The Literature of Plagues:  An Upcoming Discussion

Since there is no sign of this plague letting up—I am referring to the plague of hysteria that has descended upon the world—we may as well make the most of it by considering what we can learn by reading great literary accounts of previous plagues.  As a graduate student, I decided to sit in on a seminar on Vergil's Georgics led by Brooks Otis, a rather famous literary scholar who had retired from Stanford to Chapel Hill.  His work on Vergil and Ovid was not at all my cup of tea:  I have no patience with lit crit of even the highest type.  Nonetheless, a wise man at any age sits at the feet of those who have earned a high reputation.

Since I was finished with courses and was starting my dissertation, I was not taking the course for credit,  but Otis politely suggested that I participate fully--which I intended to--by doing all the assignments.  He had a list of topics from which he wanted the students to pick themes for their own study in the course of the semester.  Since there was no one else to do it, I joined my young fellow-student Laura Stone in choosing the influence of the Georgics on later literature.

When it came time to do a report or paper, I did one on the literature of plagues, which is how I came to read and reread a good deal of stuff.  As I recall, Otis liked what I had to say just a bit more than my dreadful paper on Tennyson's "In Memoriam."  I mistook some of his dislike for Tennyson as derived from the universal anti-Christianism of the professoriate, but Otis was some kind of Christian and serious enough to understand that Tennyson was simply a Victorian.  He got even more uncomfortable when I tried to engage him in a discussion of Bay Area Beat poets, particularly their godfather Kenneth Patchen...

But that is another story.  As long as we have to endure the tedium or the fear, let us at least take the opportunity to consult wiser men than ourselves.

I propose a regular reading schedule of the following:

1. The Plagues of Egypt depicted in Exodus

2.  The Plague at Athens described by Thucydides (Book II, see https://www.livius.org/sources/content/thucydides-historian/the-plague/) and Sophocles (Oedipus Tyrannus).

3. Vergil’s Description of an Animal Plague, Georgics  III and Lucretius’ poetic account of the Athenian Plague in De rerum natura VI.

4.  The Black Plague of 1348 recounted by Boccaccio in The Decameron

4.  Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year

5. The Plague at Milan in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi.

6.  Jean Giono’s novel, Horseman on the Roof, which describes cholera in Provence during the 19th century, and/or the film based on it.

I’m happy to consider other accounts, and these works will be  handled either in written pieces or in podcasts.  I am happy to recommend translations as we go along.