Nicolette D'Angelo (Oxford University)
Why do we think Hippokrates has anything to say about pandemics today? Despite an initial surge in public and academic interest in classical plagues, it has been argued that COVID-19 has presented “limit cases” to the relevance of Classics (Chaudhari & Dexter 2021). Nonetheless, the impulse to compare past and present has become a virus itself, “spreading rapidly along modern channels of communication, turning those infected into dribbling zombies writing op-eds about how current events demonstrate the eternal relevance of Thucydides” and the Athenian plague (Morley 2020). This paper seeks to take this virality seriously, operationalizing recent classical scholarship on contagion, miasma, contamination, virality, and pestilence in classical studies (Jouanna 2012, Fletcher 2017, Nutton 2017, Michelakis 2019, Gardner 2019) and media studies (Wald 2013, Mitchell 2014). While Michelakis in particular has fruitfully illustrated how language takes on a life of its own in plague narratives, I propose contagion as a motif of classical reception more broadly. More specifically, I contend it could replace reception as a metaphor of knowledge transmission.
Here I join a group of scholars (e.g., Goldhill 2002, Ward 2019) who question the usefulness of reception as a metaphor insofar as it often implies linear ideas of literary influence and thus fails to account for more dynamic, diffuse transmissions. Contagion theory by contrast can capture “fuzzy connections” among specialist and non-specialist populations (Hardwick 2011). This makes contagion an apt metaphor for uniting a burgeoning but disparate wave of scholarship on popular, especially digital, afterlives of classical texts and ideas (Hanink 2017, Zuckerberg 2018, King 2019, 2020).
Contagious receptions emerge from a nexus of existing trends in scholarly and popular interest in ancient medicine. As a case study, I apply contagion theory to ask why an apocryphal story—
that Hippokrates cured the Athenian plague with fire—has recurred throughout Western medical history and is re-emerging today. First attested in the Hellenistic pseudepigraphic Hippokratic writings (Smith 1990), the fire myth is discussed by Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist.), Galen (De Ther. ad Pis) and Aetius (Tetrabibloi), among others. Though far-fetched, the fire myth was “an understandable prophylactic or therapeutic response” from later Roman antiquity until the Renaissance due to the prevalence of miasmatic theory (Pinault 1986). I consider in turn what societal conditions make this myth “understandable” today, allowing it to spread via social media, the press, and medical databases. I argue that the fire cure speaks to a suppressed mythologizing impulse within Western biomedicine which, in this case, helps explain widespread speculation about COVID-19 and seasonality, experimental therapies, and vaccination.
This mythologizing impulse underlies how classicists and physicians today read ancient plague narratives with the end-goal of retrodiagnosis, a subject of sustained scholarly interest in modernity. I consider how the Epidemics in particular are cherry-picked vis-à-vis Thucydides’ plague narrative to make medical claims about the Athenian plague in presentist terms (Shrewsbury 1950, Williams 1957, Parry 1969, Cunha 2004, Pappas 2008, Barbaris et al. 2016). The ultimate form of contagious reading is finding contagion where it did not exist before.