The speculations of the ancient world made disease most often an instrument of divine wrath. Judgment was meted out either to a community (the plague in Book I of the Iliad that Apollo inflicts on the Achaeans in punishment for Agamemnon’s abduction of Chryses’ daughter; the plague in Oedipus that strikes Thebes because of the polluting presence of the royal sinner) or to a single person (the stinking wound in Philoctetes’ foot). The diseases around which the modern fantasies have gathered—TB, cancer—are viewed as forms of self-judgment, of self-betrayal.
