![]() Homer’s Iliad begins with a plague sent upon the Greek camp at Troy by Apollo to punish the Greeks for Agamemnon’s enslavement of Chryseis. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War too has references to the plague that wreak havoc in the lives of the people. This is not the only text from classical literature that deals with such an epidemic. ![]() The resonance with our times, as we live through a pandemic that is affecting us in so many different ways, is constantly with me as I teach the text. This year as I have been reading the play and discussing various aspects of it, what strikes me most is the reference to an epidemic that is wreaking havoc in the lives of the citizens of Thebes. ![]() Plague figures importantly in the text and is the reason why things move in the direction that they do leading on to the tragedy of Oedipus. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is a text that I have been teaching for some years now. ![]()
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