I cannot even imagine. The sheer idea of living through this pandemic in Thucydides times is unfathomable. The fact that even today Sarah Christine Teets was due to deliver her second child on the day that her local hospital would be at the peak use for resources is scary. Her anxious spiral was a completely understandable reaction. The passage she mentioned within her article is very relevant to today and I think there is a lot to be spoken on. Thucydides brought forth the fact that we must think on our past to learn and solve our modern-day issues. A plague was once upon us so what can we do time around to not reap the devastation of before.
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After reading “Thucydides, Historical Solidarity, and Birth in the Pandemic,” I was fascinated with the author’s discussion of the “cliched quote by George Santayana about not knowing history and being doomed to repeat it.” I immediately recalled times where each of my history teaches in middle school and high school stated this quote like they were the ones to invent it. However, I have never read anyone actually discussing this quotation, and I certainly had never studied how Thucydides would have responded to this quotation (understanding history does not make you immune to its repetition). Additionally, I love that the author chose to include Historian Sarah Bond’s twitter thread from 2019, which included her statement that the “reason to study history is not so we don’t repeat or rhyme it (we will regardless), it is to translate people, pain, & pleasure of the present [by using] historical literacy to create perpetual empathy towards humanity & to instill in us a hunger to understand, inquire, & to document.”
On a personal level, I believe this is why I am so interested in storytelling—whether that be historical, literary, or religious. Storytelling allows us to listen, sympathize, and connect with others through their experiences or traditions. In a way, it is a technique to live vicariously through others’ experiences, even if just for a moment. Still, I believe the author does an excellent job by stating that history is not always “comforting [but it is] something more like solidarity.” Similar to how she was able to find solidarity in giving birth during the Covid-19 pandemic through Thucydides 2.48.3, I believe this article highlights the importance of finding commonality and community in times of extreme stress, and while these connections might be found on an online social media forum or inside an ancient Athenian plague text, each person can find intrinsic value in the historical, literary, and religious stories that are shared throughout time.
Something that I thought was interesting was the use of Thucydides work and ideals in modern-day politics. I do not know much about politics or really enjoy discussing this topic however it seems that the Athenians ran a similar democracy compare to us where they govern in the “interests of the majority, not just a few.” This comparison also was well explained at the beginning of the podcast just before Emily Greenwood was introduced he discussed how lines of Thucydides were used just after the 2016 election. I was just unaware that these greek traditions were partly some of our customs as well.
The podcast also gave a good introduction to the plague that overcame Athens. Whereat first the symptoms sound just like a common cold but then turn into much worse symptoms. Their tongues began to bleed and their breath gave off a terrible odor. This reminds me of the beginning of the coronavirus when everyone was not taking it seriously and did not think it would affect the United States but then it turned into a global pandemic killing thousands. This plague also did not affect the same person twice at least not fatally. The comparison between this book and modern times is quite interesting I can’t wait for our class discussion.
The podcast was a great resource for extra information before reading Thucydides. After listening to this, I was able to pick on things I wouldn’t have necessarily paid attention to in Thucydides. For example, the role of women. In the podcast, it mentions that women listening to this speech in the audience might have been booing at the time of hearing it, having just lost their husbands. The brief mention of women seems to be in a way a mockery. Hearing that the account was not popularly received among women allowed me to understand why they might have felt this way. After hearing the speaker go on and on about men, it seemed insulting that women should only be addressed partially and in relation to their lost husbands.
The description of the plague also stood out to me while reading this. I would not want to have contracted this plague—it sounds terrible! While the description was gruesome, it honestly made me grateful that COVID isn’t as severe. Having seen a pandemic allowed me interesting perspective. I thought it was interesting that the plague affected so much of the body, even the eyes. I also thought it was terrible that bodies were being piled on top of each other. This imagery paints a picture of just how much the people who lived through this plague suffered.
Why are women stored in history the way they are? I used the word Stored as a type of metaphorical example of being put in a place for retrieval but women seem to never be accessed. When they are accessed it seems to be for great contributes and pivotal moments of some kind. But the account is Stored and minimized to their detriment. We know they are there but we never see their impact in history as much as we see men. Why do women seem to have received such an invaluable role in history, especially when it comes to war? Thucydides is no exception, out of 150,000 words women are mentioned only 34 times. I can only assume of those 34 mentions it was something along these lines.
"If I may speak also of the duty of those wives who will now be widows, a brief exhortation will say it all. Your great virtue is to show no more weakness than is inherent in your nature, and to cause least talk among males for either praise or blame"( Book Two pg 96). Our duty to men, our response to what men have accomplished, and our responsibility to the men's memory. Why are women given such instructional directives? What is meant by women's inherent nature is weak? Physically? Mentally? A woman's natural state of being should not be contextualized as a reason for her not being a worthy contributor in history.
Through listening to the Greenwood podcast and reading Thucydides' description of Athenian funerals I found it odd that Athenian women were shunted to the side. Even more fascinating was learning that many researchers believe that Pericles' speech at this funeral was written by a woman and a foreigner at that. I found it odd that Greek women were so prominent in contemporary texts but Thucydides, whose attention to detail is apparent within his text, chose to leave them aside. Without the podcast's external knowledge, I would have never paid attention to the lack of mothers and wives present. I began to lean into the theory that they would have been publicly booing Pericles because he was the general and that this may have been why Thucydides left them out in this scene.
Thucydides also shares the story of the plague of Athens, remarking that the first community to experience the plague believed their wells to be poisoned by Sparta and its colleagues. Reading that section made me wonder about the commonality of biowarfare in Ancient Greece and whether this was a common enough occurrence that this would be their first guess. If biowarfare was common at the time was it always using wells and other aspects of the environment such as agriculture?