects impossible for audiences to verify.
- 15.
On this phrase and the understanding of other kinds of ‘efficacy’ purveyed by the Hippocratic texts see Demand (1999). Though Demand’s discussion deals with texts that offer therapeutic treatments (and therefore crucially different than Sacred Disease and Airs), her comments about a wider sense of ‘efficacy’, ‘conceptional satisfaction’ and ‘shared world-view[s]’ (142–148) are not irrelevant to this discussion. See also Jouanna (2012d): 157, 169, 172 on the nosological over the therapeutic in AWP with Irwin (2018b): 53 n. 24. Contrast Regimen II ch. 38 where countering the effects of weather and climate is announced as the aim of what will follow.
- 16.
See e.g. Longrigg (1993): 1 for an emphatic expression of this view: ‘The importance of this revolutionary innovation for the subsequent history of medicine can hardly be overstressed. Here for the first time in the history of medicine was displayed a strikingly rational attitude which resulted in a radically new conception of disease whose causes and symptoms were now accounted for in purely natural terms.’ It underlies many a discussion of these texts: see e.g. Hankinson (1998): 34 or Jouanna (2005): 4, citing Airs and On the Sacred Disease as examples, ‘Of course, it is still a far cry from the Hippocratic Corpus to the technical terminology of causation as we find it later in Galen under the influence of Aristotelian or Stoic philosophy, but the Hippocratic doctors’ reflections on causation are remarkable for their time.’
- 17.
- 18.
See, for instance, Airs 10, where prediction is everything: ‘As to the seasons, a consideration of the following points will make it possible to decide whether the year will prove unhealthy or healthy…’—and treatment is nowhere. See Lloyd (1991): 255 and Demont (2020): 535–536 on the relationship of prognosis to divination and on the awareness in our medical texts of prognosis’ parallelism with prophecy ([Hippocr.] Epid. 1.5 with Calchas at Il. 1.70). The phrase also has associations with the authority of the poet: see West (1966) 166 on Hes. Th. 32.
- 19.
See Furley (1996): 82–85; cf. Furley (2006): 421–423; Jordan (1986): 134; Longrigg (1992): 38. That this caused moral anxiety in the late fifth century is Plutarch’s view (Nic. 23.3), leading to the prosecutions of various figures: ‘Men could not abide the natural philosophers and “visionaries”, as they were then called, for that they reduced the divine agency down to irrational causes, blind forces, and necessary incidents.’ On the sophists and traditional religion more generally, see n. 27 below.
- 20.
See e.g. Schmitz (2005): 44, 62.
- 21.
- 22.
Plut. Per. 4. Stadter (1989): 82 is right to point out that the story does not support its introduction as it ‘does not actually show Pericles rising above superstition, or the superiority of Anaxagoras’ science’—its inclusion is ostensibly gratuitous, unless its presence is explained by the point he goes on to make; see further Stadter (1989): 82–86. The influence of Anaxagoras on Pericles is stressed throughout the Life (chs. 4, 6, 8, 16, 32), on which see Hershbell (1982). See also Pl. Phaedr. 269e4-270a8, Isoc. 15.235 (cf. Pl. Alc. 118c3–5). Anaxagoras may well have been one of the ‘Cheirons’ around Pericles lampooned in Cratinus’ play by the same name (frs. 246–268 K.-A.). One should note that as priest of Apollo at Delphi Plutarch is likely to have had further reasons to champion the compatibility of the scientific and religious account here.
- 23.
Plut. Per. 8.1: ‘It was from natural science, as the divine Plato says [Pl. Phaedr. 269e4-270a8], that he “acquired his loftiness of thought and perfectness of execution, in addition to his natural gifts”, and applying what he learned to the art of speaking, he far excelled all other speakers …’
- 24.
ἢν καὶ νῦν ὑπενδῶμέν ποτε (πάντα γὰρ πέφυκε καὶ ἐλασσοῦσθαι). See also Plut. Per. 15.3–4, where things wrong in the city are explained as ‘natural’, παντοδαπῶν γάρ, ὡς εἰκός, παθῶν ἐν ὄχλῳ τοσαύτην τὸ μέγεθος ἀρχὴν ἔχοντι φυομένων. Other morally controversial policies implemented through Pericles’ persuasion (not necessily medical) include the use of the Delian treasury in the building policy (Plut. Per. 12, with Irwin 2018a: 301–310), the refusal to revoke the Megarian decree (Thuc. 1.42, 67.3–4, 139.1, 140.2; Diod. 12.39; Plut. Per. 29.4, 31.1), brutal reprisals (e.g. Samos: Duris apud Plut. Per. 28).
- 25.
This topic will be the third chapter of the monograph alluded to in the introduction above. It will be touched on below in Part III with the subject of the Athenian ‘plague’.
- 26.
Laskaris (2002) on Sacred Disease as a sophistic protreptic speech. The example of Prodicus is instructive: famous as a sophist, implicated in politics as teacher of Theramenes, but the evidence suggests also a figure with medical interests: out of the 90 extant fragments collected by Mayhew (2011), five point to his work being at home with the more theoretical Hippocratic texts (nos. 61–65; cf. nos. 62–65 with Sacred Disease 20 on challenging conventional onomata pertaining to the body) and a full six we owe to Galen (nos. 35–36, 62–65), and we may also include his views on the status of the body and soul after death (nos. 88–89, [Pl.] Axiochus). See also Ar. Clouds where the ἰατροτέχναι are prominent among the sophists whom the Clouds nourish (331–332, with Sommerstein 1982 ad 332); the scholiast accounts for their presence by singling out one text by name, Airs, Waters, Places (cf. Dover 1968 ad 332). On the permeability between categories of late-fifth century intellectuals see Lloyd (1987): 92–100; cf. Muir (1985): esp. 205–207; Thomas (2006): 93–95. On the well-recognized role of rhetoric—often quite polemical—in medical treatises see Lloyd (1991); Jouanna (2012c); Agarwalla (2010). Some striking examples: On Diseases 1.1, On the Natural of Man 1. How rhetoric is described in the Phaedrus bears remarkable similarities with the doctor’s technique of matching one’s speech to the patient at hand revealed in Plato’s Laws 720b-e (with Demand 1999: 145–146 and Irwin 2018b: n. 31). Hippocrates’ prominence and that of his method in the Phaedrus is itself of interest (Pl. Phaedr. 273d-e; on this passage cf. Mansfeld 1980; Gill 2002/3).
- 27.
- 28.
Plato, Gorg. 456b, on which see Dean-Jones 2003: 119: ‘Plato obviously intends his readers to be surprised and perturbed at the possibility that somebody with only Gorgias’ knowledge of medicine could win the post of public physician over a true doctor’; see also Jouanna (2012c): 51 and Lloyd (1991): 252–253. Gorgias’ later claim is more disturbing, ‘The orator is able to speak against everyone on every question so as in gatherings to be more persuasive, in short, about anything he likes … he has the ability to rob doctors or others craftsmen of their reputations. (457a-b)’.
- 29.
459a: ‘You were saying just now, you know, that even in the matter of health the rhetor will be more convincing than a doctor’. Through the analogy that Socrates goes on to employ, such a rhetor would be analogous to a pastry chef pretending to be a doctor prescribing not the foodstuffs promoting the well-being of his patients (464b), but rather catering to their pleasure irrespective of concerns for their health. On this analogy in the dialogue see Moss (2007).
- 30.
Thuc. 1.140–144 and 2.13, Diod. 12.39. On the policy see Allison (1983).
- 31.
The duration of each is known only from Thucydides (3.87), whose testimony is here at question: ‘not less than one’ seems rhetorically much shorter than ‘two full years’ but need not have been significantly shorter, nor strictly speaking shorter at all. The evidence from the Athenians’ response, recorded in more detail elsewhere, would suggest the second outbreak was worse than the first, if not in terms of length, then in intensity. See below, with n. 35.
- 32.
It would be the subject of a monograph in its own right to discuss not only Thucydides’ extensive use of the discourse of medicine and natural science—a well-worn subject (see the useful recent treatment of Swain 1994 with bibliography), but also the motivations behind it (less addressed), which, I would argue, belong to the climate I am outlining in this article. My interest here, however, is to establish that climate rather than become involved in an author study. Such a study will be the focus of the work alluded to in the introduction above. There, in short, I argue that Thucydides’ avoidance of religion, on the one hand, and, on the other, his mobilization of the concept of ‘human nature’ together are enlisted to diminish, if not remove, moral censure directed at Pericles and Athenian arche (‘empire’). See already my forthcoming contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Thucydides, which takes the Athenian ‘plague’ as its case study.
- 33.
- 34.
For the idea of a year being healthy or unhealthy, cf. Thuc. 2.49.1.
- 35.
- 36.
As well noted: see e.g. Rubel (2000): 129–130; Schmitz (2005): 63; Furley (2006): 431. Thucydides says only that the purification was on account of ‘some oracle’ (κατὰ χρησμὸν δή τινα, 3.104), and has organized his narrative in such a way as to make it very difficult to see it as a consequence of the plague: one has to work one’s way back through a series of temporal markers to recognize the causal relationship: 3.87—τοῦ δ᾽ ἐπιγιγνομένου χειμῶνος … παρέμεινε … οὐκ ἔλασσον ἐνιαυτοῦ; 3.89—τοῦ δ᾽ ἐπιγιγνομένου θέρους; 3.90—τοῦ αὐτοῦ θέρους; 3.91—τοῦ αὐτοῦ θέρους; 3.94—τοῦ αὐτοῦ θέρους; 3.99—κατὰ τοὺς αὐτοὺς χρόνους; 3.100—τοῦ αὐτοῦ θέρους; 3.103—τοῦ δ᾽ ἐπιγιγνομένου χειμῶνος; 3.104—τοῦ δ᾽ αὐτοῦ χειμῶνος (= ‘not less than a year later’ since 3.87). The consequences for clarity arising from Thucydides’ organization of his narrative is noted already by Dion. Hal. Thuc. 9 (with emphasis on book 3), on which see Irwin (2015): esp. 125–130. Thucydides’ selective silences about Delos are notorious, particularly his failure to record the removal of the Delian treasury to Athens in 454 BC.
- 37.
See Libanius (Orat. ad Antioch. (16) 50–51) who seems to reflect sources that equate Pericles with famous mythic figures likewise responsible for bringing disaster on their people: ‘Who does not know how the army of the Achaeans was seized by Plague through the wrong doing of Agamemnon, how at sea they suffered on account of the crime of Ajax? Did not the Athenians pay the penalty as a collective for the hybris of Pericles towards Megara, and the Thebans suffered plague when Oedipus killed Laios and did so although Oedipus was ignorant of whom he killed?’ See also Furley (1996): 79–82.
- 38.
The contestable idea that the gods are indifferent to where they are honored so long as they are honored seems to underlie Thuc. 2.15 and may well have been the argument Pericles made to persuade Athenians that forsaking worship in the rural sanctuaries implied by the confinement policy would not be impious; cf. Irwin (2013a): 47.
- 39.
Although only admitted obliquely in Thucydides, this is made explicit in Diodorus (12.54.2–3) and was certainly the case: evidenced by the orge the Athenians felt both towards the Corcyraeans who seemed unwilling to allow the Athenians to use their harbors for their fleet to go to Sicily in 427 before compelled to by Messenian hoplites (Thuc. 3.75.1) and towards the generals who came home empty handed (Thuc. 4.65.3). See Irwin (2014): esp. 63–70.
- 40.
And perhaps the purification is closely related to Sicily: was it feared (and therefore argued) that the Athenians’ justification of the campaign, Ionianism, was belied by their appalling treatment of Delos and their Ionian kin? Interestingly, according to Diodorus another Sicilian expedition was the occasion of an outbreak, occurring when the Athenians were camped around Syracuse (14.70.5–6)—that the event was recalled or invented suggests a connection made by some. For further suggestion of the traditional view that the god attended to Athens’ aggression see the lurking allusion to the Samian War in Plato’s claim that Diotima put off the plague for ten years (Sym. 201d). For other coincidences of plague and campaigns see Pericles’ stratia, whether at Epidaurus (Plut. Per. 35.3–4) or Potidaea (Thuc. 2.58), and Irwin (2023).
- 41.
Book 3 of Herodotus is particularly interesting here as it is framed by figures of the medical profession (the Egyptian oculist, 3.1, and Democedes of Croton, 3.134, the latter in relation to Sicily) who feed imperialists’ ambitions to further their own interests: see Irwin (2018b): 59–63. For Sicilian ambitions as a topic of Book 3, see Irwin (2014): Part III.
- 42.
For other glimpses of the conditions in Athens see Ar. Knights 792ff., or Pl. Rep. 439e (the infamous Leontius). For general complaints about the confinement policy as part of the war see Ar. Acharnians, and on the reluctance of some Athenians to return to this confinement in the so-called ‘Decelean War’ see Irwin (2013a): 61–69.
- 43.
Perhaps more acute cases of transgression were more readily to hand: the mass execution of the Mytilenaeans (Thuc. 3.49), abandoning despite promises the Plataeans remaining at Plataea (Thuc. 2.73), Athens’ role in the carnage at Corcyra (see above n. 39), and the expansionist campaign against Sicily (Thuc. 3.86.4, Diod. 12.54, and see above). On Thucydides’ masterful rhetoric in book 3 used on the Athenians’ behalf, see Irwin (2015).
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
Furley (2006): 420. Cf. here Jouanna (2012a): 110 on Regimen IV ch. 87 on dreams, and p. 112 on the apparent upholding of traditional religion of the great sanctuaries of the Hippocratic doctors despite their rationalist attacks on lesser religious figures; one can understand an expediency in this as few patients would feel confident about recovery were their doctors to profess otherwise.
- 47.
- 48.
In the monograph to which this study will belong a chapter will be dedicated to the historical actors responsible for the interpenetration of the discourse of natural science with those of politics and ethics.
- 49.
The term was associated with a rhetorical technique that flaunted its ability to construct opposing arguments, the ability to take either side on any question and argue it with equal success, or as Euripides would say: ἐκ παντὸς ἄν τις πράγματος δισσῶν λόγων|ἀγῶνα θεῖτ’ ἄν, εἰ λέγειν εἴη σοφός (‘For out of every matter one could stage a contest of opposing (dissoi) logoi, if one should be clever at speaking’, Eur. fr. 189 Nauck), or see Plutarch’s depiction of Pericles and Zeno (Per. 4.3). For the close association of Protagoras with the dissos logos, even the attribution of its creation see DK 80A1, 20; Sen. Ep. 89.43.
- 50.
The debate was set in train by the response of Parry (1989) (orig. 1969) to the affinities between Thucydides’ language and the medical writers argued by Page (1953) and followed by several scholars. But Parry erroneously considered an argument for the manifest presence of medical discourse in the account to be at odds with poetic influence from Homer and tragedy: see Longrigg (1992): 30–32; Morgan (1994); Hillard (2006): 158–159. Excellent contributions integrating these positions with a critical appreciation of Thucydides’ role in engendering this debate (e.g. Bellemore and Plant 1994; Marshall 1990; Demont 1983) have nevertheless failed to shift the discussion in some influential quarters (e.g. Thomas 2006: 95–104; Hornblower 2009 [orig. 1987]).
- 51.
Thucydides 2.48.3: ‘All speculation as to its origin and its causes, if causes can be found adequate to produce so great a disturbance, I leave to other writers, whether lay or professional; for myself, I shall simply set down its nature, and explain the symptoms by which perhaps it may be recognized by the student, if it should ever break out again.’ On his refusal as ‘perhaps the most striking feature’ of his introduction to the plague narrative see e.g. Kallett (2013): 358; Kosak (2000): 50 (‘pointedly avoids ascribing a particular cause’).
- 52.
As well recognized, this claim at 2.48.3 relates to his proem’s own claim for the utility of his work at 1.22.4: it will be ὠφέλιμα, a term itself with medical associations, on which see Jouanna (2012b): 22–23 n. 4. On the connection of these passages see most recently Bruzzone (2017): 907–909 and the bibliography she collects in n. 65 and n. 66. On Thucydides’ self-presentation here and his sincerity, Marshall (1990): 164 is spot on: ‘I accept then that Thucydides represents his description as practically and medically useful. It does not, however, follow that this representation is necessarily entirely sincere; the description, even if accurate, may have motives other than or in addition to the practical; Parry (pp. 114 f.) is not wrong to point out the atmosphere of mystery.’
- 53.
On the force of legetai, see Westlake (1977); Rhodes (1988): 204; Kallett (2013): 357 (‘distancing mechanism’). Bellemore and Plant (1994): 386–387 comment, ‘this should put us on our guard’, and yet Demont (2013): 77 will (too strongly) note, ‘there is no suggestion that these opinions are wrong’ (my italics—his view is correct if one modifies ‘suggestion’ with ‘explicit’—this is the effect of Thucydides’ dissos logos, and how the choice (perhaps unconscious) here on how to understand legetai will render its readers complicit.
- 54.
See e.g. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Athens—Feb. 2021) where the possibility that the ‘plague’ was typhoid is dismissed as follows: ‘As typhoid is most commonly transmitted through poor hygiene habits and public sanitation conditions in crowded urban areas, it is an unlikely cause of a plague emerging in the less urbanized Africa, as reported by Thucydides’. More recently see Littman (2009): 459, 466.
- 55.
- 56.
- 57.
- 58.
- 59.
Note, however, that Πρῶτὸν τε ἦρχε καὶ ἐς τἆλλα τῇ πόλει ἐπὶ πλέον ἀνομίας τὸ νόσημα (2.53.1) does implicitly admit that anomia (‘lawlessness’) had preceded the plague; cf. Jordan (1986): 134, pace Thomas (2006): 106. This is another example of Thucydides under the guise of ‘rationalism’ inverting cause and effect.
- 60.
See Hillard (2006): 152 on the ‘veritable industry of academic endeavor’ attempting to pinpoint the disease on the basis of Thucydides’ description: each champions a favorite, though no disease corresponds exactly with all the symptoms listed by Thucydides, on which see most recently Littman (2009). To my mind, what afflicted Athens need not have been one exceptional illness, as Thucydides so aggressively asserts, nor ‘from Ethiopia’ as hearsay had it, but rather more mundane, common illnesses taken to superlative heights based on overcrowding as was the case during e.g. the American Civil War when typhoid (‘camp fever’), dysentery and typhus wiped out significant numbers of soldiers: see e.g. Sartin (1993) and Gilchrist (1998). To admit as much, however, would remove the plague’s mystique, both diminishing the Homeric grandeur of Thucydides’ war and raising those questions of human responsibility that Thucydides’ text seems intent upon evading. A recent discovery in 1994–1995 of a mass grave in the Kerameikos dated to the period of the ‘plague’ (Baziotopoulou-Valavani 2002) and subsequent DNA analysis promises further exploration of this question; early studies have begun to suggest typhoid (Papagrigorakis, et al. 2006a and 2006b) but not without controversy (Shapiro et al. 2006). On what Thucydides gains from framing the epidemic as ‘plague’, and therefore why ‘plague’ should always appear in inverted commas, see Woodman (1988): 32–40; Marshall (1990); Bellemore and Plant (1994).
- 61.
Sources of fresh running water (κρῆναι) did not yet seem to exist in the Piraeus, despite whatever efforts Pericles and his family undertook or sponsored to improve water supply implied by IG I3 49, on which see Dillon (1996): 197–198, unless those efforts are what enabled the spread of waterborne disease (such as typhoid): the presence of Pericles’ sons date this narrowly to just before or just after the outbreak of the war, and quite possibly some form of preparation for it.
- 62.
Already so conceptualized in Solon 36.4 W.
- 63.
Note Thucydides seems to imply here (and if so disingenuously) that there is nothing more to say about the plague despite what we know from Part II.
- 64.
See e.g. Furley (2006): 419 who speaks of ‘scathing words’ that ‘cast doubt on the efficacy of the oracle’.
- 65.
It is important to stress that it is a choice of the narrative to quote the oracle and the dispute around it, a choice that then creates the conditions necessary to make these allusions; cf. the absence of the oracle in 3.104. It is possible that he exploits the existence of an actual oracle (mentioned at 2.54.4, probably a version of that mentioned at 1.118.3) in order to invent his own. For further discussion of the loimos/limos play on words, see Jouanna (2006).
- 66.
- 67.
Emily Greenwood reminds me that a ‘Dorian’ war led also to further limos in the quarries of Syracuse (7.87.2: λιμῷ ἅμα καὶ δίψῃ ἐπιέζοντο).
- 68.
Cf. Longrigg (2000): 61–63.
- 69.
Such ones as expressed moral misgivings are treated in derogatory way by Thucydides’ Pericles (2.63.2) and otherwise any opposition is presented as based only on material reasons (2.14–16, 62.3) or misplaced sentimentality (2.14–16); but for a fuller appreciation of dissent in Athens at this time see Irwin (2013a).
- 70.
For engendering ‘wonder’ in others as an element of Athenian self-representation and that which Thucydides’ text helps secure for the future: see ‘Pericles’ in Thuc. 2.39.4, 41.4. The archaia in 1.21.2 about which people feel thauma will be for the future the deeds of Athens, should Thucydides’ work succeed in preserving a certain memory of them: see Irwin (2018a, 2018b): 319–320. See 2.64 for ‘Pericles’s’ (that is, also Thucydides’) attempt to dismiss any moral misgivings of the Athenians as an obstacle to the future’s admiration and emulation of their acts.
- 71.
Kallett (2013) moves towards such an understanding of the mechanics of Thucydides’ deployment of muted allusions to religion, but frames it benignly as ‘didactic’, providing readers with an exercise in identifying it, rather than as argued here rendering them complicit for their failure to identify and interpret the religious perspective buried in his account. For further discussion of this reading of Thucydides' 'plague' narrative see Irwin (2023).
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Irwin, E. (2022). ‘The Athenian ‘Plague’: Religion, ‘Rationality’, and Ethics’. In: Kõiv, M., Läänemets, M., Droß-Krüpe, K., Fink, S. (eds) Crisis in Early Religion. Universal- und kulturhistorische Studien. Studies in Universal and Cultural History. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36989-7_9
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