« Nous sommes en guerre » ?

Faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, many Heads of States have resorted to military metaphors, while the journalists and historians who were invited to recall the major epidemics of the past have regularly conjured up Thucydides’ account of “the Great Plague” of Athens in 429 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War. This paper’s aim is to trace the origins of the military metaphor as it applies to disease control, and to compare the perceptions of epidemic and military death tolls in Ancient Greece, using historical and archeological sources. It appears that the Greek perceptions of epidemic v.s. military death tolls were poles apart: whereas epidemic deaths were deemed to be meaningless, military deaths contributed to rebuilding social cohesion in the endangered city. It may be in this quest for meaning, revolving around the union of a community, that the major stake of representing an epidemic as the Enemy is to be found, especially in our modern societies which can no longer perceive war as a tangible reality of everyday life.