ABSTRACT
Jennifer Clarke Kosak My purpose is to investigate some Greek views about the physical nature of the city as they were expressed in the fifth century BC. I wish to ask whether the Greeks in this period considered the city a place of refuge or a place of danger and to consider whether their ideas about the nature of the city changed in response to historical circumstances. I will try to answer this question by examining connections made by the Greeks between human suffering and the geographical entity that comprised a city, and, in particular, Greek ideas about the city and disease. Disease is a potentially valuable point of reference because it is frequently connected with urban centres. Mirko Grmek has argued that population growth and increasing urbanisation in the sixth and early fifth centuries led to a corresponding increase in the incidence of disease in Greece, an increase which he maintains lowered life expectancy rates (1991:92, 98-9, 104). While scholars continue to refine our understanding of life expectancy rates in antiquity, there is universal agreement among demographers and historians that urban environments tend to encourage higher rates of disease than rural ones (see, for example, Corvisier 1985:59-63). Furthermore, Grmek’s argument that many diseases can flourish only under conditions of relatively high population density is not, to my knowledge, contradicted by other researchers. Grmek points out that by the second century, the decline in health and the resulting devastation of the population was noticed by writers such as Polybius (1991:98). Within the larger framework of an investigation into Greek ideas about the physical nature of the polis, the two questions I wish to address are first, whether the Greeks themselves indicate an awareness of this up-swing in occurrences of disease over the course of the late sixth and fifth centuries, and second, whether they came to associate disease with the city, urban growth or urban structures. The answer to the first question is, as we shall see, rendered obscure by lack of evidence; answers to the second question are perhaps more easily found, though it will become clear that the notion of disease contemplated here includes what many twentieth-century thinkers would consider both metaphorical and actual.1 By envisioning the city as a place that is subject to illness, the Greeks in the fifth century anticipate what becomes a standard image in the literature of the
fourth century (cf., for example, Din. 1.110 and Arist. Pol. 1302b34-42): the city as a corporate entity, subject to the stresses, processes and dysfunctions of the human body (see Brock, Marshall, this volume). The frame of such a city is, I shall argue, marked out by its walls, within which dread disorders can arise. By the late fifth century, the city walls, intended to provide protection for the citizenry, come to be regarded as structures that can also preserve, encourage and even breed destruction.
