Donald Trump's helicopter touchdown on the White Home, Oct. 5, as he returns from being hospitalized at Walter Reed. Liu Jie/Xinhua by way of Getty Photographs

It’s onerous to course of the information of the president’s constructive COVID-19 prognosis with out having recourse to some form of mythological system, some bigger body of reference.

Karma, wrote one journalist, after which reproached himself for the ungenerous thought. Or maybe it was easy irony on show when, Washington Put up reporters wrote, “President Trump contracted the novel coronavirus after months during which he and folks round him…averted taking primary steps to stop the virus’s unfold.”

All these reactions make sense. If there’s one factor we find out about a virus that’s nonetheless mysterious in some ways, it’s that this coronavirus is professional at going round.

And as a classics scholar, I can guarantee you: What goes round comes round. Greek mythology gives perception to assist us perceive as we speak’s chaos.

Failure to see till too late

A few years in the past, my highschool English academics put a number of stress on phrases like foreshadowing, climax and denouement. All these phrases marked factors alongside a steep curve of the event of a narrative: rising motion, turning level, falling motion.

There was additionally a number of emphasis, as we mentioned plots, on a time period I then discovered more durable to know: satisfaction. Satisfaction: vanity; an exaggerated sense of self-worth. Satisfaction tended to be adopted by disaster – that falling motion once more.

As a highschool scholar, I tended to confuse satisfaction with vainness, with narcissistic preening; the tragic penalty of vainness appeared exaggeratedly extreme.

What does “satisfaction” actually imply? The Greek phrase it interprets is hubris, and satisfaction doesn’t fairly cowl the vary of the which means of hubris. Vainness might be a part of hubris, however a extra essential sense of the phrase is horrible judgment, gross overconfidence, blindness, obtuseness, a failure to see what’s staring you within the face – a failure to see it till it’s too late.

Trump stands, maskless, on the Truman Balcony after returning to the White Home.

Win McNamee/Getty Photographs)

Retribution and rashness

I don’t recall my academics mentioning nemesis or até, forces or ideas which are carefully related to hubris in Greek mythology.

Nemesis is extra typically personified, and therefore capitalized, than até. She’s a goddess of retribution, and she will be able to observe acts of hubris with the knowledge of a regulation of gravity – besides that there could also be a substantial time lag, as if one dropped a plate and it took a era for it to interrupt. That idea likewise seems within the Bible’s e-book of Ezekiel, which says “The fathers have eaten bitter grapes, and the tooth of the youngsters shall be set on edge.”

Até is a extra unpredictable determine, not essentially personified – classics scholar E.R. Dodds in “The Greeks and the Irrational” tentatively defines até as “a form of responsible rashness.”

However, até might be unforgettably personified, as when Mark Antony addresses the physique of Caesar and predicts civil battle in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar:”

“And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,

With Até by his facet, come sizzling from hell,

Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice,

Cry havoc, and let slip the canine of battle…”

Goddess or not, até, like nemesis, might be considered a form of mechanism whereby one evil is succeeded by one other. There’s a series response, a trigger and end result. Nemesis appears cooler, extra focused and exact; até lets all hell break free, and in addition is the hell that breaks free. Classes blur within the chaos.

‘He himself is the polluter’

Once I studied and taught Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King,” the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasn’t emphasised is that the play was written throughout and is about within the midst of a plague.

The residents of Thebes, within the tragedy’s opening scene, implore their sensible and resourceful ruler Oedipus to save lots of them from this disastrous sickness. Oedipus, moved by their plight and assured in his personal functionality, guarantees to do precisely that. His effort to search out the felony whose unpunished sin is polluting town and inflicting the plague results in Oedipus’s personal publicity because the supply of that air pollution.

However he persists in his hunt for the reality – although the reality, as each scholar learns, seems to be that he himself is the polluter whom he seeks. Trump, like Oedipus, is the supply of the air pollution – or on the very least, a vector, a spreader, an enabler. In contrast to Oedipus, the president has actively discouraged the hunt for the reality.

The ultimate phrases of the tragedy are addressed by the refrain to the residents of Thebes. Presumably the plague will probably be routed; town has certainly been cleansed. In distinction, the residents of our nation carry on dying. The president removes his masks and proclaims his triumph.

Aristotle recommends in his “Poetics” that in one of the best tragedies, the pivot or reversal – known as “peripeteia” – from the peak of success to catastrophe is accompanied by some form of information – anagnorisis, or recognition. “Pathei mathos,” sings the refrain in Aeschylus’s tragedy “Agamemnon”: knowledge comes by struggling.

A scene from the Theater of Warfare’s manufacturing of ‘Oedipus Rex’

The simultaneity of Oedipus’s enlightenment and his disaster is likely one of the components that made Aristotle so admire this elegantly plotted play.

The untranslatable, chaotic pressure of até performs out within the cycle of reversal adopted by recognition; vanity adopted by retribution. What are we imagined to suppose?

Whether or not we rejoice or mourn, whether or not we’re elated or fearful, and no matter occurs within the weeks and months to come back, this information – that the president has COVID-19 – arrives with a freight of predictability: This specific an infection appears, on reflection, if not inevitable then at the very least overwhelmingly possible.

Hubris: not seeing what’s in entrance of your nostril. At the same time as lawsuits and tell-all books have piled up, Trump has all the time appeared triumphantly immune. Not any extra.

Tragedy’s lesson

What occurs subsequent? In contrast to Oedipus, Trump has denied that there was ever a harmful sickness within the metropolis – though Bob Woodward’s e-book, “Rage” makes clear that he knew there was. In contrast to Oedipus, he has refused his folks’s pleas for assist.

What does Oedipus be taught in the midst of the drama? Rather a lot. He might blame the gods or destiny for his plight, however he additionally takes accountability for what has occurred.

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What is going to Covid – his personal private, irrefutable expertise of COVID-19 – educate Trump? Humility? Compassion? Respect for professional recommendation? The existence of Nemesis? His personal prognosis of hubris, with a measure of até thrown in?

The reply is all too clear. Launched from the hospital, Trump tweeted: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life!” He additionally mentioned “Possibly I’m immune” and took off his masks when returning to the White Home.

Tragedy, I inform my college students, doesn’t educate a lesson or preach an ethical. It affords a imaginative and prescient. Not: don’t be boastful, prideful, hubristic. Moderately: Males of Thebes, look upon Oedipus.

Rachel Hadas doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.