THE PLAGUE IN ATHENS
PLAGUE IN ATHENS: 430-426 BC
A new disease which leaves doctors baffled, from which even
leading politicians cannot be protected; ships becoming floating incubators for
infection; places of worship being used as temporary morgues; medical staff
putting their lives at risk by caring for the sick; conspiracy theories about
biological warfare; the suspension of normal life; a densely-packed urban
population in lockdown, gripped by fear of the disease.
Welcome to Athens ,
in the spring of 430 BC.
In the spring of 430, in the second year of the
Peloponnesian War, Attica (the territory
of Athens ) was invaded by the armies
of the Peloponnesian League, a military confederation of Greek states led by Sparta . During these early years of the war, the
Spartan strategy was to invade Attica each
spring, to disrupt food supplies, panic the civilian population and hopefully
provoke the Athenians into battle.
However Pericles, the most powerful statesman and de facto leader of Athens , refused
to be drawn into battle and adopted a more cautious strategy: the rural
population of Attica, from villages like Marathon, were to be protected by
bringing them into Athens
itself, safely within the city walls.
Bust of Pericles in the British Museum
- did his policies create conditions in which an epidemic could take hold?
The Peloponnesian League raid on Attica lasted forty days,
by the end of which the city was in the grip of a previously unknown disease,
which ultimately killed at least a quarter of the population. The reason we know so much about the Athenian
plague is that we have a detailed eyewitness account written by a plague survivor,
the historian Thucydides. He lists the
many symptoms of the disease, including coughing, sneezing, retching, vomiting,
violent spasms, diarrhoea, pustules and ulcers on the skin. Worst of all,
though, was the fever, the burning feeling: ‘people could not bear the touch even of the lightest linen clothing,
but wanted to be completely naked.’ Thucydides
describes sufferers flocking round fountains and even plunging into water-tanks
in a vain attempt to slake their thirst – contaminating the water-supplies in
the process. Most people, he says, died
on the seventh or eighth day; if you survived that stage of the disease, you
might still die of dehydration from diarrhoea.
Even if you survived the illness, you might suffer serious
after-effects: blindness, amnesia, loss of fingers and toes. Survivors, however, also acquired immunity
from the disease; Thucydides says that most survivors were so relieved and
elated that they believed themselves invincible, ‘unable to die from any other disease in the future.’
There was no obvious method of treating the disease;
treatments that worked in some cases seemed to do harm in others. The highest mortality of all was among
doctors, as they were the people who came into most frequent contact with the
sick. Unlike other infectious diseases,
which tended to carry off the very young, the very old and those with
underlying conditions, this epidemic was no respecter of age or health: ‘those with naturally strong constitutions
were no better able to resist the disease than the weak … ‘people in perfect
health suddenly began to have burning feelings in the head; their eyes became
red and inflamed.’ Many young adults
across all social classes died, depriving Athens
of thousands of fighting men at a crucial time in the war against Sparta .
It has been calculated that the Athenian plague had a higher
mortality rate (25-30%) than the Black Death in 14th century Europe . About
80,000 people died in Athens – the equivalent of
that number of people dying in Belfast or Nottingham today.
Although there were reports of plague in a few other Greek
cities, including Thebes , Athens remained the centre of the outbreak
and lost far more people than any other city.
Just as globalisation, ease of travel and densely-packed urban environments
have facilitated the spread of Coronavirus in the modern world, Athens suffered from its
interconnectivity. The disease first
appeared in Attica in Peiraeus, the port
of Athens , the hub of a trading
network which reached across the Aegean and into the Black
Sea , creating ideal conditions for the spread of disease on
trading vessels. Thucydides, trying to
trace the path of the disease, claims that it originated somewhere in Africa, then
moved up through Ethiopia , Egypt and Libya
before reaching the Aegean island
of Lemnos (part of the
Athenian Empire), from which it spread to Peiraeus.
The Athenians struggled to make sense of it all, especially
as Sparta and the Peloponnese remained
completely untouched by the plague (apart from a small outbreak in Epidaurus , caused by an
Athenian naval raid). As the start of
the epidemic appeared to coincide with the Peloponnesian League invasion,
rumours of biological warfare began to spread, with people claiming that the
Spartans had deliberately infected the water cisterns in Peiraeus.
People sought explanations in oracles from the gods. Before the start of the war, when the
Spartans had asked the Delphic Oracle whether they should go to war with
Athens, they had received the reply that ‘if
they fought with all their might, victory would be theirs and the god Apollo
himself would be on their side’ – and everyone knew that Apollo was the god
of infectious diseases, of plagues and epidemics. The Athenian plague was proof that Apollo
really was backing the Spartans.
The citizens of Athens
began to pass round the words of another, more ancient oracle: ‘War with the Dorians comes, and death will
come at the same time’. There was no
doubt that they were at war with the Dorians, as most of the Peloponnesian
League states spoke Doric dialects of Greek – the only trouble was, there was a
bit of confusion over whether the oracle had said ‘death’ or ‘dearth’. Thucydides sceptically commented that people
were adjusting the wording to fit the current situation: ‘Certainly I think that if there is another war with the Dorians after
this one, and if a dearth results from it, then in all probability people will
quote the other version.’
Can we identify the
disease?
The nature of the disease which devastated Athens during the years 430-426 BC remains a
mystery. Thucydides simply calls it a loimos
or a nosos, the general words used in
Classical Greek for infectious diseases. He admits that he’s not a doctor and
that he can’t identify the disease, but he says it’s important that he lists
its symptoms, so that his readers will be able to recognise the disease, if it
ever returns.
The reason the disease has proved so difficult to identify,
despite Thucydides’s comprehensive list of symptoms, is that the list of
symptoms is a bit too comprehensive,
fitting no recognised illness. A
particularly baffling aspect of the disease is that it seems to have affected
the respiratory system and the
gastrointestinal system, as well as causing bleeding from the mouth and throat
– some historians have wondered whether this unusual mixture of symptoms might
even indicate the presence of more than one infectious disease circulating in Athens at this time.
Back in the 1980s, as an Ancient History student at
university, I was set an essay in which I had to assess the competing claims of
the various candidates for the Athenian plague: typhus, typhoid, bubonic
plague, scarlet fever, smallpox or measles. Another possibility, given that
pathogens mutate over time, is that the Athenian plague was caused by a
pathogen which no longer exists, or has mutated into something else. Every year fresh articles appear on the
topic, often driven by attempts to identify the Athenian plague with new
diseases which have emerged; as I write this article, there are probably people
already trying to argue that the Athenian plague was caused by Covid-19. Over the last few years, Ebola (or some other
form of haemorrhagic fever) has emerged as a popular candidate. Whilst it’s true that this might explain the
references to bleeding, as well as the blindness suffered by some survivors, it
doesn’t explain why Ebola would suddenly reappear after a gap of nearly 2,500
years.
Hopes of a solution to the mystery were raised in 1994-95 with
the discovery of a ‘plague pit’ during excavations for a new metro station in Athens . This pit, situated near the Kerameikos (the
ancient cemetery
of Athens , so-called
because it was near the potters’ quarter, an industrial area outside the city
walls) contained the skeletons of about 240 individuals, randomly-placed, with
an unusually low number of grave goods, mostly of poor quality. A facial reconstruction of a young girl,
based on one of the skeletons from the pit, is now on display in the National Archaeological
Museum , Athens . Analysis of dental pulp from some of
the teeth found in the plague-pit suggested the presence of Salmonella enterica, the pathogen which
causes typhoid fever, but the methodology of this study has been questioned and
research is still on-going.
Reconstruction of 'Myrtis', a young girl who died of plague in Athens
National Archaeological Museum, Athens
Every year the University
of Maryland holds an
annual conference devoted to solving medical mysteries, and their 1999
conference was devoted to the problem of the Athenian plague. They concluded
that the disease which offered the best fit with Thucydides’s description was
typhus: it has a mortality rate of 20%, death usually occurs after seven days
(often through dehydration) and it can cause gangrene of the fingers and
toes.
Typhus is certainly a strong candidate for the Athenian
plague, as it’s transmitted by body lice and associated with conditions of
overcrowding and poor sanitation – which is why it used to be known as ‘jail
fever’ in Britain. Typhus often occurs
in conditions of incarceration (it was rife in Nazi concentration camps) and
during wartime: recent studies have suggested that a third of the deaths in
Napoleon’s army during the retreat from Moscow
may have been due to typhus. Given that
the plague hit Athens at a time when most of the
population of Attica were crammed inside the
city walls, putting immense pressure on fairly primitive sewage and
water-supply systems, this seems like a good fit. If Athens was
hit by a typhus epidemic, this would also help to explain why other areas of Greece remained
unaffected.
What Impact did the
Plague have on Athens ?
Athens’ huge losses from the plague meant that Pericles came
in for a lot of stick over his policy of bringing the rural population of
Attica into the city, instead of fighting the Spartans: Plutarch, in his
biography of Pericles, complained that ‘he
left the countryfolk penned up like cattle to infect each other, without
providing them with any relief or change of quarters.’ That said, news of the Athenian plague scared
the Spartans so much that they didn’t launch a spring offensive in 429 – or in
426, when the plague returned to Athens . Some historians have suggested that if the
Spartans had dared to take advantage of Athens’ weakened situation, they could
have brought a swift end to the war – which instead dragged on for another twenty-five
years.
In 429 two of Pericles’s sons died from the plague (causing
him to seek citizenship rights for his illegitimate son), followed by Pericles
himself. His control of the city had
been so complete (Thucydides says that ‘Athens was notionally a democracy, but in reality
was under the control of one man’), that his unexpected death created a
power vacuum. The comic playwright
Aristophanes (rather a young fogey) saw Pericles’s death as the start of a new
era in Athenian politics, marked by corruption and pandering to the
masses.
Despite losing such a large proportion of her population, Athens showed remarkable
resilience in bouncing back from the plague years, achieving some military
success against the Peloponnesian League as early as 425. The population of Athens, swelled by economic
migrants, would probably have recovered to its 431 level if it had not been for
the hubristically misconceived Sicilian Expedition of 415-413, during which
Athens lost 20,000 infantry and large numbers of sailors – however, the fact
that the Athenians could even consider mounting an expedition to conquer the
largest island in the Mediterranean shows how quickly the city had recovered
its confidence. As it was, the population
of Athens
didn’t reach its 431 figure until around World War I (yes, you did read that
sentence correctly).
We can’t judge the impact of the plague just by looking at
population statistics, though. The most
chilling aspect of Thucydides’ account is how the experience of the plague changed
the entire mindset of the Athenian people, as normal life was so severely
disrupted. People lost faith in
religion, as the plague had proved so indiscriminate in its choice of victims: where
was the point in praying and sacrificing to the gods, if they wouldn’t protect
you? The sights of temples piled with dead bodies certainly hastened the growth
of religious scepticism. Funerals were hi-jacked by people throwing extra
corpses onto the pyres. Amidst abrupt
changes of fortune and fears for the future, a climate of lawlessness and
hedonism prevailed: you’d probably never be tried for your crimes, and what was
the point of having money if you couldn’t spend it?
Thucydides, who must have been so relieved at his own
recovery from the disease, nevertheless felt that the plague years had a
long-term effect on the Athenian psyche, leading to the atrocities which
characterised the later years of the war. The massacre of the adult male
populations of Scione and Melos , and the
enslavement of their women and children, were the actions of a people to whom
death had become commonplace, life had become cheap and the gods had become
irrelevant.
I’m certainly not suggesting that the current Coronavirus
outbreak will cause this level of social breakdown – fortunately the mortality
rate for Coronavirus is far lower than that for the mystery disease which
devastated Athens at the height of its power – but it will be interesting to
see what lasting marks our current experiences leave on our own society, and how
they affect our own mindset.
References &
Further Reading
Thucydides, History of
the Peloponnesian War – all quotations are taken from the
English translation by Rex Warner
(Penguin Classics, 1954)
Victor Davis Hanson, A
War Like No Other (London : Methuen , 2007) – excellent
modern history
of the Peloponnesian War, including the plague
Wikipedia article on Plague
of Athens: very detailed and thorough account, with
discussion of the various
theories on the identity of the disease
‘Plague of Athens : Another
Medical Mystery Solved at University
of Maryland ’,
University of Maryland Medical Center, posted 1st
January 1999
[this article can be accessed by
clicking footnote 20 on the Wikipedia article]
Coming to your blog late in the day but have enjoyed the posts I've read so far!
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