Plague or Poetry? Thucydides on the Epidemic at Athens

Abstract

In the second book of his History, chapters 47 through 55, Thucydides describes in great detail a severe v6oao; (disease) that ravaged the city of Athens in the summer of 430/429 BC.1 This disease quickly reached epidemic proportions, attacking about twenty-five percent of the adult population with a high rate of mortality. So vividly did Thucydides describe the signs, symptoms, and sequelae of the disease that his ancient and modem readers alike became fascinated with the illness. But, despite his detailed description, the cause of the epidemic remains uncertain. Its mysterious nature has played upon the minds of philologists, historians, and physicians and, in recent years, the disease has assumed more importance in some quarters than the war in which it arose. Certainly more scholarly attention has been directed to the nature of the epidemic than to the effects of the epidemic on Athens' ability to conduct the war with Sparta. Especially in the past one hundred years, physicians have joined philologists in speculating about what micro-organism caused the epidemic. One scholarly analysis has succeeded another, arguing that the cause was smallpox or measles, typhus or scarlet fever, bubonic plague or pneumonic plague, ergotism, leptospirosis or Tularemia, and, more recently, Marburg-Ebola virus, Rift Valley Fever, or influenza complicated by staphylococcal infection.2 Each 11 will translate Greek words and phrases, with apologies to philologists, for the sake of physicians who may not have learned Greek. The terms 'disease' and 'epidemic' will be used throughout since they are more in keeping with Thucydides' terminology and avoid the connotations of the more usual term 'plague,' especially those of the medieval disease of the same name. The text of Thucydides used is the Oxford edition of H. S. Jones (1900, rpt. with apparatus criticus, 1942). 2Smallpox (Littman and Littman), measles (Page, Shrewsbury), typhus (Crawfurd, Gomme), scarlet fever (Rolleston 49), bubonic plague or pneumonic plague (Hooker, MacArthur), ergotism (Salway and Dell), leptospirosis or Tularemia (Wylie and Stubbs), MarburgEbola virus (Scarrow), Rift Valley Fever (Morens and Chu), influenza complicated by

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