Athens’ Great Plague – 3

Men cared not to abstain from wrong, under circumstances in which punishment was not likely to overtake them.

Continuing The Great Plague at Athens,
our selection from George Grote. The selection is presented in five easy 5 minute installments.

Previously in The Great Plague at Athens.

Time: 430 BC
Place: Athens

Men cared not to abstain from wrong, under circumstances in which punishment was not likely to overtake them, nor to put a check upon their passions and endure privations, in obedience even to their strongest conviction, when the chance was so small of their living to reap reward or enjoy any future esteem. An interval, short and sweet, before their doom was realized — before they became plunged in the widespread misery which they witnessed around and which affected indiscriminately the virtuous and the profligate — was all that they looked to enjoy; embracing with avidity the immediate pleasures of sense, as well as such positive gains, however ill-gotten, as could be made the means of procuring them and throwing aside all thought both of honor and of long-sighted advantage. Life and property being alike ephemeral, there was no hope left but to snatch a moment of enjoyment, before the outstretched hand of destiny should fall upon its victims.

The picture of society under the pressure of a murderous epidemic, with its train of physical torments, wretchedness and demoralization, has been drawn by more than one eminent author but by none with more impressive fidelity and conciseness than by Thucydides, who had no predecessor, nor anything but the reality, to copy from. We may remark that amid all the melancholy accompaniments of the time there are no human sacrifices, such as those offered up at Carthage during pestilence to appease the anger of the gods — there are no cruel persecutions against imaginary authors of the disease, such as those against the Untori (anointers of doors) in the plague of Milan in 1630.

Three years altogether did this calamity desolate Athens: continuously, during the entire second and third years of the war — after which followed a period of marked abatement for a year and a half; but it then revived again and lasted for another year, with the same fury as at first. The public loss, over and above the private misery, which this unexpected enemy inflicted upon Athens, was incalculable. Out of twelve hundred horsemen, all among the rich men of the state, three hundred died of the epidemic; besides forty-four hundred hoplites out of the roll formally kept and a number of the poorer population so great as to defy computation. No efforts of the Peloponnesians could have done so much to ruin Athens or to bring the war to a termination such as they desired: and the distemper told the more in their favor, as it never spread at all into Peloponnesus, though it passed from Athens to some of the more populous islands. The Lacedaemonian army was withdrawn from Attica somewhat earlier than it would otherwise have been, for fear of taking the contagion.

But it was while the Lacedaemonians were yet in Attica and during the first freshness of the terrible malady, that Pericles equipped and conducted from Piraeus an armament of one hundred triremes and four thousand hoplites to attack the coasts of Peloponnesus; three hundred horsemen were also carried in some horse-transports, prepared for the occasion out of old triremes. To diminish the crowd accumulated in the city was doubtless of beneficial tendency and perhaps those who went aboard might consider it as a chance of escape to quit an infected home. But unhappily they carried the infection along with them, which desolated the fleet not less than the city and crippled all its efforts. Reinforced by fifty ships of war from Chios and Lesbos, the Athenians first landed near Epidaurus in Peloponnesus, ravaging the territory and making an unavailing attempt upon the city; next they made like incursions on the most southerly portions of the Argolic peninsula — Troezen, Halieis and Hermione — and lastly attacked and captured Prasiae, on the eastern coast of Laconia. On returning to Athens, the same armament was immediately conducted under Agnon and Cleopompus, to press the siege of Potidaea, the blockade of which still continued without any visible progress. On arriving there an attack was made on the walls by battering engines and by the other aggressive methods then practised; but nothing whatever was achieved. In fact, the armament became incompetent for all serious effort, from the aggravated character which the distemper here assumed, communicated by the soldiers fresh from Athens even to those who had before been free from it at Potidaea. So frightful was the mortality that out of the four thousand hoplites under Agnon no fewer than one thousand and fifty died in the short space of forty days. The armament was brought back in this distressed condition to Athens, while the reduction of Potidaea was left as before, to the slow course of blockade.

On returning from the expedition against Peloponnesus, Pericles found his countrymen almost distracted with their manifold sufferings. Over and above the raging epidemic they had just gone over Attica and ascertained the devastations committed by the invaders throughout all the territory — except the Marathonian Tetrapolis and Deceleia, districts spared, as we are told, through indulgence founded on an ancient legendary sympathy — during their long stay of forty days. The rich had found their comfortable mansions and farms, the poor their modest cottages, in the various demes, torn down and ruined. Death, sickness, loss of property and despair of the future now rendered the Athenians angry and intractable to the last degree. They vented their feelings against Pericles as the cause not merely of the war but also of all that they were now enduring. Either with or without his consent, they sent envoys to Sparta to open negotiations for peace but the Spartans turned a deaf ear to the proposition. This new disappointment rendered them still more furious against Pericles, whose long-standing political enemies now doubtless found strong sympathy in their denunciations of his character and policy. That unshaken and majestic firmness, which ranked first among his many eminent qualities, was never more imperiously required and never more effectively manifested.

Continued.

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