Civilization or Barbarism? The Plague of Athens or the Return of History to Nature (An Essay on Thucydides)

Abstract

This article analyzes both nature and the consequences of the Plague of Athens as recounted by Thucydides. It comes to conclude that nature treats itself as an infirmity that can be metaphorically characterised not only as both imperialist (invading the victim's entire body if it does not kill them first) and monotheist (making all other diseases become it), but also as subversive (breaking off from old morality) and barbaric (at times directly presenting itself as antihuman). 

Highlighted among the plague's effects is the creation of a new double ethics, each one distinctly characterized. The first is an ethics of desperation, in which the hero is the diseased person; next, an ethics of uncertainty, based on what it is not. The first will most likely die, physically, from the plague, and the second presents itself as the social and cultural being of -- though not out of -- the plague. The results of this finally subverted world are the dehumanisation and denaturalisation of the human and natural worlds, and the social world as well. Paradoxically, from this moral torment life presents itself in the first ethics as the recovered person, and in the second as its principal protagonist. A world of desire and pleasure now emerges, removing the individual from history and finding a central role for society as genuine protagonist. This new human (dis)order that rises up out of these phenomena is master of necessity, an anthropological and social rally reuniting civilisation and barbarism in a single cultural emblem.