were confused about the disease’s transmission and mutation as it seemingly afflicted anyone. Panic spread as individuals watched their communities succumb to the illness. The plagues of all three worlds – Sophocles’, Athens’, and our own – were strange, indiscriminate, and all-consuming. Another pattern repeated in all three plague-ridden worlds is the destruction of social and civil bonds. Thucydides describes a corpse-laden Athens and the disintegration of funerary practices: The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around fountains in their desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died inside them…All the funeral ceremonies which used to be observed were now disorganized, and they buried the dead as best they could. Many people, lacking the necessary means of burial because so many deaths had already occurred in their households, adopted the most shameless methods. They would arrive first at a funeral pyre that had been made by others, put their own dead upon it and set it alight; or, finding another pyre burning, they would throw the corpse that they were carrying on top of the other one and go away. (Thucydides 96) Thucydides’ Athens is eerie and disturbing as the dead seem to outnumber the living. Those who had not yet succumbed to the plague were “halfdead creatures” left “staggering” throughout the city. The scope of the plague was so vast that the streets were lined with bodies that could not be buried fast enough. Even temples, a sacred cornerstone of ancient Greek culture, were laden with bloated corpses of strangers as religious and funerary traditions, among the most sacred customs upheld by the ancient Greeks, were abandoned. Athenians were reduced to burning bodies of loved ones unceremoniously or to stealing the pyres of others when they could not afford them. The desertion of these funerary practices during the plague suggests the weakening and dissolution of social, religious, and legal customs: the pillars on which Athenian society built itself collapsed during this plague. Likewise, in Oedipus Tyrannos, Thebes experiences a collapse of civil and social structure. When the chorus appears, it laments the city’s collective agony. Typically, in Greek tragedy, the chorus’ first song, or parados, highlights plot points and thematic devices that will be engaged throughout the play. The chorus builds on ideas established by the now departed priest: Now our afflictions have no end, now all our stricken host lies down and no man fights off death with his own mind; the noble plowland bears no grain, and groaning mothers cannot bear – see, how our 44
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