Claude Calame's Greece: From the plague in Athens to the pandemic of 2020

Le Regard Libre N° 63 - Claude Calame

Each month, we feature a column by one of the personalities who take turns writing for Le Regard Libre. Historian, anthropologist and Hellenist Claude Calame proposes a contemporary lesson from ancient Greece.

To the mind of a Hellenist in lockdown, the profound health crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic cannot help but bring to mind the medical challenge faced by the Athenians in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, more than two millennia ago. The historian Thucydides, a contemporary of those events, describes the Greeks« distress in the face of an epidemic whose origin he traces to Ethiopia: “Indeed, no remedy proved effective—not even medicine, due to the doctors’ ignorance of a disease they were attempting to treat for the first time e