“From these things therefore it is clear that the city-state is a natural growth, and that man is by nature an animal that lives in a polis, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it […]” – Aristotle, “Politics” […]
With a global pandemic uprooting most every basic element of modern social life that so many of us have taken for granted throughout our entire lives, it is not surprising that some are looking back into the past to learn what those who lived in L.P. Hartley’s metaphorical “foreign country” where they “do things differently” did when faced with such epidemiological challenges. Many doing so are naturally looking to the early twentieth century and its influenza pandemic; however travelling a bit farther back may be an even more enlightening journey.