Thucydides on the Plague

The skull of an eleven year old girl, victim of the plague, found in the Kerameikos cemetery; archaeologists have called her Myrthis.

Among the most famous parts of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is his account of the plague that killed nearly a third of the Athenian population in the summer of 430 and caused greater loss of human life than the rest of the Archidamian War. (A mass grave discovered in 1994 illustrates the terrible death rate; the disease has been identified as typhoid fever.) What is remarkable is the complete absence of any explanation: the historian offers a clinical description of the symptoms, but does not discuss the cause of the disease. Thucydides' elder colleague Herodotus of Halicarnassus would have said that "the gods wanted it" or something like it, but Thucydides refuses to do so.

One would expect that after the description of the disease, the historian would have made a remark about the consequences that the plague had for the war. However, this is not what he does. The story gradually changes into a shocking story about moral corruption, which serves as a mirror to the "Funeral Speech of Pericles", in which the virtues of the Athenians have been praised. This diptych - the speech and the medical description - leave the reader with some questions about human nature.

Atempts to identify the disease with ebola hemorrhagic fever, glanders, typhus, or smallpox are misguided. This is not a medical account, but a moral story posing as a medical account.

The translation of Thucydides 2.47.1-55.1 was made by Richard Crawley.

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Thucydides on the plague

[2.47.2] In the first days of summer the Spartans and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of Sparta, and sat down and laid waste the country.

[2.47.3] Not many days after their arrival in Attica the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighborhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered.

[2.47.4] Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them altogether.