But rather than a narrative of historical events moving from order to chaos, Hobbes offers a systematic thought experiment that takes the opposite trajectory, from natural barbarism to civilisation within the state. The propositions that emerge from Thucydides’ account of the plague also animate Leviathan.
Without a realistic expectation that I have a future, how can I be expected to plan my actions on the basis of laws and conventions? Thucydides’ plague narrative suggests that if you replace fear of secular authority with blind panic about personal survival, the legal and conventional bases of social order dissolve. Neither the fear of the gods, nor laws of men, awed any man: not the former, because they concluded it was alike to worship or not worship, from seeing that alike they all perished: nor the latter, because no man expected that lives would last till he received punishment of his crimes by judgment. On Thucydides’ account, people reacted to the awareness of impending death with utter dejection, and the city descended into chaos. (‘There’s none that pleas’d me like Thucydides,’ he wrote in his verse autobiography.) Beginning in the second year of the war (430 BC), plague devastated Athens, taking the lives of perhaps 100,000 citizens, including Pericles. He produced the first English translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in the late 1620s. Hobbes’s extra year as a student – it took him longer to graduate than it should have – may have been due to the cancelling of ‘Determinations’ (oral exams) because of plague, which ravaged Oxford in both 16. Early modern England experienced waves of epidemics every ten years or so, some resulting in urban mortality rates as high as 20 per cent. Is it far-fetched to imagine that the city is in lockdown?
A deserted city, barring a handful of military and medical officials, when it should be anything but. The scene is bright and sunny – conditions on land are offset by the threatening storm clouds out to sea, beyond the state’s territorial waters – and it is near the middle of the day, to judge by the shadows cast by the buildings and trees.
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