CHAPTER 3
DISEASE
THE RAVAGES OF THE PLAGUE AT ATHENS (430–426)

Anatomy of an Epidemic

By the second season of the war, the struggle was not to be decided between spearmen or even ravagers and horsemen. It now seemed to hinge on how well, psychologically as well as materially, refugees could ride out a few weeks of enemy occupation. Thanks to Pericles’ strategy, for a second spring much of the population—perhaps well over 200,000—was crammed inside Athens for more than a month. The city of the Parthenon and theater of Dionysus was again to be a fetid refugee camp.

The prior inaugural year of fighting had proved that such massive evacuation and relocation were practicable. Yet in this second season the city’s luck quite literally ran out. The combination of Mediterranean heat, overcrowding, lack of plentiful clean water, shelter, and proper sanitation, and the stress of war and invasion provided a suitable landscape for a mysterious and terribly destructive disease. When the epidemic passed, Thucydides would make an astounding summation of conditions in Greece as a whole during the three decades of the war: “What caused the greatest suffering and killed a considerable part of the population was the terrible plague.”¹

None of the other Greek city-states had ever experienced anything quite like the Athenian pestilence. Nearby hostile Thebes, the capital of the Boeotian Confederacy, had doubled its population since the outbreak of the war, due to the influx of refugees from the surrounding unwalled hamlets of Boeotia, many of which lay along the porous border and feared an Athenian invasion.² Yet even if it was now twice its antebellum population, Thebes proper still probably had fewer than 50,000 residents, hardly enough population density to guarantee the easy contagion of an infectious disease. In any case, its smaller numbers of refugees were much more easily housed than the tens of thousands who camped out in Athens. Moreover, the refugees in Thebes did not dwell in a port that was a hub to the thousands of possible disease carriers in the eastern Mediterranean. Neither was it besieged and lacking open access to the countryside nor was it even much visited by travelers or traders. Overcrowding was the catalyst for the plague, but Athens was also a magnet for a wide diversity of peoples who might be disease carriers in a way not true of other hard-pressed landlocked states during the war.

Modern militaries have concocted devilish brews of supergerms as would-be weapons of mass destruction against their enemies because they are lethal, cheap, of small weight and size, and can nullify the effect of conventional weaponry or superior manpower. Diseases also instill terror beyond their proven ability to kill, inasmuch as the agents of death are far more indiscriminate, invisible, and, as the poet Hesiod says, silent.

Disaster was not supposed to strike Athens, at least at the moment. This was a city, after all, that had trumped adversity repeatedly. Athens had twice survived incineration by the Persians a half century earlier, during the invasion and occupation of 480–479, only in the war’s aftermath to evolve from ruins into the cultural center of Greece. In the postbellum tensions with Sparta, the citizenry had turned out en masse to build the Long Walls in a fevered state of anxiety, thus completing a vast circuit around Athens and Piraeus of over seventeen miles, four miles greater in circumference even than the famous ramparts that protected Constantinople.

For twenty years Pericles had mobilized 20,000 laborers to create his architectural masterpieces on the Acropolis, the Parthenon and Propylaea, as well as massive public buildings and fortifications in the agora and the Piraeus. Despite all the worries about the supposedly terrible grand army of the Peloponnese, Athens had ridden out the first invasion of 431 well enough, and had watched the enemy trudge back home without a sense of accomplishment.³

The contrast of previous Periclean grandness with the human depravity induced by the plague drew Thucydides’ interest in the disease and prompted his riveting account of the effects of the contagion in the second book of his history.

Himself a survivor of the infection, Thucydides juxtaposed a graphic narrative of the outbreak with Pericles’ solemn funeral oration over the first year’s dead soldiers, an encomium that had reminded Athenians of their city’s eminence. Apparently, the historian wished to emphasize the capriciousness of fate and the unpredictability of war—and so impress upon his readers the brutal nature of man when stripped of his precious culture and civilization, so vaunted in Pericles’ funeral speech, which had been delivered shortly before the plague’s outbreak. Thucydides believed that deleterious effects from the plague rippled out for years, sharply reducing the war-making potential of the Athenian military:

After reading Thucydides’ macabre account of the social consequences of the plague, it is unclear, as the historian perhaps intended, whether the Athenians remained the Renaissance men just praised by Pericles in his famous funeral oration or were utter savages who fought with one another over funeral pyres to burn their dead. Clearly the few hundred men who fell during the first year of the war in patrolling the countryside and during sea duty off the Peloponnese earned praise and public funerals, while the next year thousands of men, women, and children died miserably in anonymous droves in the street, often rotting without burial or cremation.

Thucydides had earlier described the miserable conditions inside the city that were prompted by the monthlong evacuation of 431. Agrarian families had probably then reoccupied their farms for a year, only to trek back into the city during the next spring in about the same numbers. Most arrivals had no permanent shelter but camped out in open spaces and sanctuaries. Shacks dotted the base of the Acropolis. Some refugees lived in towers atop the city’s lengthy fortifications. Conditions were probably worse during these initial first two invasions, at least before the city made arrangements to construct more permanent shelters in the four-mile corridor between the city proper and the fortifications at the Piraeus. Athens, like Los Angeles, lies in a basin surrounded by three large mountain ranges. The sea lies almost five miles away, and there are only small rivers that flow near the metropolitan area—all of these conditions making it difficult to dump sewage in any nearby moving body of water that could wash effluent out to sea.

Shanties offered no real relief from the summer heat and stood in stark contrast to the abandoned spacious country homes of the more affluent refugees. Later Plato would argue that Greeks should have two residences, urban and rural, to reinforce the social fabric of the polis. But he was reacting against the turmoil of wartime Attica, when estate owners were reduced to refugee status under Periclean strategy, and the urban poor scarcely knew what life in the long-suffering countryside was like. By the time the war broke out, over 20,000 Athenians had almost nothing to do with farming.⁵

Those who once had the nicest estates in Attica within a few days occupied the worst, which explains the particularly hostile opposition to Pericles’ policies from refugee landowners. Aristophanes remarked often on the ridiculous scene in wartime Athens, a city brimming with exasperated rural folk at every juncture who resorted to squatting in birds’ nests and casks. Much of the turmoil resulted from this radical change in fortune: the wealthy were now on the bottom rail and veritable visitors in their own city—guests of the radical poor, who wanted the war, were losing little in it, and might see profit accrue from nonstop naval service.⁶

The outbreak of the mystifying disease occurred sometime in late May 430. Athenians started to die mysteriously in droves during the forty days the Spartans ravaged, the longest of all the Peloponnesian invasions, which might have put even greater stress on the cramped refugees in the city. Thucydides’ description is somewhat vague about the chronology of the outbreak. He says only that the plague (called a nosos) descended upon the city while the Spartans were ravaging in Attica.

The disease probably prompted them to cut short their devastation; they heard frightening rumors of the havoc inside the walls and from the countryside could see clouds of funeral smoke in the city. Still, the second invasion turned out to be the longest of all the Spartan inroads—forty days in all, in which they covered the most ground in Attica and sought to do thoroughly what they had not completed the year before. Most likely fear of approaching the rich Athenian plain near the disease-ridden city induced the Spartans to roam far to the south to devastate the seaside districts of southern Attica and the hinterland around the mines at Laurium.

The Spartans had learned that the invasion of 431 had done nothing to weaken Athens or its empire, and had figured on a much longer campaign the next year. This sojourn of tens of thousands of rural folk inside the city also indirectly helped to spread the disease, which in turn had the paradoxical effect of cutting short what must have been planned as the most devastating and comprehensive ravaging campaign of the Archidamian War.⁷

The fact that the disease broke out “not many days after” the Spartans neared the plain and was raging by the time they left suggests that less than a month after the disease first touched Athens, it had reached epidemic proportions. Indeed, it swept the city, and even inadvertently infected the Athenian fleet. Disease-carrying but symptom-silent fighters set sail from the Piraeus to raid the Peloponnese and to press home the siege at Potidaea in the north, in part to be away from the misery of the infected city. When they attacked the Peloponnese town of Epidaurus in reprisal for the Spartan-led invasion, local inhabitants were said to have been sickened from proximity to the soldiers.⁸

Many contemporary Athenians believed that the plague was no accident. Surely, they thought, it was a direct result of deliberate Spartan efforts to infect them in a time of war. There was something to their paranoid logic: plagues of such virulence were almost unknown in classical Greece, which prompted Athenians to consider almost any explanation to account for such a terrible and rare occurrence. Some Athenians may have remembered folktales of their hero Solon, who a century earlier had easily stormed the nearby city of Cirrha after putting a powerful purgative into the town’s stream water, thereby sickening enough of the defenders to cause capitulation. The Athenians themselves may have polluted the city’s water supply when they departed ahead of Xerxes’ occupying troops in late summer 480. In a hot Mediterranean climate, where water was always scarce, enemy pollution of fountains, cisterns, and rivers was a nearly constant fear during times of war. Military handbooks would later recommend such contamination of water supplies as an effective way of stymieing hostile forces by bringing on either illness or thirst. In Sicily the Athenians themselves later sought to ruin the terra-cotta pipes that conveyed water to the besieged city of Syracuse.⁹

So the outbreak of 430 seemed to coincide roughly with the arrival of enemy troops in Attica. Odd timing, was it not? The conspiracists had even more ammunition. The disease first attacked those who drew water from cisterns in the port at Piraeus that were rumored to be poisoned by the enemy. The outbreak never infected the cities of the Peloponnese, instead following both Athenian troops up north besieging Potidaea and sailors off the Peloponnese. The crowds did not bother to ponder the obvious criteria of overcrowding at Athens and its singular congestion; rather, in despair, they must have thought something along the lines of “We are sick, they are not; therefore, they must be responsible.”

After news of the outbreak, some communities in the Peloponnese apparently began to build impressive temples to their gods precisely because they had been spared this awful nightmare. Wisely, the Peloponnesians deliberately stayed away the next year and instead spent the spring of 429 besieging Plataea, on the other side of Mount Kithairon, keeping a mountain range between them and the infectious disease.

In prophecies, the epidemic was connected with the fulfillment of an old, hotly debated warning that “a Dorian war will come and with it a plague or a famine.” In his denial of these theories, Thucydides nevertheless has an understandable propensity to record the popular myth of Spartan culpability, the idea of water contamination, the resurrection of old prophecies, and the general de facto immunity of the Spartans from the disease, almost as if he is not quite sure himself whether such a natural event that was so obviously militarily efficacious could be entirely accidental.¹⁰

The Limitations of Medicine

What, then, exactly was the disease? Today the generic word “plague” conjures up bubonic plague, especially the terrifying epidemics of the Black Death in Medieval Europe and Renaissance Italy, and the images of fleas, rats, and horrific pustules. In fact, the use of the English term is inexact inasmuch as the Athenian epidemic was most likely not bubonic plague, despite disagreements about its etiology.

Classical scholars and physicians who collate Thucydides’ account with other plague narratives and contemporary symptomatology, have spent over a century in bitter disputes about the nature of the epidemic. At various times they have postulated a mass outbreak of typhus, typhoid fever, measles, influenza, smallpox, scarlet fever, or—somewhat more fancifully—various hemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, leptospirosis, tularemia, anthrax, dengue fever, and ergotism.¹¹

The arguments are complex. Often analysis hinges on the esoteric. Few can agree whether the plague-bearing species of rat (there seems to be no word in Greek for Rattus rattus) even existed in ancient Greece or whether the ancient word for “heart” (kariia) sometimes really meant the mouth of the stomach or, reaching even farther, whether surviving stone busts of Thucydides himself reveal the telltale pockmarks of smallpox infection. Although Thucydides provides detailed descriptions of an array of terrible symptoms—fever, inflammation, eye problems, sore and bloody throat, sneezing, hoarseness, chest pain, cough, intestinal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, skin eruptions and ulcers, thirst and dehydration, general weakness and fatigue, gangrene in the extremities, permanent brain damage—it is not easy for modern medical sleuths to connect the precise meaning of his Greek vocabulary with either a formal ancient or a contemporary medical lexicon.

Since ancient medicine was empirically based—it could offer diagnoses and prognoses based on past careful clinical observation of symptoms, rather than through scientific identification of microbes at the cellular level—there was no formal ancient catalog of diseases anything like our own clinical classifications of viruses and bacteria. Perhaps the most likely explanation of the plague, if it was not a form of malignant confluent smallpox, is that it was caused by an organism now extinct, or at least one that has evolved over two millennia in ways that make it no longer deadly.

Any infectious disease that achieves about a 30 percent lethality rate among a pristine population probably provides immunity to survivors. If it depends on frequent person-to-person contact, it needs a fresh supply of thousands of urban hosts to spread and survive. Thus the plague may well have burned itself out in the singular conditions of wartime Athens. As Thucydides notes, it returned only sporadically after its initial deadly appearance, even when the conditions inside Athens once again became as bleak as those of 430, especially after the Spartan occupation of Decelea (413).

In 404, for example, after the debacle of Aegospotami and the destruction of the Athenian fleet, which brought the war to a close, Lysander’s enormous 200-ship fleet scoured the Aegean, sending tens of thousands of expatriate Athenians back home to a city shut in by the continual presence of the Spartan king Agis at the nearby fort of Decelea and another army marching northward from the Peloponnese. Contemporary sources report fears of widespread famine and starvation at Athens at war’s end, but not another outbreak of the plague.

A quarter century later, the lack of a similar outbreak among the hungry, cooped-up Athenians at war’s end might suggest either that there were enough plague survivors in the city with immunity to prevent an easy flare-up or that after years of evacuation the Athenians were more adept at accommodating sudden demands on housing, garbage removal, water, and sewage treatment. In any case, it was probably the vain hope of the victorious admiral Lysander that a cramped and besieged Athens in 404 might re-create the horrific nightmare of 430, which a quarter century earlier had proved to Spartan advantage.¹²

The outbreak seems to have originated in Africa. Then the plague made its way northward from Ethiopia into Egypt and Libya. From there it settled into various parts of the Persian Empire before arriving at the Piraeus. Greece and the surrounding eastern Mediterranean were just days away by sea from the millions in Africa and Asia, and a natural nexus for tropical disease. Most plagues in Greek and Roman times arose in the south and usually broke out during the summer, presumably when microbial life best survived outdoors amid stagnant water, foul sewage, active insects, and rotting food. Still, the Athenians had never seen an epidemic of this magnitude, even though less virulent forms of similar maladies had apparently swept the Aegean Islands, especially Lemnos, in the immediately prior decades.

The Infected

Although Thucydides obviously drew on his own clinical experience, and recognized that the disease affected individuals in different ways, he sought to provide a generic description of the infection. Typically, the dreaded signs started with a violent heat in the head, the eyes quickly burning and turning red. Both the throat and tongue appeared bloody and became malodorous.

After these initial symptoms, those infected soon began sneezing and became hoarse, maladies shortly accompanied by severe coughing. Once the stomach was affected, the sick began vomiting bile of all sorts. At the same time they experienced dry heaves and violent spasms. These convulsions sometimes immediately followed the initial symptoms, but on other occasions they became manifest only much later. In some patients the infection seemed to attack both the respiratory and intestinal tracts almost simultaneously, which explains in part the terror of a disease that could strike so comprehensively. In an age when vaccination has rid us of the worst infectious diseases of our past, it is hard to imagine a worse sort of malady, as if a modern patient experienced the flu, dysentery, measles, and pneumonia all at once.

The ill appeared neither warm to the touch nor especially pale in appearance. Instead, the body was flush and livid, with an outbreak of small blisters and sores. The unfortunate afflicted soon felt so hot that they could not endure even the slightest touch of clothing or linens. Many often found it preferable to remain naked. In their last stages, the more aggrieved patients often wanted to throw themselves into cold water. Some jumped into cisterns in vain hopes of quenching a terrible thirst, a fact prompting some nineteenth-century scholars to wrongly identify the plague with rabies.

Still, if most people believed that tainted water had caused the outbreak, in their death throes they felt no compunction about plunging into it for immediate relief. Whatever the actual etiology of the disease, common medicine of this time did not grasp the danger of passing microbes from person to person by contaminating common drinking water.

Worse still, there was no respite through sleep. The victims were restless and suffered constant insomnia. Yet even at the apex of the affliction, most sufferers did not immediately perish; many endured until the seventh to ninth day, when they succumbed to fever and exhaustion. Even when the more hearty passed that point of crisis, many subsequently experienced both ulceration and watery diarrhea, which, for these survivors, ultimately resulted in exhaustion, dehydration, and death.

For the remainder who held out even after the intestinal attacks, the infection descended into the extremities. Once there it sometimes rendered the genitals, fingertips, and toes deformed and useless. Others were left blind or with brain damage. Thucydides suggests that the deformed and maimed limped around Athens for decades after the initial outbreak of 430. They were perhaps still visible, like ghosts after the war, when he returned to finish his history after his twenty-year exile—prompting us also to wonder exactly how the historian himself struggled with the residual effects of his own bout with the malady while composing his work. Although the mortality rate stymied Athenian military operations for a decade, there is no real evidence of a similar toll on Athens’ war-making ability from so many weakened and maimed survivors.

Careful nursing or simple neglect—it seemed not to matter much to the sick, since so many died anyway. In such a miserable climate, the first symptoms of the plague usually sent the afflicted into a profound depression. Only those who had survived the disease and acquired resistance showed any real pity for the suffering—because of both their trust in their newfound immunity and a shared empathy acquired from their own ordeal.

We moderns must put the infection in even a wider context of suffering to comprehend fully the dire predicament of ancient Athens in 430. Most of us when sick with a fever go to bed, and feel pangs of real worry with the onset of secondary symptoms such as vomiting or diarrhea. Despite familial care, a doctor’s visit, patient caregivers, and plentiful medications, postillness fatigue can affect us for days or even weeks. But imagine such sickness in a time of war. While enemies at the gates were trying to kill the infected’s family, he clung to life in delirium. Medicine, clean water, toilets, bedding—all the appurtenances of modern convalescent care—were not available to ailing Athenians. To the terror of enemy soldiers, add the daily trauma from the deaths of children, siblings, and spouses, attributable to a disease of unknown cause, duration, cure, or prophylaxis. Amid such calamity, someone must provide food, tend the ill, take away the bodies, and keep the ramparts manned and the sorties sent out.

In such a chaotic climate, had the Spartans themselves not feared infection during the second invasion of 430 and assaulted the walls, or had they returned the next year rather than gone to Plataea, they might well have taken the city, given the skeleton garrisons and the general despair at Athens. On the contrary, Spartan worries over manpower—especially the sense of how precious and few were the state’s hoplite class of elite, full-citizen infantrymen—made the army go home earlier and not return until its soldiers were sure the chance of catching the malady was over.¹³

Even the half dead soon fell prostrate in the streets and fountains. Their last visions were the moldering remains of friends and family and the realization that they too would soon experience such a grisly fate. How could a city under siege dispose of thousands of corpses within its walls? Recent excavations of a proposed Athenian subway station near the ancient Kerameikos cemetery revealed one such mass grave and over a thousand tombs quite near the surface. In some cases dozens of skeletons were found thrown helter-skelter into large shafts, apparently without the normal care and usual offerings accorded the dead. The evidence of hasty group interment suggested to the excavators that the subway engineers had stumbled upon one of the many mass burials necessitated by the epidemic of 430, something apparently not repeated in the subsequent twenty-five-hundred-year history of the city.¹⁴

A similar nightmare of mass burials on a far larger scale in the ancient world occurred during the bubonic plague at Constantinople a millennium later, during the reign of Justinian, in the sixth century A.D. There the cemeteries soon filled, causing rotting bodies to pile up in the streets and along the seashore. Even huge pits that were dug with the intention of holding 70,000 corpses soon overflowed, causing the dead to be thrown into towers on the walls.¹⁵

At Athens, within days the responsible officials were unable to cart away, much less bury or burn, the mounting piles of corpses. Individuals lacked the resources to care for their fallen family members. Sometimes they stole fuel or entire pyres—or heaped their own lost ones onto the biers of others. Dissension broke out. Many of the longtime residents of the city blamed the newcomers from the countryside, whose numbers and rustic habits purportedly might explain the sudden onset of a novel pestilence. Such tension may well have simmered for decades, laying the foundation for political upheaval some twenty years later.¹⁶

The scene of rotting corpses and bodies unburied throughout the city made an indelible impression on the Athenians. Just six years later, in the aftermath of the battle of Delium (424), the victorious Thebans allowed the Athenian dead from the battle to rot while haggling over concessions, an outrage that encouraged Euripides to condemn it a year later in his Suppliant Women (423). In similar fashion, the hysteria that swept the city after reports that the bodies of Athenian seamen were not picked up after the victory at Arginusae (406) prompted a trial of the triumphant generals. That suicidal act seems an inexplicable madness until one remembers that the Athenians never really recovered from the horrific images and memories ingrained in that most disastrous year of 430. And on Sicily, corpses were often left to decompose in the fields, the bones of the dead picked up only months later, when hostilities ceased.¹⁷

Culture and Mass Death

Why did Thucydides devote such a prominent place in a supposedly military history to discussion of the disease, careful to chart in detail the descent into barbarism on the part of the Athenians? Besides his own recovery from the malady, he had both wider historical and philosophical interests. First, as a product of the Athenian enlightenment of the mid-fifth century that sought to explain natural phenomena through scientific rather than religious or folk exegesis, Thucydides, the didactic historian, wanted to demonstrate to his readers his own faith in the rationalist method of identifying symptoms. Careful clinical observation might lead to a diagnosis of some previously known illness. Only that way could the rationalist in turn provide a prognosis for the patient. So he wished “to set out its symptoms by which it might be known should it ever break out once more.”¹⁸

Thucydides often takes special pains to dismiss false knowledge, such as the preposterous idea that recovery for the lucky ensured their future immunity from all other illnesses. He also rejects a supernatural cause for the epidemic. And he ridicules those who sought to explain the outbreak by associating it with the old prophecy about a Dorian invasion. Again, overcrowding, not the gods, caused the disease. Human activity, not divine dispensation, was the culprit.

Like his later famous descriptions of the civil war on Corcyra, the murder at Mycalessus of Boeotian schoolboys by Thracian mercenaries, and the final destruction of the Athenian army on Sicily, the Thucydidean discourse on the plague becomes a reminder of how close humans always are to savagery—and how precious is their salvation won through law, religion, science, and custom. This thin veneer of civilization is a universal constant, one immune to the arrogance of modernism that professes that technology has at last nullified the age-old pathologies of human nature. The historian’s skill at dissecting the etiology of the disease serves also as a reminder that his larger history is equally empirical and didactic, lacking the romance and folklore of Herodotus or the epic poets.

The plague infected Athens with utter lawlessness, what Thucydides called anomia. Men, convinced that the end was near anyway, “showed a more careless daring.” When death hovered over all, most lost the old self-control and instead “turned themselves over to the pleasures of the moment.” They forgot fear of both law and the gods, Thucydides adds, because no one could determine whether righteous conduct provided a defense against the disease. But since a horrible death came indiscriminately and without warning, people lived for the day and thus often acted criminally in order to obtain some “pleasure” from life.¹⁹

The plague reflected a theme found throughout the history: a horrific liberating effect is likewise brought on by the conundrum of wars, making men resort to things that they would otherwise never consider during their rational calculations in peace and tranquillity, when they have so much to lose. And because Athens was Greece’s intellectual center and entertained pretensions of singular humanity and a self-proclaimed elevated culture, the pandemonium that followed from the plague reminds us that civilization can be lost anywhere and at any time.

Furthermore, because the outbreak occurred in the second year of the twenty-seven-year-long war, a threshold had been crossed: once the Athenians had been reduced to such straits, it was nearly impossible to recover their moral bearings in subsequent years. Criminality and savagery become accustomed, or rather institutionalized, behaviors, almost as if the Athenians, once freed from decades of civilizing influences, could not shake off the newfound habits of brutality. The death of Pericles during the epidemic is emblematic of the Athenian descent, the perishing of the last singular statesman who might have had the intellect and moral authority to steady the Athenians amid the savagery. To Thucydides, the wages of the plague are not just misery, death, and disability. They are the lawless precursors to more deliberate policies that follow in a variety of brutal Athenian actions taken against rebellious allies and neutral states.

Thus, in a key passage Thucydides says the plague “first” introduced into the city a greater lawlessness. He suggests that many of the awful things that Athens did in the later years of the war were inculcated between 430 and 426, when the citizenry was in peril of being wiped out. If this analysis is true, then the disease also had a profound effect on the tactics and methods by which Athens conducted the Peloponnesian War—a fact perhaps lost on those military historians who underappreciate the cultural ripples of disease that were felt across the empire, from Mytilene to Melos.²⁰

The Most Deadly Enemy

Nevertheless, Thucydides’ ultimate concerns remain military: the incredible losses to the plague almost immediately altered the tenuous balance of power and, with it, the entire course and strategy of the war. After another, though less virulent, return of the disease in 427–426, the historian flat out concludes, “Nothing did more damage to Athenian power than the plague”—a sweeping retrospective assessment that would seem to include battle defeats at Delium (424) and Mantinea, the disaster at Syracuse (413), the depredations from the permanent Spartan fort at Decelea (413–404), and a number of key Athenian setbacks at sea (411–404). While Thucydides states that there were two severe onsets of the disease, he also says, “At no time did it completely leave,” suggesting that for nearly four years Athenians were dying from the mysterious outbreak.²¹

Still, one of the great mysteries of the war remains the precise effect of the plague on the war-making capability of Athens. Thucydides does not exaggerate the calamity that befell Athens, but it is not clear how the epidemic altered Athenian tactics, other than by diverting Spartan ravagers in 429 from the Attic hinterland to nearby Plataea and depleting Athenian manpower over the next few years. Yet if nothing else, the plague raises a number of what-ifs about what Athens might have done without the sudden loss of tens of thousands of its citizens.

The historian follows his general summation of the epidemic’s ill effects with the explicit statement that 4,400 Athenian hoplite infantry “in the ranks” perished, and another “300 cavalrymen,” as well as “an indeterminable number” of the common people.²² What do these vast numbers tell us about the ultimate harm to the Athenians’ ability to wage war?

At the outbreak of the fighting Athens probably had a male citizenry of somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000, about half of which in theory qualified for service as hoplite heavy infantrymen. These roughly 15,000 to 20,000 hoplites were augmented by noncitizen resident aliens; they mostly served on garrison duty and could be pressed into the phalanx in emergencies. Thus the entire army was also broken down in terms of the frontline (13,000) and reserve (16,000) hoplites. If 4,400 hoplite fatalities “in the ranks” refers only to losses from the 13,000 citizens who were prepared to go into battle, then over a third of all such infantrymen were felled within four years—or a 34 percent loss among the best troops the city could muster. In relative terms, the plague turned out to be the Athenians’ ancient equivalent of a Somme or Stalingrad.

In addition, the 300 lost horsemen meant that 30 percent of Athens’ precious 1,000–man cavalry was now also gone. There is no information on the effect of the disease upon horses stabled in the city or whether sorties could continue against Peloponnesian ravagers who had headed south, past the Athenian plain. The only defense against enemy patrols in Attica was the Athenian cavalry, which in a single year lost more horsemen than its aggregate casualties over three decades. Even nine years after the plague departed, the Athenians still found themselves critically short of cavalry in Sicily, at just the moment when mounted patrols were to become even more crucial back in Attica.

Thucydides adds that the expeditionary force besieging the northern city of Potidaea likewise became infected. Even though the Athenians would eventually take the city, they lost 1,050 hoplites out of 4,000 in a mere 40 days (26 percent). The percentage of fatalities and the rapid six-week spread of the infection at Potidaea were eerily similar to the effects of the disease at Athens proper.

Whatever the causative organism, the epidemic was an especially lethal one to have resulted in such high rates of mortality among healthy adult men. Infected Athenians probably died in greater proportions of the population than did residents of medieval London during the worst years of the Black Death. Sickness always has a certain affinity for war, a time when food is short, stress is widespread, and soldiers—like Hagnon’s Athenian besiegers at Potidaea (432–430)—are forced to bivouac in outdoors tents and barracks. Some of the great plagues of the ancient world—the Antonine epidemic that killed as many as one-third of the population in certain places in Greece, Italy, Asia Minor, and imperial Egypt, as well as others during the reigns of the emperors Decius (A.D. 249–251) and Gallus (A.D. 251–253)—started first in military camps and before they had finished nearly ruined Roman armies.

Besides these explicit figures of an aggregate 5,750 crack Athenian troops lost, one can extrapolate from the remarkably consistent percentages of fatalities (around 30 percent) to reach some type of figure for the reserve hoplites (about 4,800 dead of the 16,000?) and the “indeterminable number” of thetes, metics, women, children, and slaves. The latter combined group of Attic residents might have totaled at least 200,000. (In 1920, before the arrival of the great exodus from Asia Minor, the Greek census reported that Attica’s total population was 501,615, excluding the metropolitan and industrial heart of Athens and the Piraeus.)

If the people of ancient Attica suffered deaths in numbers commensurate to the percentages of males in the cavalry and army—perhaps well over 10,000—then at least 60,000 additional civilians also perished. In terms of annual wages lost that would have been otherwise garnered by these stricken soldiers and laborers, the death of somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 adult males of all statuses meant an immediate shortfall of well over 1,000 talents to their families—or the yearly equivalent of the entire reserve fund that was set aside for the protection of the city from an Athenian fleet, a sum in contemporary American dollars approximating $500 million in lost economic activity. Athens’ financial troubles in the ensuing decades of the war were due not just to skyrocketing military expenditures and rebellious allies but also to the loss or disablement of thousands of workers in Attica at the very start of the war.

The deaths of another 40,000 to 50,000 women, slaves, and children proved catastrophic. Aside from their essential role in the Athenian economy, even during wartime such “noncombatants” often played a pivotal role. At sieges, for example, women cooks were invaluable in keeping the defending garrison alive and healthy. The loss of such caregivers no doubt explains the high numbers of deaths of those who otherwise might have been fed and nursed through the illness. The Athenian phalanx could not march in full force into Megara or Boeotia without servile baggage carriers, while thousands of slaves were beginning to row in the Athenian imperial fleet, whose triremes required somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 sailors.

The plague probably killed at least five times more frontline hoplites than were lost at the bloody battle of Delium. Its aggregate cost even exceeded the number of those who perished in the notorious catastrophe at Sicily. None of these fatality figures includes the thousands who were maimed and crippled by the disease—or, even more catastrophically, the effects on Athenian demography for years to come when so many of child-bearing age were swept away. Pausanias, for example, wrote that over thirty years later the postwar Athenians begged off from joining the Panhellenic expedition to Asia Minor on the pretext that they were still suffering from the vast manpower losses of the war and plague.²³

The sudden death of so many hoplites also had more immediate repercussions in the following years. Athens would field only 7,000 hoplites at the battle of Delium in 424. They sent fewer than 1,000 to the even more critical battle of Mantinea in 418—thousands fewer hoplites than the 10,000 Athenians who fought at Marathon in 490. Both defeats were close-run battles. Three or four thousand more Athenian infantrymen might have made the difference between victory and rout. Had the Athenian alliance won at either critical engagement, the entire war might have ended on terms favorable to Athens with the departure of Boeotia from the enemy alliance, and a new democratic Peloponnesian axis encircling an emasculated Spartan state.

So the death of some 10,000 frontline and reserve hoplites, coupled with 300 horsemen, along with ongoing sieges and naval patrols, suggests that Athens was unable to commit to any serious land efforts for years. The disaster might also explain why there was no hoplite campaign such as even the halfhearted Athenian efforts at Delium or Mantinea initiated during the five years immediately after 429. Instead, the Athenians were paranoid about revolts among the subjects of the empire, in part due to losses from the plague and the impression that the city was too beleaguered to enforce its overseas rule.²⁴

Something had gone drastically wrong in just a few years. The army that had once put 16,000 hoplites in the field to ravage the Megarid at the beginning of the war, seven years later at Delium was less than half that size. For Athens to defeat either of the qualitatively better Theban or Peloponnesian armies, numerical superiority, not parity, was essential. If the thetic class who manned the fleet perished from disease at aggregate percentages commensurate to the hoplites and cavalrymen (i.e., about 30 percent), then of some 20,000 citizen rowers, perhaps 6,000 to 7,000 also died over the course of the epidemic—or enough sailors to man 30 to 35 triremes outright. That is more than the total of all the Athenian dead at the naval victory of Salamis fifty years earlier, an event that had kicked off the great Athenian half century.

It was not until 415, nearly fifteen years after the initial outbreak, that the Athenian military was restored to even tolerable strength. For example, in a discussion of the preparations to invade Sicily in 416, Thucydides explains that the population was confident in their preparations since “the city had just recovered from the plague and the long war,” adding that financial capital had been restored during the Peace of Nicias “and a number of young men had grown up.”²⁵

Tally up all the cavalrymen, hoplites, and thetes who perished, add in the adult male metics, and assume that a like percentage of women and children, as well as slaves of all ages and both sexes, died: somewhere around 70,000 to 80,000 residents of Attica suddenly were gone. Most probably succumbed within a few months after the initial outbreak of 430. Thus a quarter to a third of the entire resident population vanished before the war really started in earnest. Yet because the plague was a natural, rather than human-induced catastrophe, the historian Thucydides devoted only a fraction of his attention to the epidemic in comparison to the later Sicilian fiasco, even though twice as many Athenians died in the streets of Athens as perished later in Sicily.

Crisis in Confidence

If modern scholars do not always factor the plague’s losses into discussions of the military history of the Archidamian War, the Athenians, at least, knew that their city had been irreparably damaged. They certainly saw their army and naval strength in terms of “before” and “after” the epidemic. Thucydides remarked that the invasion of the Megarid during the first autumn of the war was the greatest display of Athenian infantry strength in its history, inasmuch as it “had not yet been stricken with the plague.” Pericles concluded of the first year of outbreak that it had done more than any other calamity to ruin the spirit of Athens. He implies that his initial policy would have been far more successful had not the pestilence confounded his carefully wrought strategy. Even during the outbreak Athenians were concluding that there had never been anything quite like it, and that the disease had radically altered the course of the war.

Similarly, the leaders of the revolt on Mytilene begged for Spartan help, with the argument that just two years after the outbreak “Athens had been ruined by the plague and the costs of the war.” For Thucydides, who survived the disease, the ripples of the plague were to be felt everywhere: decreased military capability, political unrest, imperial revolt, changed strategy, and, worst of all, death of the only Athenian leader who seemed to be able to keep the factious citizenry together during the dark hours of war.²⁶

Pericles, worn out by age and the loss of two of his sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, to the disease, himself at last crumbled. The disaster hit him hard. Pericles lost a sister as well as “the greatest number of his relatives and friends.” He died two and a half years into the war, after a drawn-out and debilitating bout with the illness, a detail omitted in Thucydides’ famous obituary of the great leader. His loss at the outset of the conflict—inasmuch as he had more or less guided Athens as its most important statesman for nearly thirty years—left the city leaderless. Athens was unsure whether Pericles’ strategic view was flawed and had led to the disaster of the plague or, in fact, was still viable and after the city’s recovery would eventually lead to victory.²⁷

If Thucydides acknowledged that the second generation of Spartan leaders, including Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander, were more skilled and audacious than old Archidamus, he seemed to think that Pericles’ successors, such as Cleon and Alcibiades, were only more reckless and amoral. Moderns sometimes bristle at the “great man” theory of history, the nineteenth-century notion that events can be shaped by the peculiar careers of individuals rather than long-term and more insidious demographic, social, and cultural processes. But few would argue with the idea that had Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, or Hitler succumbed to smallpox in early 1939, World War II might have had a far different course, if not outcome, altogether. Throughout the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, the death of prominent individuals seems to have had a profound effect on the course of events: the speech of old Pagondas alone convincing the Boeotians to head for Delium; the end of both Brasidas and Cleon at Amphipolis leading to the Peace of Nicias; Lamachus’ unfortunate demise above Syracuse, which helped doom the expedition; the appearance of Lysander, which galvanized the Spartan fleet; and, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Cyrus the Younger’s death at Cunaxa, which left the victorious 10,000 in the position of the defeated, despite their having prevailed on the battlefield.²⁸

Thucydides recovered after his bout with the disease. But it is unclear whether the ordeal helped shape his largely pessimistic view of human events or left him with permanent physical handicaps that hampered his generalship and thus led to his exile. Surely his ideas about the importance of culture in harnessing nature had something to do with his brush with death amid a sea of stricken thousands who randomly perished about him. In some sense, his dark impressions of the war formed in the second year of the fighting, when the plague quite literally determined the tone and theme of its own subsequent chronicler.

To make good the losses of the plague, Athens looked to a number of desperate measures, which had incalculable effects in eroding the cultural cohesion of the city. Later, popular myth circulated the idea that casual polygamy was de facto allowed for the first time. Luminaries like Socrates and Euripides, out of patriotic fervor, purportedly had additional children with second wives.²⁹ Changes in nationality laws now allowed citizens’ rights to those born in Attica to one Athenian parent, whereas the previous law had required two. Pericles had once reminded the Athenians that, as in the past, their citizenship was a rare honor and a privilege. Yet in postplague Athens it was the quantity, not necessarily the pedigree, of people that now mattered if the city was to survive the war. With the death of his two legitimate sons, Pericles immediately sought legislation to extend citizenship to his surviving illegitimate son, Pericles the Younger.³⁰

An ancient community that professes faith in an adolescent science—like an enlightened fifth-century Athens—has real trouble in accounting for naturally occurring calamity when its own novel god Reason fails. Later stories told of visits to plague-ridden Athens by the legendary father of medicine, Hippocrates himself. Some ancient accounts reflect scientific theories that weather conditions were the causative agents, or perhaps polluted grain brought on by unseasonably moist conditions. Even though so-called miasmatic conjectures—the air of 430 was contaminated by mysterious gases, dead bodies, or stagnant water—were apparently common explanations for the outbreak, Thucydides did not think them worthy of discussion in any detail. But many others did. The historian Diodorus, for example, argued that the crowding had produced “polluted” air that sickened the citizenry.³¹

Yet while “air” has little clinical connection with infectious disease, the ancients were not entirely wrong in their empirical suppositions. Many viruses and bacteria circulate through tiny airborne droplets expelled through coughing. In addition, stagnant water can explain outbreaks of ill health, inasmuch as pools are ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes that breed malaria (“bad air”).

Still, if Hippocratic science could not adequately explain, much less ameliorate, the effects of the plague, if Greek cosmologists and natural philosophers offered not a clue about the true etiology of the epidemic, and if Socratic ethics failed to explain why for the good of the city one should be civic-minded amid such calamity, then even a sophisticated people like the classical Athenians—Pericles included—could turn to cult and superstition in preference to both science and traditional Olympian religion. What had Zeus, Apollo, or Athena done to stop the plague? No more than had Hippocrates and the doctors. Thus, in both Thucydides’ history and Aristophanes’ contemporary comedies, offbeat prophets and soothsayers fill the vacuum and find a renaissance during the plague years among a disillusioned populace.

The biographer Plutarch thought the spiritual odyssey of Pericles himself offered an object lesson about the descent from science to false knowledge. Traditionalists had parodied the Athenian leader for much of his earlier career for being a rationalist, a student of the natural philosophers Anaxagoras and Protagoras. Silly stories circulated about him idling his time away in dialectics with Protagoras, attempting to discover whether a javelin or its thrower was morally responsible for the accidental death of its target. Yet in his last days, even Pericles, Athens’ wartime leader, was reduced to pathetic false notions, and so wore an amulet around his neck to save him from the enfeebling disease. Before this terrible war was over, the Athenians would see things even worse than their great rationalist general reduced to embracing superstition on his deathbed.³²

In the aftermath of the disease, the cult of Asclepius, along with that of Hygieia (“Health”), was introduced from Epidaurus in the Peloponnese to Athens sometime around 420, as if worshipping these newer gods of medical cures on a regular basis might save the city from further cycles of epidemics. The so-called Asclepieion (“House of Asclepius”) was constructed directly to the west of the great theater of Dionysus, beneath the Acropolis, a bitter reminder that in addition to public drama Athens now needed divine medical relief. Meanwhile, on the border between Boeotia and Attica at the Oropus, the legendary hero Amphiaraos soon also won his own cult sanctuary, in hopes that such a healing deity might provide prophylaxis from further infection.

There was more worry that the gods were angry. Just four years after the outbreak, and shortly after a return of the disease in 426, the Athenians took the drastic step of purifying the island of Delos—the legendary center of the old Greek Delian League—in hopes of regaining the favor of Apollo, who traditionally warded off disease. Under the leadership of Nicias they removed all the graves from the island and set up annual games in the god’s honor.³³

More untraditional cults from the East—the Phrygian mountain goddess, Cybele, Sabazius, the Thracian Dionysus, and Asiatic Bacchus—would soon be imported by the beleaguered Athenians, hedging their bets in case the traditional Olympians, like Apollo, Athena, and Zeus, could bring no relief in the future. Yet for all the rise in supernatural explanations and their collective hysteria, even in their worse moments the Athenians never resorted to human sacrifice to mollify the gods or engaged in witch trials or ritual scapegoating in hopes of alleviating their misery. Nevertheless, just as Athens was reeling from outside enemies, inside the walls of the city began the greatest spiritual transformation and period of religious uncertainty in the history of the city. All subsequent campaigning at Mytilene, Melos, Scione, and Sicily must be seen in light of the cultural chaos unleashed on the democracy at home.

The Survivors

Difficult times call for different men. Pericles was dead. Yet his orphaned young ward Alcibiades was emerging to prove indestructible—and, later, shameless. He had survived four years of exposure to the plague, both in the hot zones at Athens and earlier, when the disease had killed every fourth soldier at Potidaea. Through the first five years of the war at home and abroad, the veteran cavalryman had kept intact his hard-won honor. With the death of the old guard to disease, Alcibiades, in his mere twenties, was on the verge of emerging as one of the new leaders of an Athens now so chronically short of healthy men. Plutarch relates how amid the misery of plague-ridden Athens, the resolute and robust Alcibiades visited the dejected Pericles and persuaded him to ignore his recent censure and resume public life. In normal reckoning, age and sobriety might ensure accession to political leadership; in these dark years of plague, however, youth, robust health, and even recklessness were the better criteria for the times.³⁴

War had earlier killed Alcibiades’ father and now made him a hero at Potidaea and a respected stalwart among the Athenian cavalry who kept the Spartans away from the precincts near the city. It had taught him that no one was immune from fate, as he watched his patron die of disease, and the city of Sophocles and the Parthenon descend into the miasma of death. Time now waited for no one in Athens, and it was far better to seize the day than to die ignominiously alone, crusted with disease.

When the plague quieted in 426, Alcibiades was only twenty-four. Yet in the five-year-long war he had seen cannibalism, disease, and slaughter at Potidaea, women and children dying in the streets at Athens, and the estates of his wealthy friends abandoned and sometimes torched in the once beautiful Attic countryside, where his own family had owned for generations at least two large farms of about eighty acres.³⁵ The lessons the young man took away from all of this were Thucydidean: war really was “a tough schoolmaster,” and only a few astute, callous men could see it through. Alcibiades almost alone of his generation would; but he also would take his city down with him. Thucydides points out that those who survived the plague wrongly believed that they would never again be susceptible to other illnesses. It is likely that Alcibiades likewise felt that his survival and that of his mentor, Socrates, were somehow part of his unusual luck and proof of an exceptional destiny to come.³⁶

Athenian soldiers went into battle for the next twenty-three years, from 426 through 404, with the knowledge that their parents, themselves, their children, or their friends had suffered from the disease, which might return to kill thousands without warning at any given time. The dread of epidemic must have hung over the combatants for much of the war. When the Spartans and Argives considered a peace treaty in 420, they wrote a codicil stating that either side might be exempt from some of the agreed requirements if they were at the time suffering from a plague.³⁷

The ripples of the plague also lapped over into both contemporary and later classical literature. The playwright Sophocles, who purportedly became involved in the cult of the healing god Asclepius when it arrived in Athens in 420, had presented his magisterial Oedipus Rex perhaps just five years after the outbreak to an audience that had recently lost tens of thousands. The play begins with the city of Thebes beleaguered by a sudden epidemic that accompanies crop disease, stock losses, and general infertility. All such calamities the Athenians in the audience would have recognized as recent burdens brought on by either the plague or the invasions of Spartan ravagers—and feared that they could return at any minute. Whereas Thucydides focuses on scientific descriptions of the epidemic and either ignores or ridicules folk stories, the religious background to the plague is central to the plot of Sophocles’ drama: the Thebans must suffer collective punishment for the unknown incest and unacknowledged parricide within its royal family.

In the play, traditional religion—the wisdom of Apollo and the seer craft of Teiresias—provides the proper way to discover both the etiology of and the cure for the disease. Athens, in Sophocles’ mind at least, may have lost over a fourth of its population not from overcrowding or poor hygienic practices but because of an absence of traditional piety. He seems to suggest that it is hubristic to assume that logic alone—perhaps the contemporary city’s sophistic elite or Pericles himself were to be equated to his all-too-proud Oedipus—can simply cut through the disease and thus find rational causes and answers for what ultimately must remain divinely inspired problems. Oedipus is rational, imperious, and—like Pericles—in way over his head against a foe that is beyond the calculation of hoplites and triremes.

Such later writers as Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, and Josephus also wove vivid descriptions of plagues and natural disasters into their work, often with striking echoes of the Athenian epidemic: an African origin, rural flight into cities, mysterious causation, no cure, and social chaos as the dividends of mass dying. In a more historical context, the Byzantine chronicler Procopius used Thucydides to provide an equally striking description of the social calamity that followed an epidemic (most likely the bubonic plague) that struck Constantinople in spring 542 and for a time killed perhaps as many as 10,000 people a day. The Athenian disaster proved to be the locus classicus to later Western historiography that chronicled such disastrous outbreaks, as if any subsequent description must entail a Thucydidean account of the social chaos that inevitably followed such mass death.³⁸

Still, for the first years of the war, the Spartan invasions neither achieved economic ruin nor prompted the hoped for decisive battle, even as thousands of Athenians perished from disease. Because neither the traditional arenas of agricultural devastation and hoplite battle nor the plague led to decisive victory, each side prepared to redefine its strategy. Athenians would no longer stay within their walls and die. Sparta could not merely send out its massive armies in a vain search for enemy hoplites. Instead, new men in fresh theaters turned up to conduct a dirty war never quite seen before in Greece.

This novel way of waging the Peloponnesian War would suit audacious leaders like Alcibiades quite well.