The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [94]
The plague was subtle at first. But it left its mark. Sadly, those democratic little houses of Athens, cheek-by-jowl (no villas protected by high-walled gardens as you find in the Roman period), were the perfect host for a visiting virus or bacterium. And now they were doubly, triply occupied – by city dwellers, by refugees and by a killer. As the disease spread the courtyards began to fill with bodies, and men, women and children desperately tried to find some relief from the searing heat of their internal cellular battle.
At first week by week, and then day by day, more and more Athenians needed to be buried. The eye-witness accounts make for unbearable reading.
Words indeed fail one when one tries to give a general picture of this disease; and as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure.4
The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. The sanctuaries in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died right there inside.5
Thucydides tells us that with the plague came degeneracy.
People had fewer inhibitions about self-indulgent behaviour they had previously repressed … The upshot was that they sought a life of swift and pleasurable gain, because they regarded their lives and their property as equally impermanent.6
Those citizens who, despite the outbreak of an ugly war, had behaved properly, had kept society running as it should, now remembered the animal in them. Running through the streets, feral, they looted and rutted. The carnage was surveyed by the fixed gaze of ideal Homeric heroes, the kinds of men Athenians were supposed to be, staring reproachfully from epic, decorated walls across the city.7 The colours of Athens’ painted-backdrop scenery – its statues and themed walkways and gaudy shrines – were still garishly bright. But the acts they witnessed were grubby. By the time Socrates and Alcibiades returned, the plague had been on the Athenian streets for two long years.
This horror-show was the home-town that Socrates and Alcibiades have re-entered.
The plague pits of Athens
The region of Demosion Sema, the public cemetery, in the north-west corner of Athens, is still, as it were, on the wrong side of the tracks. Traders as grubby as their suitcases sell twentieth-century debris. Here there are men who mend bikes and wicker chairs; many of the walls around about are covered with graffiti – some of it commissioned as an exercise in social inclusion, most not. There is much new development here: it is a district that sits somewhere between life and death. And just at the edge of this mongrel zone, construction workers preparing ground for the 1994 extension of the Athens metro made a gruesome discovery. Behind a metal fence is a half-dug building site. The concrete foundations are there to support something new, but they cover something very old. Because in Socrates’ day this was a mass grave. Thucydides stated that during the plague years Athens had been infected by something supernatural, ghoulish, heaven-sent; he uses the same word that Socrates did to describe his own inner-demon, ‘daimonion’.
And now one eleven-year-old girl, called Myrtis, has risen from this morass of the dead to throw light on Thucydides’ ghoulish daimonion, on Athens’ uninvited guest. She has been named by the scientists who resurrected her. In amongst the jumble of hastily buried bodies, thrown together into the ground in around 430/429 BC, Myrtis’ skull was discovered. It is in a remarkably good state of preservation; the bone is smooth, the skull virtually intact, the teeth all present. In fact the remains are so robust, it is clear this young girl had a pronounced overbite, messy eye-teeth,