Pantelis Michelakis (Bristol University)
The aim of this paper is to explore causality as a channel and as an environment (Meyrowitz 1999) within which information about the plague is produced, transmitted and (mis)recognized in Greek plague narratives. My primary focus is the use of causality in the first book of Homer’s Iliad (especially lines 1.8-487), in the opening scenes of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (lines 1-215), and in the description of the Athenian plague of 430-426 BCE in the second book of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (2.47-54), against the backdrop of causality in representations of epidemic disease in archaic and classical aetiological myths and in early Hippocratic writings (e.g. Harris 2016; Hankinson 2018).
Drawing on informational epidemiology (to account for how ideas spread; Rothman 2002; Fuller 2005) and on the conceptual vocabulary of Greek epistemology (where thinking and method are closely linked with roads and paths; Heidegger 1992; Folit-Weinberg, forthcoming), I explore the trasmissibility of causality as it spreads from character to character within the narratives under consideration and across the divide between narrative and readers/listeners/spectators. I also explore the agency of causality as it relates to the automatisms of method that, far from being under the control of their users, exist with them symbiotically. On the one hand, causality is used instrumentally, as a mechanism for dealing with the scarcity or excess of information, separating what is relevant and meaningful from what is deemed to be interference and noise. As such, it promises structured understanding and the limiting of possibilities (Shanske 2007; Meinel 2015). On the other hand, causality comes to be exposed as inadequate for accounting for the multilayred reality of the plague and its many uncertainties, undermined by missing, misleading, or false leads, and procedural errors (Lewis 1989; Redfield 1994). Narratives of the plague are complex informational spaces that simulate, analyse and respond to data. To be exposed to them is to encounter this double operation of causality through surprise (Iliad), critique (Thucydides), or a combination of these two seemingly contrasting attitudes to it (Sophocles’ Oedipus the King).
In the plague narratives under consideration, it is not only information that spreads in ways that cannot be controlled and contained, but also different modes of information processing and production (inductive, deductive, conditional, or categorical). To understand the centrality of causality in this context, we need to consider how it oscillates between inference and deduction (Shugan 2007), how it can be associated with originary causes but also metonymically with sequences of events (Levine 2017), and how it facilitates the mingling of necessary causes and contingent associations (Desrosières 2010) as well as of cause and blame (Allison 1983; Gumpert 2012). Causality is a nebulous but popular concept (Pearl 2009) that is endemic to narrative across different genres precisely because it promises simplicity (Shugan 2007), performs imaginative reasoning (Levine 2017), and delivers explanations at the expense of fidelity to reality (Mahadevan 2018).