Thucydides
and
the
Plague
of
Athens
Thucydides was the world’s first historian.
Presently, we get most of our knowledge
about ancient Greece from his writing. But Thucydides didn’t just write about history, he
lived through it. However, he almost didn’t survive one historical event: the
Plague of
Athens.
In 430 BCE, an army attacked the city of Athens, where Thucydides lived. Thousands
of people hid from the army behind Athens’ large walls. The city became very crowded
as the population
expanded. Then a
horrifying disease broke out. People
summoned
doctors. But it was to no
avail because no one understood how the disease spread.
It seemed
random. They didn’t know that it was an
organism. Instead, they
defined
disease as a punishment from their gods. Thucydides was
incredulous that gods caused
the plague, but he explained why others believed it. There was an old,
long verse which
predicted the disease. To
paraphrase it, the verse said the gods would send a disease
during a war. As a result, large crowds gathered at
shrines to ask the gods to stop the
plague. But the situation only
worsened because these people were so close to each
other they became sick. That’s how they learned a
fundamental lesson about the plague:
it spread from person to person.
People wanted to leave the crowded city, but they
dreaded what the army outside would
do to them. At this time, Thucydides got sick, too. He quickly
scribbled down notes because
he thought he would soon die. His writing shows a
stark contrast between people’s behavior
before and during the plague. There were
riots, and people ignored laws. They didn’t think
they’d live long enough to be punished. Many sick
people were left to die in solitude because
no one wanted to be near them. The plague
lingered for two years. But luckily, Thucydides
survived. Without his writing, we would know much less about ancient Greece and the Plague
of Athens.
