Plague, Blight, and the Birth of Astronomy
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Eryximachus — οἵ τε γὰρ λοιμοὶ φιλοῦσι γίγνεσθαι ἐκ τῶν τοιούτων καὶ ἄλλα ἀνόμοια πολλὰ νοσήματα καὶ τοῖς θηρίοις καὶ τοῖς φυτοῖς, καὶ γὰρ πάχναι καὶ χάλαζαι καὶ ἐρυσῖβαι ἐκ πλεονεξίας καὶ ἀκοσμίας περὶ ἄλληλα τῶν τοιούτων γίγνεται ἐρωτικῶν, ὧν ἐπιστήμη περὶ ἄστρων τε φορὰς καὶ ἐνιαυτῶν ὥρας ἀστρονομία καλεῖται. ἔτι τοίνυν καὶ αἱ θυσίαι πᾶσαι καὶ οἷς μαντικὴ ἐπιστατεῖ— ταῦτα δʼ ἐστὶν ἡ περὶ θεούς τε
For plagues, too, tend to arise from such things, and many other, different, diseases, both in animals and in plants, for indeed frosts and hails and blights arise from excess and disorder, toward one another, of these erotic forces, the knowledge of which, concerning both the stars' courses and the years' seasons, is called astronomy. Further, then, all sacrifices, and everything the art of divination presides over — these, and are concerning the gods and—
Continuing Eryximachus's speech: having shown that the double Eros governs the seasons of the year (188a), he now traces its disordered form into disease among animals and plants and into frost, hail, and blight, and names the science that studies the stars and the seasons ‘astronomy.’ The unit ends mid-sentence, turning to sacrifice and divination as Love’s remaining domain.
Eryximachus names his own conclusion inside a relative clause: ‘the knowledge of which … is called astronomy.’ The coinage argues for him. Astronomia is ástron, star, plus the root of nómos, which means both law and apportionment; naming the science of the stars already says the stars keep a nómos, an order they answer to — the same claim he has just made about the seasons by calling the healthy Love kósmios at 188a. Plagues and the rest of the diseased list get identical treatment: they arise ‘from such things,’ a demonstrative that only cashes out once the sentence reaches pleonexía and akosmía, excess and disorder, the two nouns doing the causal work that a city’s wronged god would do in another kind of story.
That other kind of story is Hesiod’s. In the Works and Days, plague and famine strike a city because its rulers have judged crookedly and angered Zeus — pestilence there is a verdict. Eryximachus keeps the vocabulary of that world (loimós, the very word Thucydides later uses for the plague that hit Athens in the war) and empties out the judge. Nothing here needs a wronged god; the plague is what excess and disorder among love’s own forces produce, no more supernatural than a bad harvest. Plato returns to this exact machinery — disease as elemental imbalance rather than divine sentence — and works it out at length in the Timaeus, where illness is the body’s own hot, cold, wet, and dry falling out of their proper ratios. Eryximachus is not yet that systematic, but the direction is already set: the same word that once meant a god’s anger now names a symptom.
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