Fever dreams: did author Dean Koontz really predict coronavirus? | Books | The Guardian

But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease, from contemporary science fiction all the way back to Homer's Iliad. Even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance. Angry gods are better than no gods at all.

In Homer's Iliad, the Greeks disrespect one of Apollo's priests. The god manifests his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp. The plague lasts nine days, brief by modern epidemiological standards. When the Greeks make amends and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured.