Greek myth, and any other myth come to that, is often an allegory for an historical event. It is believed, for example, that the Lernean Hydra, one of Hercules’ Twelve Tasks was one such event. Hercules was tasked with ridding the swampy area of Lerna of the multi-headed serpent, yet every time he cut off one of its heads two more would grow back in its place. Archaeologists have come to believe that this tale, or myth, actually commemorates an infamous plague which devastated the population of ancient Lerna, with the duplicating heads of the serpent representing the rapid spread of whatever sickness gripped the region. 

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As I’m sure you can already tell, this piece will be dealing with myths relating to plagues and diseases. More specifically it will look at who, or what, the ancients believed were to blame for these diseases. The population of the ancient world, no matter where they lived, loved having someone or something to blame when things went wrong. When masses of people started inexplicably dying, many early cultures looked first to a vengeful or unforgiving God—or gods. For instance, when disease struck Agamemnon’s Greek army, as mentioned by Homer in his 8th century BCE epic, the Iliad, it is Apollo who is to blame. Agamemnon attempts to ransom his captured daughter, and in doing so insults Chryses, priest of Apollo. As punishment, Apollo rains down a plague, via his arrows, firstly upon the mules and dogs in the Greek camp, and then upon the soldiers themselves (Iliad I.9ff) – “But then, Launching a piercing shaft at the men themselves, He cut them down in droves—and the corpse-fires burned on, Night and day, no end in sight. Nine days the arrows of god swept through the army”. Throughout the Iliad, Apollo is addressed by his epithet of ‘Apollo Smintheus’, or “Apollo the mouse god”. This was by no means an attempt at belittling Apollo as a god, but genuinely linking him to the pestilence-carrying rodents. The Greeks didn’t know it was the microorganisms on the fleas of the mice, and not the mice themselves that carried or spread the diseases, however they clearly recognised the correlation between rodent infestations and plague, and therefore passed on the blame to the main god linked to disease. This may not have been the intention in the Iliad; however, it is no mistake or coincidence that Apollo is the god of these sickness spreading creatures.

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In Roman Poetry, numerous aspects of pestilence and disease were personified, in the forms of Morbus (disease) and Pestis and Lues (pestilence). These were equivalent to the Greek Nosoi, the personified spirits of plague, sickness and disease which were among the number of evil spirits that escaped from Pandora’s jar (yes, jar, not box, though that’s a myth for another day). – Virgil, Georgics, 3.551ff (trans. Fairclough): “[A drought is followed by hunger and disease:] On this land from the sickened sky there once came a piteous season that glowed with Autumns full heat… Ghastly Tisiphone [Erinys] rages, and, let forth into light from Stygian gloom, drives before her Morbus (Disease) [Nosos] and Metus (Dread) [Phobos], while day by day, uprising, she rears still higher her greedy head.” -  It is clear here that the Greeks and Romans needed to blame their illnesses/ diseases/ plagues on these evil spirits, either to understand them, or to explain them. Rather than being content that these things were simply natural, they chose to personify them as evil, vengeful spirits, so as to blame something mythical for their issues. When things went wrong the ancients seem to put the blame on anything that they could, much like Trump today.

For its part, the Bible carries numerous references to plague as the wrath of divinity: 

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“For this time, I will send all my plagues upon you yourself, and upon your officials, and upon your people, so that you may know that there is no one like me on all the earth.” (Exodus 9:14)

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“…The anger of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord struck the people with a very great plague.” (Numbers 11:33)

“Woe to us! Who can deliver us from the power of these mighty gods? These are the gods who struck the Egyptians with every sort of plague in the wilderness.” (1 Samuel 4:8)

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Again, these diseases, or plagues, are attributed to the wrath of a god (or THE God, as it were). It is interesting to see people during this time of our very own crisis turning to the Bible and using it to reassure others, however not attributing what is going on to God, but saying his love will save us, whereas the ancients clearly had no such qualms. On the other hand, many people currently believe that the Covid crisis, in combination with the wildfires that raged across Australis earlier this year, and the locusts that plague East Africa still, form some kind of modern-day Exodus. Who’s to say the plagues (and perhaps even our current epidemic) came from anywhere other than the wrath of God or gods. Were these myths of plagues the work of these superhuman beings, or were they simply the ancients finding ways to explain things from fragments of what they did have?

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 Ancient peoples had no idea what the bones of even more ancient creatures would look like, or a concept of extinction. So many mythological creatures are an assortment of different animal features, which is most likely from finding fossils which didn’t resemble any one modern animal but roughly resembled different features from various sorts of animals. For example, the mythical Griffin, with the head of an eagle, and the body of a lion, could come from the fossils of the Protoceratops; large beaked skull, and four legs. When they found something unlike anything they had seen before, such as the giant bones of a therapod (a group which encompasses the TRex), they created dragons as an explanation. As for all the mythology behind fire-breathing and treasure hoarding, you can probably chalk that up to human imagination!

 

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Look at this elephant skull out of context (above), and you might believe you were looking at the remains of a giant one-eyed beast. Prehistoric dwarf elephants, extinct by the time ancient Greeks encountered their skulls and remains, are likely the origin of the mythical creature known as Cyclops. Furthermore, the myth of demigods likely came from the discovery of bones of prehistoric bears. Naturally these skeletons were incomplete, but when reconstructed would have looked very human, just 8 feet tall… These bones were reburied with armour and weapons, fitting for a ‘hero’, and then rediscovered around 500 odd years later during Greece’s ‘golden age’. These skeletons were huge, surrounded by armour and weaponry, in lavish tombs, so the natural conclusion reached in the age of great philosophers had to be that demigods, and therefore gods, existed.

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Maybe, just maybe, in a couple thousand years (or less, and that is, if we all actually survive global warming), there will be a myth about how in the year 2020, there were giant bats, flying around like some overgrown vampires, plaguing humanity with flu like symptoms…