In The History Of The Peloponnesian War, Greek historian Thucydides provides a contemporary account of the plague that struck Athens in 430BC.

The outbreak, which killed nearly a third of the population, stripped society down to biology. Belief in the gods evaporated, fear of the law vanished, and the desire for property became laughable.

It made little difference whether people prayed or not because both believers and disbelievers perished. Human laws became irrelevant because no one expected to live long enough to be brought to trial for crimes. People spent while they could as they saw the posthumous estates of the rich passing to those who had nothing.

By rejecting religion, law and property, Athenians broke irreverently with the expectation of continuity which orders society by extrapolating a felt past and a lived present into an expected future. From inheriting faith to observing laws to accumulating possessions, most Athenians had lived to leave something received, learnt or owned for their descendants.

That expectation disappeared with the plague. Witnessing the dying gasps of neighbours and strangers, Athenians sought to live before it was their turn to receive the death sentence passed on all. Reinventing existence as an accidentally provisional gift, they invoked a helplessly defiant sense of living and invited it to take their dying moments hostage.

Lucretius helped import the Greek memory of faithless time into the Roman world. On The Nature Of Things employs the Thucydidean depiction of the plague as empirical evidence for philosopher Epicurus' rejection of religion and belief in the gods. The Epicurean claim is that humans can be happy like the gods if they stop fearing death and the gods themselves.

Epicurus proclaims that the "most terrible evil, death, is nothing for us, since when we exist, death does not exist, and when death exists, we do not exist". His radical epistemology mocked efforts by vagabond time to domesticate fellow sojourning humans on the pastures of promised immortality.

The coronavirus pandemic has revived the insurgent spirit of those ages, if only up to a point.

Atheists and agnostics are rejoicing at how places of worship, citadels of eternal faith, are asking the devout to stay away, while hospitals, those secular sanctuaries of medicine, are inviting the diseased to come in.

Stoicism, too, is coming in - in the form of hospital staff who carry the sick into hospitals on stretchers that bear their passing weight. The Stoic reading of virtue, not as a means to pleasure but as an end embedded in the natural course of things whose final destination is unknown, complements the Epicurean discovery that death is nothing more than the fear of it. Hence, the cloying companionship of existence is preferable to the coy fidelity of immortality. Overworked doctors worldwide, trying to save patients, realise this bitter truth better than others do.

However, most mortals are clinging to faith more closely than ever. Religious gatherings of thousands in the midst of an infectious outbreak are astonishing. Other mortals are reverting to the gods of leisure and sports. Hedonists have thronged beaches and parks in defiance of social distancing advisories, although their delinquent abandon does not approximate to the abandonment of law in stricken Greece.

Then, again, markets, those ancestral preserves of private property, are crying like little children, beseeching governments to protect them. Private property stands revealed as little more than a personal claim on collective transience. Yet companies are intent still on buying other companies.

Evidently, unlike the victims of the Athenian plague, the inhabitants of the coronaviral world expect time to continue in familiar shape, form and norm.

This is so because the limits of pagan religiosity have been breached since that plague. The advent of revealed religion overran boundaries between the known meanings of life and death.

The notion of salvation gathered the wayward movements of the self - its birth, its growth and flowering, its insatiable desires and loss of direction, its redemptive capacity for self-recognition and suffering - into a singular promise of eternal life. But at the same time, the law came to be sanctioned not by the hereafter but by the present. Unlike the Athenian state, which lay at the mercy of querulous gods, today's state generally is secular.

Populist as well, it can deploy its democratic prowess to nationalise private property in an emergency. That way, the burden of economic existence is lifted from the lonely individual and placed on the gregarious shoulders of society.

The state has taken over the role played by chance in Thucydidean Greece. In that transfer lies the possibility of hope.

Fatalism is not impossible. Descent to barbarism would follow should the state abrogate its responsibilities. Civil society might step in, but it would not possess the financial, regulatory and punitive clout of the state. It is only massive and sustained state intervention in the economy that can rescue nations.

Looking down from his perch in the afterlife, Thucydides might draw a long breath and say to his companions that the world is a better place today than even his Athens was.

Two-thirds of Athens survived.

Asad Latif is a former Straits Times journalist.

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