Treatment of the Plague in Sophocles, Thucydides, Lucretius, and Vergil in the Stylistic Approach

The plague was an interesting and attractive topic for a number of writers in different fields, prose or poetry, in order to express a specific point of view, and each of them had his own distinctive style in order to show this idea. This research paper deals with the treatment of the plague by the poet Sophocles in “Oedipus the King", the historian Thucydides in "The History of the Peloponnesian War", the poet Lucretius in the poem "On the Nature of Things", and the poet Vergil in "The Georgics", in the stylistic approach, where each of these writers had a purpose in dealing with the subject of the plague, and this was reflected in using vocabulary, adjectives and linguistic tools that help them to achieve this purpose. Sophocles was expressing the culture of his time, while Thucydides was interested in describing the symptoms of the disease rather than providing a philosophical or religious explanation for the causes of the disease, as he spoke objectively without arousing pity and passion, while Lucretius did not view the Athenian plague as a historical event, as he does not care about time and place, he wants to direct the reader to accept the idea of death by accepting the scientific explanation of natural phenomena. in general Lucretius deals with reality in phrases closer to prose than to poetry, so he does not resort to artistic prowess as does Vergil, who explicitly aims to sympathize with the victims of the plague through the use of vocabulary indicating sadness and despair. He presents a simplified picture of the plague in an emotional, rhetorical style through contradiction and pity, without considering the scientific and historical facts.