Thucydides and Hobbes on Epidemics and Politics: From the Plague of Athens to England’s Rabies
Thucydides and Hobbes on Epidemics and Politics: From the Plague of Athens to England’s Rabies

Summary/Abstract: Thomas Hobbes’s England was deeply troubled by the successive plague visitations regularly occurring in the late 16th and 17th centuries. The catastrophic outbreak in 1625 found Hobbes working on the first ever direct translation of Thucydides’ History from Greek to English. This fact allows for the supposition that Hobbes paid special attention to Thucydides’ masterful account of the plague at Athens and its social and political consequences. These circumstances authorise the here proposed enquiry into the relation between Hobbes’s understanding of the state of nature in Leviathan and the epidemics, mediated by his experience of the plague and the translation of the plague narrative in Thucydides’ History.

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