A playwright in the fifth century B.C., Sophocles starts 'Oedipus Tyrannos' with the title character being challenged to determine the cause of a plague occurring in his city. One of the seen causes of this city's downfall is bad leadership.

Epic and tragedy assist audiences and storytellers to understand human suffering. Plagues and leadership go hand in hand.

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A Leader's Intelligence

Plagues and leadership are related. In a perspective, plagues work as a setup for a more relevant theme in the myth of the ancients. That is a leader's intelligence.

At the start of the Iliad, the prophet Calchas has sufficient knowledge about the cause of the nine-day plague. He was someone with a very broad knowledge of history and was able to use his experience.

The epics serve as a reminder to audiences that a leader is required to know how to make plans for the future based on the events from the past. These leaders are encouraged to use the past to have a better understanding of an event's cause and effect. This will help answer questions such as who caused the plague and was there a way that it could have been prevented.

The Recklessness of People

Myths are useful tools in helping audiences have a clear understanding of the causes of things.

According to Mark Turner (a narrative theorist) and Charles Fernyhough (specialist in memory), people are taught how to behave through stories and concepts they have encountered in their childhood. It had helped adults have a sense of responsibility in the world.

Plague Stories

Plague stories show situations where humans are pushed to limits. A leader is always important to the causal sequence. According to a line by Zeus in the Odyssey by Homer, he said that humans are always putting their misfortunes to the gods. However, people experience pain pass their fate due to their recklessness.

The problems people create are not just plagues. Hesiod, a poet, wrote about Zeus showing his displeasure with bad leaders by giving those burdens such as failures of militaries and pandemics.

The Catastrophic Illness

In ancient times, plagues were a common phenomenon. However, not every plague experienced during that time was blamed on bad leadership. Similar to other natural disasters, the blame was frequently put on the gods.

However, historians such as Polybius and Livy, said that epidemics that targeted armies and people who lived in cities were caused by poor sanitation. Additionally, physicians and philosophers searched through the rational method had found out that the epidemics were caused by pollution or the climate.

The Plague that Hit Athens

According to Thucydides, the plague that hit Athens with an unproved origin in Ethiopia said his observations. He noticed sick people suffered from intense fever, shortness of breath, and a variety of sickly discharge. The plague and leadership's correlation is shown in this story.

As a state, Athens was not prepared to face the challenge of the devastating plague. Thucydides describes the uselessness of any response from humans. The illness caused hundreds of deaths because the people were grouped inside the walls of the city waiting for the Spartan armies during the Peloponnesian War.