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The Plague of Athens: 430–428 B.C. Epidemic and Epizoötic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

J. A. H. Wylie  and
H. W. Stubbs
J. A. H. Wylie
Affiliation:
Dept. of Theology, Exeter University
H. W. Stubbs
Affiliation:
Dept. of Classics, Exeter University
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Extract

In a recent re-assessment of the medical aspects of the Plague of Athens which is, to date, the most scholarly and comprehensive, Poole and Holladay have emphasized the tendency of many infectious diseases markedly to decline in virulence over decades and centuries and, sometimes, significantly to change their clinical manifestations. In the light of modern medicine they consider four possibilities: (i) The Plague was a disease (or combination of diseases) which still exists today. This they regard as improbable, (ii) It still exists in some remote place or places unknown to medical science. This is discussed and dismissed, (iii) It became extinct, (iv) It was caused by an agent which nowadays causes a significantly different clinical syndrome. They conclude as follows: ‘The truth, we suggest, almost certainly lies in possibility (iii) or (iv). But we can see no way of choosing between them. On either view the question: “What was the Athenian Plague?” is in principle unanswerable if the questioner is wanting to attach to the Plagsie the name of some modern disease or diseases’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 6 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1983

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References

1 Poole, J. C. F. & Holladay, A. J., ‘Thucydides and the Plague of Athens’. CQ n.s. 29 (1979), 282–300CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 Several scholars, over the years, have ascribed to the Plague of Athens several causes encompassing all the familiar human epidemics: bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox and several others. It would be inappropriate here to list again the arguments for and against these pestilences, which have already, many times, been exhaustively described and, for one reason or another, discarded.

3 Livy, 25. 26; Diodorus, 14. 71.

4 Poole, J. C. F. & Holladay, A. J., op. cit. n. 1Google Scholar.

5 In a critique of the word ‘στερισκ⋯μενōι’, meaning either active or passive ablation of the limbs and genitalia in the Plague of Athens due to gangrene, Mercier, L., (‘Essai d'interprétation de στερισκ⋯μεμενōι et de la ‘peste’ d' Athènes’, Bull. Assoc. Guillaume Budé (1974), 223–6Google Scholar) advances this wholly fanciful diagnosis of the Plague of Athens. Not only is this a trivial disease, rarely more than a transient nuisance – the Guillan-Barré syndrome, recently afflicting Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn – but neither its neuro- nor vascular pathology allows of the development of gangrene, nor is it certain, even, that it is an infectious disease; it may well be numbered amongst the auto-immune disorders and it is never epidemic. Mercier, with scarcely more justification, suggests the name ‘Athens ‘flu’, cf. the Spanish ‘flu of 1918–19. This, too. neither epidemio-logically nor nosologically bears the slightest resemblance to the Plague of Athens.

6 Acute fulminating Dengue or Dengue Shock should, for the sake of completeness, be mentioned, especially as the disease is particularly associated with modern Greece. But here the similarity with the Plague of Athens ends.

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18 The capacity of water to spread infectious disease has been recognized from time immemorial. At the height of the Plague, the Athenians blamed the Spartan enemy for poisoning the cisterns, and in the Middle Ages the proliferation of the Black Death was widely attributed to Jews deliberately poisoning the wells. If tularaemia (or leptospirosis) was responsible for the Athenian Plague, the citation of such scapegoats is unnecessary. Human and animal carrion in the reservoirs would have sufficed to maintain the epidemic.

19 L. H. Collier, personal communication.

20 Young, L. S., Bicknell, D. S., Archer, B. G., Clinton, J. M., Leavens, L. J., Feeley, J. C. & Brachman, P. S., ‘Tularaemia Epidemic: Vermont, 1968’, New Eng. J. Med. 280 (1969), 1253–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 J. C. F. Poole & A. J. Holladay, op. cit. n. 1.

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23 Poole, J. C. F. & Holladay, A. J., ‘Thucydides and the Plague: A footnote’, CQ n.s. 32 (1982), 235–6CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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27 We are grateful to the respective heads of our departments: the Reverend Professor J. R. Canon Porter and Professor T. P. Wiseman, for encouragement; also to Professor Leslie Collier of the Department of Virology, the London Hospital Medical College and Dr B. Thorn, Director of the P.H.L.S., Brighton, for advice, but especially to Dr J. C. F. Poole of The Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford University, for invaluable suggestions for the final drafting of this paper, all of which were accepted. Similarly indispensable in the early stages of this work was the participation therein of our colleague, Dr Richard A. S. Seaford, Lecturer in Classics at this University. Our thanks are due also to Miss Brenda Sutton, Assistant Librarian to the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and, finally, to Mrs John Wylie for unstinted secretarial help. One of us (J.A.H.W.) acknowledges with gratitude the generous financial support of the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund.