It is possible that the pathogen responsible for the Plague, and the Plague’s symptoms as well, might have changed over 24 centuries.
Moreover, Thucydides’ Athenian contemporaries made little distinction between medicine and religion. The two works mentioned above were produced at about the same time. Thucydides could not know the nature of the contagion he was proposing, although he thought it might be a fluid. And, while the epidemic in Athens is referred to today as a plague, it almost certainly was not bubonic or pneumonic plague.Some modern references to the Plague of Athens presume that it was smallpox. In 430 BC, a plague struck the city of Athens, which was then under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Yet Thucydides also tells us that dogs too were susceptible to the Plague. [The Athenian leader, Pericles, responded to the Spartan siege by moving people into Athens from the countryside. When Thucydides picks up very briefly the thread of the plague a little bit later (3.87) he provides numbers of the deceased: 4,400 hoplites (citizen-soldiers), 300 cavalrymen and an unknown number of ordinary people.Epidemic typhus and smallpox are most favoured, but about 30 different diseases have been Thucydides offers us a narrative of a pestilence that is different in all kinds of ways from what we face.The lessons that we learn from the coronavirus crisis will come from our own experiences of it, not from reading Thucydides.
Professor Christopher Mackie - Classics & Ancient History, La Trobe UniversityThe coronavirus is concentrating our minds on the fragility of human existence in the face of a deadly disease. Indeed “in the end people were so overcome by their sufferings that they paid no further attention to such things”.He describes the symptoms in some detail – the burning feeling of sufferers, stomachaches and vomiting, the desire to be totally naked without any linen resting on the body itself, the insomnia and the restlessness.The next stage, after seven or eight days if people survived that long, saw the pestilence descend to the bowels and other parts of the body – genitals, fingers and toes. Yet the extent, to which it might have contributed to the ultimate Spartan victory in the war, or to the eventual decline of the Athenian empire, is not known.First, Thucydides noted that the most densely populated sections of Athens had the highest frequency of Plague victims. Another possibility is that the pathogen responsible for the Plague has since become extinct.Thucydides’ insights are not nearly as well known today as they ought to be.
Thucydides famously describes to us the plague of Athens in 430 B.C, which killed nearly a third of the Athenian population and also Athens leader Pericles. Words like “epidemic” and “pandemic” (and “panic”!) The “Plague of Athens” was a severe epidemic, which struck the city between 430 and 427 B.C.E. One reason is that the ancient Greeks had precious little scientific knowledge that might have enabled them to understand the Plague. Teaching virology has been a most rewarding aspect of my career. But these are not mutually exclusive. The play Oedipus was probably produced about 429 BC, and the plague of Athens occurred in 430-426 BC.Thucydides writes prose, not verse (as Homer and Sophocles do), and he worked in the comparatively new field of “history” (meaning “enquiry” or “research” in Greek). In contrast, medical theory of the day held that epidemics result from Miasma readily explained why large numbers of people could become ill at the same time.
Thucydides and the Plague of Athens - Volume 29 Issue 2 - J. C. F. Poole, A. J. Holladay The plague of Athens struck in 430 BC, violently killing up to half of the Greek city's population. may have been the first physician to believe that diseases have natural causes, rather than being punishments inflicted by the gods.
[Physicians were the ones most frequently exposed to affected individuals.]
And, this transition was not easy since, as we know well, the powerful churchmen of Galileo’s day rejected the concept that the universe might be governed by natural laws, since that notion might be at odds with the omnipotence of God.Holladay, A.J., and J.C.F. For example, he said that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects, because it is their purpose to do so. Second, Thucydides noted that physicians had highest likelihood of any group in the population of succumbing to the Plague.
Consider how the history of medical science might have been different if Hippocrates, and others of Thucydides’ contemporaries, had been influenced by his observations.How might we explain why Thucydides’ insights were largely ignored by his contemporaries and, indeed, lost to western medicine? For instance, Sophocles (one of the great dramatists of classical Greece) believed that the plague had a supernatural cause, and that an oracle, rather than a physician, needed to be consulted for its resolution.Hippocrates (about 460 to 370 B.C.E.)
Aristotle’s science held that nature did what pure logic suggested it should do. Apollo is also the archer god, and he is depicted firing arrows into the Greek army with a terrible effect:About 270 years after the Iliad, or thereabouts, plague is the centrepiece of two great classical Athenian works – Thucydides (c.460-400BC) and Sophocles (490-406BC) would have known one another in Athens, although it is hard to say much more than that for a lack of evidence. Of numerous suggested identifications none has found general approval; and it is doubtful
And, while the epidemic in Athens is referred to today as a plague, it almost certainly was not bubonic or pneumonic plague.
In any case, after Hippocrates’ death, the practice of Greek medicine actually regressed back to a more superstitious state.What’s more, contrary to popular opinion; the Greeks did not actually invent the scientific method. That is, survivors of the Plague were resistant to further attacks of the Plague, but not to other diseases. Before then, western medicine continued to attribute epidemics to miasma.Another of Thucydides’ key observations was that individuals who recovered from the Plague were resistant to future attacks. ), when a reinforcing body of Athenian soldiers transmitted the Plague to Athenian soldiers already at Poteida. For info on adopting or buying this textbook, please visit the publisher site: http://www.asmscience.org/content/book/10.1128/9781555814533