The Triumph of Death, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1562)
When news of a plague on the continent first reached London in the 1660s, authorities kept the information hushed up. ‘We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and report of things,’ wrote Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year. ‘But it seems that the Government had a true account of it,’ noted Defoe, ‘and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private.’
When the plague finally hit London in 1665, the city’s wealthy residents panicked and fled to the countryside. ‘The richer sort of people, especially the nobility and gentry from the west part of the city thronged out of town with their families and servants in an unusual manner,’ observed Defoe. ‘This was a very terrible and melancholy thing to see, and as it was a sight which I could not but look on from morning to night (for indeed there was nothing else of moment to be seen), it filled me with very serious thoughts of the misery that was coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of those who would be left in it.’
Much of Defoe’s famous account of the London plague could be transcribed almost word-for-word to describe reactions to the current pandemic sweeping the globe. The initial secrecy of government leaders who downplayed the epidemic’s impact; the mounting panic as the enormity of the crisis sunk in; and the flight of rich people in Paris, London, New York, and other large urban centres to safer areas beyond the city. The shuttering of London’s houses also resembled our lockdown confinement. ‘This shutting up of houses was at first counted a very cruel and unchristian method,’ wrote Defoe, ‘and the poor people so confined made bitter lamentations.’
The plague that struck London in 1665 was the last major wave of the Black Death that had been devastating Europe’s populations since it arrived from China in the fourteenth century. The pestilence, spread by fleas on plague-infected rats, decimated more than a third of Europe’s population and caused massive economic and social upheaval.
We will be spared devastation on this scale. But we will be forced to come to terms with the lessons inflicted by all pandemics. One is that truth is invariably the first casualty. The initial impulse is to conceal, downplay, underestimate — or lie outright about the threat. Another lesson is that infectious disease is devoid of moral content. Pandemics are indiscriminate; they know no deference. Emperors and kings fall victim alongside beggars. Most importantly, the legacy of pandemics is far-reaching beyond the immediate impact on society. Entire orders are eroded, and new values emerge from their ruins.
Plague in the Ancient City, Michael Sweerts (1652).
One of history’s most catastrophic pandemics stretches back to the cradle of Western civilisation in ancient Greece. We know about the Plague of Athens in 430 BC because it was meticulously recorded by historian Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. The backdrop was the war between Sparta and Athens. The self-confident Athenian democracy, led the great statesman Pericles, was at the pinnacle of its power and glory in the fifth century BC — until the military threat from rival Sparta. Instead of engaging in pitched battled with the Spartans, Pericles commanded Athenians to take refuge in their fortified city and challenge the Spartans in naval battle. It was a disastrous mistake. Pestilence soon entered the crowded city and decimated the enclosed population. Thucydides described in great detail the symptoms of the Athenian pestilence: sneezing, coughing, vomiting, thirst, diarrhoea, gangrene, and fever so burning that the afflicted threw themselves into water. Those who survived lost their memory and could not recognise their loved ones. Such was the suffering, recounted Thucydides, that men no longer feared gods or the laws of man.
There has been much speculation about the nature of the disease, which Thucydides claimed originated in Ethiopia. Some believe it was smallpox, others speculate it was typhoid fever, still others claim it was measles, possibly scarlet fever. About a quarter of Athens’ adult population was wiped out by the disease. Thucydides insisted on telling the truth about the pestilence, at least as he observed it. He rejected superstitious interpretation for the plague — for example, that it was divine retribution, like the plague inflicted on the Greeks by the god Apollo as recounted in Homer’s Iliad. Thucydides regarded the Athens plague as an essentially human tragedy. Though like other historians in the ancient world, he drew a moral lesson from the catastrophe. The plague marked the collapse of civilised behaviour in Athens, triggering lawlessness in contrast to the grandeur of the city state at the height of its power. The Spartans won the war, but it was the plague that extinguished the high flowering of Athenian democracy. Pericles himself was among its victims.
Four centuries later, the Roman Empire was, in like manner, devastated by pestilence. Known as the Antonine Plague, the pandemic was named after the family name, Antoninus, of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. It raged from 165 to 180 AD when Rome was at the apogee of its imperial power. The surrounding context of the Antonine Plague was, once again, war. The pestilence followed co-emperor Lucius Verus’ legions back to Rome following a siege of Seleucia in modern-day Iraq.
We are confident about the precise nature of the Antonine Plague: smallpox. The symptoms were a skin rash over the entire body and black stool. Historians disagree, however, on the number of people killed by the pandemic. Some claim half the Roman Empire’s population was swept away, others argue that these figures are exaggerated and the number killed was roughly five million. The victims likely included Rome’s two emperors, Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius. While the precise cause of their deaths is unknown, it is speculated that they succumbed to the disease named after their imperial family.
Danse Macabre
18th century German painting showing nine women of different social ranks dancing with the dead.
The main victim of the Antonine Plague was the Roman Empire itself. Historians still debate the causes of Rome’s decline and fall — moral decadence, imperial overstretch, barbarian invasions. There can be little doubt, however, that pestilence played a role in hastening the empire’s decline. The plague also facilitated the rise of Christianity, the upstart religion that offered salvation from suffering in this world. A century after the Antonine Plague, another epidemic struck the empire, adding plague to war and economic depression. As disparate populations throughout Europe struggled with the afflictions of violence and chaos, the crippled Roman Empire lurched toward collapse. At a time when life was misery, fear, and suffering, the new religion Christianity provided a compelling counter narrative that held out the promise of eternal life. Christian faith offered spiritual consolation in a world order that was falling apart. As the empire expired, Christianity emerged from the chaos and its theology spread throughout the Romanised world.
Christendom would not be spared from the devastation of pestilence however. Plague returned to Europe in the fourteenth century after the Black Death arrived in Italy via trade routes from China. Perhaps the most famous literary account of the Black Death is Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a tale about a group of ten Florentines who escape to a countryside villa outside of Florence. Boccaccio provided a horrific description of plague’s symptoms. The afflicted, with black and purple spots all over their skin, were dropping dead in the streets. What we today call “social distancing” quickly degenerated into moral abandonment of the most basic human sympathies. Brother abandoned brother; even parents cast away their own children. ‘The authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared,’ wrote Boccaccio, echoing Thucydides. ‘For, like other men, the ministers and the executors of the laws were all dead or sick or shut up with their families, so that no duties were carried out. Every man was therefore able to do as he pleased.’
Beyond its gruesome trail of death, the Black Death’s consequences were profound and enduring. While opportunities opened at the bottom of society due to drastically reduced population numbers, the power of the rich became more concentrated as inheritors of land and wealth were fewer. This eventually triggered peasants’ revolts and, over time, challenges to the establishment — in Italy, against family dynasties such as the Medicis, then against the Catholic Church. The stage was set for the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.
The plague was still terrorizing Europe in waves in the seventeenth century, when both William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton were forced to self-isolate to escape its ravages in England. The pestilence returned to London in 1665 under the reign of Charles II, killing about 100,000 or roughly a quarter of the city’s population. Ironically, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, while presented as a true account of the Great Plague of London, was in fact fiction. The widespread perception that Defoe’s work, like his more famous Robinson Crusoe, was a true history was not unusual in his day. Many authors disguised their fictional tales as factual accounts of real events. The reading public in the 18th century distrusted fiction as lies. To make their works socially acceptable, Defoe and other writers dressed up their fiction as fact.
“Bring out your dead.”
A street in London street during the Great Plague.
Defoe published Journal of the Plague year in 1722, more than a half century after the plague, and so could not possibly have witnessed the actual events as an adult. He was using his account of the plague year to comment on the London of his own day. The book targets, for example, astrologers, charlatans, and quacks selling bogus cures to a desperate and credulous population. ‘The people, from what principle I cannot imagine,’ he observed, ‘were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales than ever they were before or since.’ The most effective remedy for the Great Plague of London came the following year. The Great Fire of London in 1666 killed off the rats carrying the infected fleas.
Two centuries after Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, another pandemic swept through Europe and every other continent. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed more people than died in the First World War from which the virus emerged. Like previous pandemics, the influenza virus followed soldiers returning from the battlefield. It is estimated that as many as 40 million died globally in the pandemic of 1918. The death toll in the United States was roughly 675,000. Most American cities were tragically unprepared to combat the flu when it struck the United States. Authorities reacted when it was too late. In Philadelphia, the city went ahead with a Liberty Bond Parade that attracted some 200,000 people. Within weeks, thousands were dying from the flu in that city.
Government leaders in most countries initially downplayed the flu virus after the initial outbreak in 1918. Consequently, the looming health crisis received little attention in the press. The denial and lies also explain why the pandemic was dubbed “Spanish” flu. The countries fighting the First World War — including the United States, Britain, France, and Germany — didn’t want the impact of the flu known while war was still raging. Since Spain was neutral, and hence not censoring information about the influenza, other countries dubbed it “Spanish flu”.
The “Spanish” flu pandemic of 1918.
An emergency hospital at Fort Funston in Kansas. (Photo: U.S. National Museum of Health and Medicine)
Today, the mistakes made during the 1918 pandemic have not been heeded by government authorities in many countries. The initial reaction was to deny, downplay, or lie about the nature of the coronavirus and its potential impact. When the catastrophic extent of the virus was finally obvious, widespread panic and flight of the rich from cities followed the same pattern as witnessed in previous pandemics.
The combination of the First World War and flu pandemic restructured the world order. Three empires collapsed — Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian — and the modern world emerged from the waste land of disillusionment. It is difficult to predict the social and political transformations that will undoubtedly reshape the world in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. But if the lessons of past pandemics are any measure, the consequences will be far-reaching. With new values born of shock and trauma, we will construct a different world. — Matthew Fraser