With the rise of city-states in Ancient Greece, we were able to witness the earliest form of government and society as we later become familiar with today. According to John Wilford (2011), we are even able to witness bureaucracy in its earliest form as well according to ancient tablets. There are a few similarities between how society operated then and how it functions now. Here I will mainly focus on how they handle issues such as disease spreading and people struggling. In the Bronze Age, there was a widespread famine occurring in both northern Europe and the Mediterranean. Pollen samples have been found in Syria and Cyprus pointing towards a 300-year event in which food was unable to grow. Environmental changes were the cause for this and in Greece, there was evidence of plants adapting to what could be a desert environment. Famine would generally lead to populations becoming sick and developing disease as a result which would spread quickly when the people are as susceptible as this. It should be specified that this had been occurring before the Sea Peoples even arrived in the area. In fact, under normal circumstances, the Sea Peoples invasion should have been manageable to the states of the Mediterranean, but due to the persisting issues, they were left vulnerable to attack. Since the famine was going on for so long and people were dying because of it, it led to the people becoming fed up and deciding to revolt against their rulers. With famine running rampant and people dying, along with the chaos occurring within states because of it, the Mediterranean economy had crashed. We can compare this with the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic the world is experiencing today. As the World Health Organization (WHO) [2020] states, COVID-19 is spread from droplets from the body, especially from the mouth or nose. The disease is highly contagious and has infected several people across the globe. As Firstpost states (2020), the ancient Greek polis relied on sacrificing the oppressed and lower-class citizens in order to defend the city-state, which mirrors the COVID-19 situation.
Hesiod in his work “Work and Days” focuses on people’s struggles. People end up destroying themselves and others around them due to greed and hubris, which parallels with how today some marginalized groups are more likely to suffer from COVID-19 due to lack of government support because they do not care or because people want the economy to remain ‘normal’ so they themselves can profit while others suffer. Hesiod also describes humanity losing everything they have accomplished and them falling into a “dark age,” in a world where there is no morality.
The world today relies heavily on being interconnected. The way COVID-19 has spread calls attention to how dependent people are for one another, from everything to companionship to commerce. Just like the human body, the Greek city-state was guarded by an outer layer. Those who are marginalized were most at danger in the face of a disease, something that is occurring currently with the Coronavirus. The best method of protecting yourself from COVID-19 is social distancing. While this sounds easy, it is only easy for those whose jobs give them paid sick leave or the option to work from home. For people who are homeless or hourly wage earners, this is quite difficult, if not impossible. In China, rural workers, who were already facing financial issues, may be unable to find work due to fear of them possibly being infected. In the U.S., lower-class citizens are the most vulnerable to the consequences of a pandemic such as this one, especially with a for-profit healthcare system that is already predatory during ‘normal’ times.
Many people are left unable to work as well as the global economy taking a huge hit from economic activity being put at a halt to slow the spread. While a lot of governments around the world are trying to mitigate financial troubles by placing quarantine and lockdown measures to slow down spread, and giving their citizens financial benefits such as suspending rent and/or giving them money so they could survive while they are left unable to work. However, the world’s largest economy in the U.S. has not done any of this. The government leadership had denied the virus’ existence for several months and then put in half-baked measures in an attempt to control it. The federal government had only given people a one-time payment of $1200 (only to a select few) during this entire time period of the pandemic, although as Lauren Hirsch (2020) states, they were able to manage a trillion dollars for big corporations, and many states are lenient or just outright refuse to enforce quarantine measures in order to protect people. Some people are even against having a quarantine citing that halting the growth of the economy is worse than people actually dying or developing medical conditions for the rest of their lives. There have even been people protesting against quarantine measures that would slow the spread and save people, with these ‘protestors’ stating that the economy and business should open up, bringing life back to ‘normal,’ despite all the damage and people being harmed it could cause. It should be noted that a lot of these ‘protestors’ are usually people who have views aligning with the American right.
Some extreme examples are people causing chaos within some stores to ‘protest’ against quarantine measures and as Caleb Ecarma (2020) states, people marching around the capitol building in Michigan with rifles and handguns in tow insisting that quarantine and masks are unnecessary and demanding to open everything back up. These people value the economy and big corporations’ ability to make money over actual people’s lives and health. This parallels with the time period around the collapse of the bronze age where people were dying due to famine and disease, and the ruling classes refused to help their citizens in order to preserve themselves. These people do not care about others than themselves and could not be bothered if poorer people or people who are vulnerable were infected and refuse to do anything that would save others.
Bibliography
“Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19).” World Health Organization. World Health Organization. Accessed November 21, 2020. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/question-and-answers-hub/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease-covid-19.
“Coronavirus Outbreak: Drawing Parallels to Today, Society's Most Vulnerable Suffered as the Ancient Greeks Purged Their City-State Body of Disease.” Firstpost. April 10, 2020. https://www.firstpost.com/living/coronavirus-outbreak-drawing-parallels-to-today-societys-most-vulnerable-suffered-as-the-ancient-greeks-purged-their-city-state-body-of-disease-8184121.html.
Ecarma, Caleb. “Trump Supporters Are Staging Armed Protests to Stick It to Coronavirus.” Vanity Fair. Condé Nast, April 16, 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/trump-supporters-protest-coronavirus-orders.
Hirsch, Lauren. “POLITICS Congress Is Working on a Massive Coronavirus Relief Package — It Might Not Be Enough for Businesses.” CNBC. March 21, 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/21/coronavirus-1-trillion-rescue-package-might-not-be-enough-for-businesses.html.
Wilford, John Noble. “Greek Tablet May Shed Light on Early Bureaucratic Practices.” The New York Times. April 4, 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/science/05archeo.html.
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