'We May Sink Totally Into Idiocy'

“For this was a kind of sickness which far surmounted all expression of words and [. . .] exceeded human nature in the cruelty wherewith it handled each one . . .”

During the second year of the Peloponnesian War, in 430 B.C., an epidemic invaded Athens. Thucydides writes not only as a witness, the historian of his time and place, but as a sufferer. He contracted the disease and survived, though as many as 100,000 of his fellow Athenians did not. It killed Pericles and his family. The exact nature of the illness is still debated, though modern scholars favor typhus or typhoid. The war continued for another twenty-six years after the outbreak, which probably contributed to the eventual defeat of Athens, and changed subsequent European and world history. I remembered Thucydides while reading Zbigniew Herbert’s “Why the Classics”:  

“in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides tells among other things

the story of his unsuccessful expedition

“among long speeches of chiefs

battles sieges plague

dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours

the episode is like a pin

in a forest”

Among twentieth-century poets, only Cavafy, Hill and Montale rival Herbert in the deft integration of historical events into their work. In 424 B.C., Thucydides commanded seven Athenian ships but arrived too late to save his native city, Amphipolis, from the Spartan general Brasidas. For this, Herbert writes, Thucydides “paid his native city / with lifelong exile.” The Greek included a description of his failure to relieve Amphipolis in his history. The Polish veteran of Nazi and Communist repression adds: “exiles of all times / know what price that is.” Herbert writes in the poem’s concluding lines:

“if art for its subject

will have a broken jar

a small broken soul

with a great self-pity

“what will remain after us

 will it be lovers' weeping

 in a small dirty hotel

 when wall-paper dawns”

For Herbert, all history is contemporary history. The walls between eras are permeable. In a 1994 interview he writes: “I am afraid we may sink totally into idiocy. Maybe it already is too late, but I think we need to start a process of national education and get rid of our complexes. . . Our major enemies are now our national shortcomings: hypocrisy, self-love, megalomania.”

Herbert is speaking of Poland in the immediate post-Soviet era but his observations suggest a broader relevance. I read Herbert when I want an astringent cleansing of the shallower regions of my thinking. He goes on to say in the interview:

“I have not encountered absolute evil except in men.”

“Practice shows that sooner or later, the dark spots on history's map show up from under the gilded surface. Western countries, from France to USA, are examples. One has to fight the dark tendencies of one's past, like Germany did after World War II.”

“Nations seldom receive from History political leaders who also possess moral authority.”