11 - Ethical Leadership in Times of ‘Crisis’

Summary

During the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430BC) the city-state of Athens was ravaged by a plague. The great historian Thucydides, who survived himself the disease, documented the social effect of the pandemic upon the city, where almost 100.000 people died. According to his account on the moral decadence the epidemic caused, he wrote that ‘the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen to them next, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.’ The ancient plague had triggered an ethical crisis, but the Athenian democracy had to survive, due to its main characteristics as highlighted by Pericles in his famous Funeral’s Oration. In this speech dedicated to the dead fighters, of the first year of the war, Pericles emphasized, that one of the emancipatory elements of the Athenian democracy was the sensibility of measure and a combination of philosophy with action.