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 14^th 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 1^st January 1999

[this article can be accessed by clicking footnote 20 on the Wikipedia article]