The Great Plague at Athens

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Introduction
Almost at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, when the prosperity of Athens had placed her at the height of her power and given her unquestioned supremacy among the Grecian states, her strength was greatly impaired by a visitation against which there was nothing in military prowess or patriotic pride and devotion that could prevail.

It is one of the tragic contrasts of history — the picture of Athens, in her full triumph and glory, smitten, at a moment when she needed to put forth her full strength, by a deadly foe against whose might mortal arms were vain. Her citizens were rejoicing in her social no less than her military preeminence, and they had already been trained in the hardships necessary to be endured in defense of an invaded country. Again they were prepared to undergo whatever service might be laid upon them in her behalf. They could foresee the arduous tasks and inevitable sufferings of a great war but had no warning of an impending calamity far worse than those which even war, though always attended with horrors, usually entails. Pericles had lately delivered his great funeral oration at the public interment of soldiers who had fallen for Athens. “The bright colors and tone of cheerful confidence,” says Grote, whose account of the plague follows, “which pervaded the discourse of Pericles, appear the more striking from being in immediate antecedence to the awful description of this distemper.”

The death of Pericles himself, who directly or indirectly fell a victim to the prevailing pestilence, marked a grievous crisis for Athens in what was already become a measureless public woe. During the autumn of the year B.C. 427 the epidemic again broke out, after a considerable intermission, and for one year continued, “to the sad ruin both of the strength and the comfort of the city.”

This selection is by George Grote.

Time: 430 BC
Place: Athens

At the close of one year after the attempted surprise of Plataea by the Thebans, the belligerent parties in Greece remained in an unaltered position as to relative strength. Nothing decisive had been accomplished on either side, either by the invasion of Attica or by the flying descents round the coast of Peloponnesus. In spite of mutual damage inflicted — doubtless in the greatest measure upon Attica — no progress was yet made toward the fulfilment of those objects which had induced the Peloponnesians to go to war. Especially the most pressing among all their wishes — the relief of Potidaea — was in no way advanced; for the Athenians had not found it necessary to relax the blockade of that city, The result of the first year’s operations had thus been to disappoint the hopes of the Corinthians and the other ardent instigators of war, while it justified the anticipations both of Pericles and of Archidamus.

A second devastation of Attica was resolved upon for the commencement of spring; and measures were taken for carrying it all over that territory, since the settled policy of Athens, not to hazard a battle with the invaders, was now ascertained. About the end of March or beginning of April the entire Peloponnesian force — two-thirds from each confederate city as before — was assembled under the command of Archidamus and marched into Attica. This time they carried the work of systematic destruction not merely over the Thriasian plain and the plain immediately near to Athens, as before; but also to the more southerly portions of Attica, down even as far as the mines of Laurium. They traversed and ravaged both the eastern and the western coast, remaining not less than forty days in the country. They found the territory deserted as before, all the population having retired within the walls.

In regard to this second invasion, Pericles recommended the same defensive policy as he had applied to the first; and apparently the citizens had now come to acquiesce in it, if not willingly, at least with a full conviction of its necessity. But a new visitation had now occurred, diverting their attention from the invader, though enormously aggravating their sufferings. A few days after Archidamus entered Attica, a pestilence or epidemic sickness broke out unexpectedly at Athens.

It appears that this terrific disorder had been raging for some time throughout the regions round the Mediterranean; having begun, as was believed, in Ethiopia — thence passing into Egypt and Libya and overrunning a considerable portion of Asia under the Persian government. About sixteen years before, there had been a similar calamity in Rome and in various parts of Italy. Recently it had been felt in Lemnos and some other islands of the Aegean, yet seemingly not with such intensity as to excite much notice generally in the Grecian world: at length it passed to Athens and first showed itself in the Piraeus. The progress of the disease was as rapid and destructive as its appearance had been sudden; while the extraordinary accumulation of people within the city and long walls, in consequence of the presence of the invaders in the country, was but too favorable to every form of contagion. Families crowded together in close cabins and places of temporary shelter — throughout a city constructed, like most of those in Greece, with little regard to the conditions of salubrity and in a state of mental chagrin from the forced abandonment and sacrifice of their properties in the country, transmitted the disorder with fatal facility from one to the other. Beginning as it did about the middle of April, the increasing heat of summer further aided the disorder, the symptoms of which, alike violent and sudden, made themselves the more remarked because the year was particularly exempt from maladies of every other description.

Of this plague — or, more properly, eruptive typhoid fever, distinct from, yet analogous to, the smallpox — a description no less clear than impressive has been left by the historian Thucydides, himself not only a spectator but a sufferer. It is not one of the least of his merits, that his notice of the symptoms, given at so early a stage of medical science and observation, is such as to instruct the medical reader of the present age and to enable the malady to be understood and identified. The observations with which that notice is ushered in deserve particular attention. “In respect to this distemper (he says), let every man, physician or not, say what he thinks respecting the source from whence it may probably have arisen and respecting the causes which he deems sufficiently powerful to have produced so great a revolution. But I, having myself had the distemper and having seen others suffering under it, will state what it actually was and will indicate in addition such other matters as will furnish any man, who lays them to heart, with knowledge and the means of calculation beforehand, in case the same misfortune should ever occur again.”

To record past facts, as a basis for rational prevision in regard to the future — the same sentiment which Thucydides mentions in his preface, as having animated him to the composition of his history — was at that time a duty so little understood that we have reason to admire not less the manner in which he performs it in practice than the distinctness with which he conceives it in theory. We infer from his language that speculation in his day was active respecting the causes of this plague, according to the vague and fanciful physics and scanty stock of ascertained facts, which was all that could then be consulted. By resisting the itch of theorizing from one of those loose hypotheses which then appeared plausibly to explain everything, he probably renounced the point of view from which most credit and interest would be derivable at the time. But his simple and precise summary of observed facts carries with it an imperishable value and even affords grounds for imagining that he was no stranger to the habits and training of his contemporary Hippocrates and the other Asclepiads of Cos.

Continued.

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