The infection of the body in literature. Two Greek stories

Among the tales of the plague in ancient literature there is the one - mythical - with which Homer's Iliad begins and the one - historical, rigorous and lucid - of Thucydides in the second book of his Stories. Francesca Berlinzani, lecturer at the Institute of Italian Studies, proposes a reflection on the current situation by narrating two Greek stories.

Two very different narrations that share the sense of dismay and anguish that the community lives in the face of contagion, that of the body and of the soul. In both stories, however, the path of hope is traced, even if differently declined, and embodied in the characters and actions of the priest and the soothsayer, and of the great father of democracy, Pericles, whose words guide us, by analogy, to Ulysses on his raft on the high seas.