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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: epidemic of the Great Plague.
Notwithstanding what German critics have written on the subject, we
must beware of regarding this conception as a mere reproduction of
that cyclic theory of events which sees in the world nothing but
the regular rotation of Strophe and Antistrophe, in the eternal
choir of life and death.
For, in his remarks on the excesses of the Corcyrean Revolution,
Thucydides distinctly rests his idea of the recurrence of history
on the psychological grounds of the general sameness of mankind.
'The sufferings,' he says, 'which revolution entailed upon the
cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always
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