"Thucydides and the plague of Athens, by Spyridon Rangos (University of Patras) "

In 431 BC, a great war known as the Peloponnesian War, exploded in Greece between Athens and Sparta, the two major military, economic and political powers of the time. In the summer of the following year, as the Athenians had gathered inside the city walls, while the Spartans were busy destroying their fields, a deadly epidemic broke out in Athens. The disease lasted for almost five years. It is estimated that one quarter to almost one third of the entire population passed away. Something between 60,000 and 80,000 people. And a significant number of survivors must have remained crippled, blind or otherwise disabled for the rest of their lives. More than 30 years later, the Athenians denied participation in an expedition against the Persians because, as they said, they had not yet managed fully to overcome the demographic consequences of the war and the plague. In Greece, epidemics were generally regarded as divine punishments, exacted for some violation of moral order. For instance, in the first book of the Iliad, the god Apollo descends to the camp of the Achaeans and executes dogs, mules and humans with his arrows. The reason for the god's anger is that one of his priests has been denied release of his captive daughter. What is poetically described as death by arrow is the sudden eruption of an epidemic. Similarly, at the beginning of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, a pestilence is afflicting Thebes because the murderer of the former king of the city has not been found out and the city is polluted. At the end of the play, the expulsion of the culprit, found out to be none other than Oedipus himself, purifies the city. Transgression, pollution and ritual purification are three stages meant to describe a crisis in the relationship between humans and gods. A plague is the most conspicuous outward sign of such a crisis. In the middle of the 5th century BC, alongside the religious interpretation of epidemics, a new kind of exploration was taking shape. Groups of physicians and individual doctors started giving rational explanation of diseases, crucially based on the concept of a body's nature. The most prominent representative of this trend was Hippocrates, of course, but many other professionals shared his belief in natural rather than supernatural causation. Medical scientists accounted for epidemics by recourse to environmental factors, such as the quality of the air and the other properties of the climate at a particular region. Contagion from one infected individual to another was completely unknown, then and for many centuries to come. The scientific explanation of the Athenian plague invoked three interrelated factors. First, the dense and polluted air generated by the stagnant waters of an excessively rainy winter. Second, the corresponding humidity of that year's produce. And third, the absence of periodic summer winds that could have purged the atmosphere. Our main evidence for the plague of Athens is the work of Thucydides, an Athenian historian and general who, by his own admission, got infected but survived. For him, it was the greatest epidemic recorded in history. His narrative, the gods are conspicuously absent. Thucydides does not espouse the traditional scheme of explanation. The plague is not a divine punishment that calls for ritual purification. Nor does he espouse the scientific explanation for that matter. With apparent contempt for unfounded conjectures, he writes, and I quote, Now anyone, doctor or layman, may say as much as he knows about where this probably came from or what causes, he thinks, are powerful enough to bring about so great a change. For my part, I will say only what it was like, so that if the plague breaks out again, people may know in advance. End of quote. Thucydides refrains from speculating about origins and causes. He gives instead a clinical description of the symptoms of the disease in order to enable future people to identify it. His wish has not been fulfilled. Notwithstanding numerous suggestions that have been made in modern times, some more probable than others, the identity of the Athenian plague remains a mystery to this day, most probably because the disease has changed form or become extinct in the meantime. Without approval or denial, Thucydides mentions still another kind of causal explanation, an explanation that we might want to call political. People suspected that the disease came about as a result of sabotage. The Spartan army was said to have poisoned the wells of Piraeus, Athens Harbor, where the epidemic first broke out. On this view, the disease was the outcome of neither divine anger, nor an unhealthy environment, but of human malice. As you can see, conspiracy theories have a long history. To Thucydides' mind, all available kinds of explanation, religious, scientific, political, share a common feature. They are hypothetical constructions meant to provide a framework of meaning for what is an inescapable fact of mortal life, namely the ever-present possibility of a natural calamity and the intrinsic frailty of human life vis-à-vis a whole range of phenomena, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and even droughts, that do not fall within the power of human prediction or effective action. For Thucydides, the disease defies human understanding. Eager not to transgress the boundary between the known and the unknown, Thucydides describes the symptoms with sufficient knowledge of the medical literature of the time and with enviable accuracy from head through throat to chest, stomach, belly, all the way down to the extremities, but he does not pretend to a superior knowledge of causes. On the other hand, his keen eye for observation gives rise to a couple of insights into the nature of the disease that go against the grain of contemporary assumptions. The first is the contagious character and cross-species transmission of the plague, and the second is the specific immunity granted to people who fell ill but recovered. The reader's fascination with Thucydides's gripping account of the plague lies not so much with his novelties, whether negative or positive, but rather with a delicate way in which he passes from the physical symptoms to the psychological impact of the disease, and then to its ethical consequences. Thucydides highlights the dejection and even depression that settle on patience once they realize that they were real. He also stresses the new outlook on life, characteristic of those still healthy. It was mocked by a single-minded pursuit of pleasure and the utter disregard for all kinds of law. According to Thucydides, the great number of deaths led to a neglect of burial customs. Archaeology has provided ample evidence for his claim, but the neglect of traditional ceremonies led to more serious transgressions of moral and social order. Unqualified hedonism won the day. Seeing the sudden upheaval of fortunes, people started committing crimes without the slightest concern for the morrow or their neighbors. They lived as if they had already been sentenced to death. Thucydides's description of the plague culminates in an account of the excessive depoliticization of social life. This account stands in striking contrast to the fine balance between private freedom and public beauty, characteristic of Athenian democracy, which Pericles, the famous statesman, praises in a funeral speech that immediately precedes the description of the disease in Thucydides's work. The glory of Athens is juxtaposed to its radical decline during the epidemic. Extreme situations such as plagues tend to ruin political societies and to distort human nature, or else to manifest our latent potentiality for evil that lies dormant in ordinary circumstances. This is Thucydides's lasting possession. No wonder that his narrative became the locus classicus for all later accounts of epidemics in antiquity, and well beyond it.