Pandora and pandemics

By historian Matthias Sandberg

John William Waterhouse’s ‘Pandora’ depicts a key moment in Greek mythology: still angry at Prometheus’ sacrilegious robbery of fire, Zeus, full of cunning, contemplated revenge: the father of the gods left a vessel full of evil to human beings, together with the treacherous commandment to keep it locked. The plan worked: Pandora’s curiosity was greater than Zeus’ warning. Immediately after her marriage to Prometheus’ brother, Epimetheus, Pandora opens the box, releasing misfortune, misery, suffering, and illness into the world. Hesiod tells of the ‘fall’ in the Greek myth thus:

But the other countless plagues wander amongst men;
for earth is full of evils and the sea is full.
Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night,
bringing mischief to mortals silently
(Erga 100-104).

It is precisely on this moment that Waterhouse’s painting focuses: the breath of evil, also in the form of epidemics, sweeps over people and their world. Besides the fact that Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BC) had already identified the ‘breath of plague’ (μίασμα) as a trigger for diseases such as malaria, Hesiod already described epidemics as a ‘space-consuming’ phenomenon – “earth is full of evils and the sea is full”. The Athenian historian Thucydides also recognized that the so-called “Plague of Athens”, which raged in the city in the middle of the Peloponnesian War in the years 430-426 BC, had a far-reaching spatial dimension, and he reflected on its spread through concepts of geographical space:

The disease is said to have begun south of Egypt in Ethiopia (Αἰθιοπία); thence it descended into Egypt (Αίγυπτος) and Libya (Λιβύη), and after spreading over the greater part of the Persian empire (ἐς τὴν βασιλέως γῆν πολλήν), suddenly fell upon Athens. It first attacked the inhabitants of Piraeus (ἐν τῷ Πειραιεῖ) … It afterwards reached the upper city (ἐς τὴν ἄνω πόλιν ἀφίκετο), and then the mortality became far greater (Thucydides II, 48, 1-2).

The late-antique historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 300-395 AD) reports in a similar way about the ‘Antonine Plague’, named after the surname of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (who ruled between 161 and 180 AD), which afflicted the Roman Empire in the late-2nd century AD:

This city [Ctesiphon] was captured by the army of the co-emperor Verus ... As the story goes, the soldiers ... set the city on fire and searched the sanctuary. They found a narrow opening. They widened it in the hope of finding something valuable, but out of the sanctuary poured a primordial decay (labes primordialis). It absorbed the strength of incurable diseases and, in the time of Verus and Marcus Antoninus, it defiled all the land from the borders of the Persians (ab ipsis persarum finibus) to the Rhine and Gaul with infection and death (ad usque rhenum et gallias cuncta contagiis polluebat et mortibus) (Amm. XIII, 6, 23-24; my translation).

Just as Pandora’s box brought ruin to the world, so a labes primordialis broke out of the temple walls desecrated by the troops of Verus (r. 161-169), a primeval decay that spread over the entire Roman world. Like Thucydides, Ammianus also measures the spatial dimension of the epidemic by means of large geographical areas: from the Euphrates to the Rhine, and even to the Gallic provinces, infection and death spread among the people.

Unlike the literary reports, an epigraph from Mauerkirchen/Bad Endorf in Bavaria (Roman, Bedaium), a Roman settlement in the province of Noricum (which extended over what is today’s southern Bavaria, Austria and South Tyrol), gives us an insight into the local-spatial dimension of the ‘Antonine Plague’. If today it is globally networked markets and journeys that have promoted the spread of the corona virus, the spread of the ‘Antonine Plague’ followed the routes of the Roman legions, who, operating ‘globally’, helped the epidemic to penetrate every corner of the empire, including Noricum: the tombstone that is lost today (formerly, Munich National Museum, Inv. IV 734) tells of the fate of an entire family; according to the epitaph (CIL 3, 5567):

To the spirits of the dead /
Iulius Victor, son of Martialis, / died at 55 years
his wife Bessa, daughter of Iuvenis, lived to 45 /
Novella, daughter of Essibnus, died at the age of 18 /
Victorinus had the gravestone made for the parents (Victor and Bessa) / and his wife (Novella) and Victorina, / his daughter, /
to those who fell victim to an epidemic that raged in the year of the consuls Mamertinus and Rufus (182 AD), /
and to Aurelius Iustinus, his brother and soldier / the Legio II Italica, who served 10 years / and was 30 years old

“per luem vita functi sunt” – a whole family died of the contagious disease (lues) in 182 AD. The surviving Victorinus, who had lost his parents, wife and a daughter (who was probably still very young given the age of his wife) – and finally also his brother – had, as the person commissioning the inscription, expressly indicated in addition to the usual consulship that all the aforementioned had died of the epidemic in the same year.

The personal example confirms not only that this was an exceptional tragedy for Victorinus, but also that, as the growth of the corona epidemic into a global pandemic has revealed, diseases like epidemics can take a ubiquitous course: diseases in distant countries, even on other continents, were ‘mobile’ in ancient times, just as they are today: corona, thought to have originated in China, is now worldwide, and the ‘Antonine Plague’ spread along the routes taken by Roman soldiers from the Tigris in the Near East to Noricum in Central Europe and beyond.

According to mythical tradition, however, Pandora’s box contained not only evil, but, Hesiod continues, also hope (ἐλπίς). And so, even in the earliest reflections on illness and epidemics, the spatially omnipresent evil is always tied to the hope that it will be overcome; antiquity and the present are similar in this respect, too.