By January 1348, the plague had penetrated France by way of Marseilles and North Africa by way of Tunis. It had begun the previous year. 430-423 BC), the Priest of Zeus describes Thebes much as what Athens must have been like at the time: “For the city…can no longer lift her head from beneath the angry waves of death. 2015 Aug 3;12(8):2697-711. doi: 10.1021/mp5006454. Careers. The Plague of Athens, Michiel Sweerts, c. 1652–1654. Intriguingly, the pit seems to have lain open for some time (days, weeks?) Choi JH, Schafer SC, Freiberg AN, Croyle MA. 2006). 2.50). Remarkably, Thucydides is the only ancient author who describes the late-5th c. BC plague in Athens (2.47-54, 2.57-58). In 430 BC, a plague struck the city of Athens, which was then under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Typhus is spread by fleas, which catch the disease from rats, but also by body lice and an infested person’s scratching or inhalation of louse feces. Five centuries later, even Pericles’ death was blamed by Plutarch on “the plague.” Like today’s conspiratorial claims about the origin of the current COVID-19 virus, we must always be careful of fake news, ancient or modern – whether it is Spartan-poisoned wells (cf. The disease itself is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestisand it had already long existed on the fleas of wild rodents. Smallpox is doubtful because Thucydides mentions no facial scarring. Quizlet flashcards, … The Athenian general and historian Thucydides left an eye-witness account of this plague and a detailed description to allow future generations to identify the disease should it break out again. In the end, we have to ask, was there actually an Athens “plague”? The epidemic, known as the Plague of Athens, swept through the main city of Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, in about 430 BC. The plague began to recede, and Epimenides sailed back to Crete. Antiquity Origins and early history. Additionally, the Hippolytus by Euripides was performed in 428 BC, followed by five comedies by Aristophanes: The Acharnians (425 BC), The Knights (424 BC), The Clouds (423 BC), The Wasps (422 BC) and Peace (421 BC). Because of the importance of Thucydides and Athens in Western history and culture, the Plague of Athens has taken a prominent position in the history of the West for the past 2500 years. Warm therapeutic waters and a majestic natural setting make Pozar... A look into the most famous neoclassical masterpieces of Athens. The plague can be limited to either a reservoir diseases (zoonotic or vector-borne) or one of the respiratory diseases associated with an unusual means of persistence, either environmental/fomite persistence or adaptation to indolent transmission among dispersed rural populations. Thucydides (3.87.2) concludes “nothing afflicted the Athenians or impaired their strength more.” He paints a picture of timeless human nature, as panic, defiance, desperation and fatalism set in (2.53). SARS-CoV-2: Outline, Prevention, and Decontamination. 2004 Mar;18(1):29-43. doi: 10.1016/S0891-5520(03)00100-4. 10, Issue. The city held festivals and presented nine plays each year, both comedies and tragedies. In 430 BC, a plague struck the city of Athens, which was then under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Accessibility In the next 3 years, most of the population was infected, and perhaps as many as 75,000 to 100,000 people, 25% of the city's population, died. However, in identifying the Plague of Athens with typhus, Dr. David Durack, like Thucydides before him, attributed all of the victims’ pathologies to a single disease. To add insult to injury, Athens’ great leader, Pericles, died in the autumn of 429 BC. Because of the importance of Thucydides and Athens in Western culture, classicist Robert Littman (2009) observes, the Plague of Athens holds a prominent position in Western history. Athens in the early first century had energy and culture. The cause of the plague of Athens: plague, typhoid, typhus, smallpox, or measles? Before the plague, it was believed that the Athenians would win the war. 2012 Jan;18(1):153-7. doi: 10.3201/eid1801.AD1801. “Appalling too was the rapidity with which men caught the infection; dying like sheep if they attended on one another; and this was the principal cause of mortality…. To emphasize this point, he states: “If any man were sick before, his disease turned to this” (2.49.1). Typhoid is a waterborne pathogen, and, despite some scholars’ assertions, ancient Athens’ intramural water supply could well have been contaminated, especially as “men half-dead [gathered] about every well or fountain through desire of water” (Thuc. Was there no public social distancing? Because typhoid was endemic in the Greek world, it is not the likely cause of this sudden epidemic. The first category includes typhus, arboviral diseases, and plague, and the second category includes smallpox. 2018 Jan 18;39(1):3-14. doi: 10.24272/j.issn.2095-8137.2017.052. Remarkably, Thucydides is the only ancient author who describes the late-5th c. BC plague in Athens (2.47-54, 2.57-58). 2.54.4). The plague of Athens took place between the years 430-426 BC, at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.The plague killed an estimated 300,000 people, among which was the Greek statesman Pericles.It is said to have caused the death of one in every three people in Athens, and it is widely believed to have contributed to the decline and fall of classical Greece. Typhus, already proposed more than 50 years ago by classicist A. W. Gomme, received further support from a University of Maryland analysis in 1999. Thucydides provides glimpses of this reality when he writes the walled-in Athenians “…were much oppressed… having not only their men killed by the disease within, but the enemy also laying waste their fields and villages without” (2.54). Epub 2015 Jan 20. The outbreak shattered that belief. Archaeological evidence for an epidemic in ancient Athens was discovered at the edge of the Kerameikos in 1994-1995, when a roughly-dug pit was found containing more than 150 skeletons, accompanied by humble grave goods dated by the excavators to 430-426 BC. Food, too, may have been tainted, through spoilage or contact with ill cooks and caregivers. Antonine Plague Duration. 3, p. 206. 8600 Rockville Pike For they went to see their friends without thought of themselves and were ashamed to leave them…” (2.51.4-5). However, more extensive DNA study of the Kerameikos mass grave remains, with attention to gender and age differentiation, could provide more statistically significant, informative results. But this was all before the powerful Athens of the fifth century BC, when the city had been at its zenith. With this oracle events were supposed to tally. How Did the Plague End? Untreated (with modern medicines), typhus is fatal in 10-40% of cases. The Antonine Plague hit the Roman Empire in two waves, the first from 165 CE to 180 CE and the second from 251 CE to 266 CE. In 430 BC, a plague struck the city of Athens, which was then under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). The words epidemic and pandemic are Greek in origin, and they point to the fact that the Greeks of antiquity thought a lot about disease, both in its purely medical sense, and as a metaphor for the broader conduct of human affairs. Nowadays, we are more secure from disease, with improved environmental conditions, medicines and medical services, as well as more effective governmental controls and greater societal cooperation, but, as with the ancient outbreak, we will not soon forget this current calamity, when a dangerous plague has once again invaded Athens and our world. A similar disorder is said to have previously smitten many places, particularly Lemnos, but there is no record of such a pestilence occurring elsewhere, or of so great a destruction of human life” (2.47.2-3). Yet it seems there was much more to the story than what Thucydides reported. Thucydides’ lurid details of “the disease” are morbidly impressive, but ultimately he was an historian, not a medical expert. Sign Up for Premium Content, Special Offers & More. 3, p. 206. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, Vol. The Black Plague, otherwise known as the Black Death or Bubonic Plague, remains the most deadly pandemic in world history. Archaeological evidence of pervasive illness in the 420s BC is seen not only in the Kerameikos mass grave and increased burial activity generally, but also in religious monuments and architecture. And can we really conclude Pericles was among its victims? The Athenian general and histo … Overall fatality rates have been estimated at 25-35% of the Athenian population, based on Thucydides’ explicit mortality figures. Athenians also now remembered an old saying, “A Dorian [Spartan] war will come, and bring a pestilence with it.” And a past oracle, purported to have been given to the Spartans: When Apollo was asked “whether they should go to war, he answered that if they put their might into it, victory would be theirs, and that he would himself be with them” (Thuc. Thucydides himself became ill, but survived to tell a tale of epidemic disease and grim misery that gripped Athens in the early years of the Peloponnesian War. Zool Res. Life in Athens returned to normal. The reality is that Athens suffered hardships from both war and widespread illness, which the war itself had caused. Around 430 B.C., not long after a war between Athens and Sparta began, an epidemic ravaged the people of Athens and lasted for five years. He too easily blamed everything on a single disease. Its true nature may never be known. His description of the illness’ indicators and progression is long and detailed (2.49), including extreme headache; red, inflamed eyes; throats and tongues growing bloody; breath noisome and unsavory; sneezing; hoarseness; chest pain and cough; stomach upset and vomiting; hiccups with strong convulsions; reddening skin with welts; internal heat (fever); insatiable thirst; dysentery; and finally death in 7-9 days. After all, Athenian theatrical contests never ceased. For the plague broke out as soon as the Peloponnesians invaded Attica, and never entering Peloponnese (not at least to an extent worth noticing), committed its worst ravages at Athens, and next to Athens, at the most populous of the other towns. Present-day philologists have offered a spectrum of interpretations, claiming the historian sought to contrast the tragedy of war and the pathos of the plague in Athens with Pericles’ high ideals expressed in his famous funeral oration (T. E. Morgan 1991), or even that Thucydides’ emotional description of the plague was intended as “trauma narrative,” meant to encourage public healing and preserve a collective memory of the ordeal (Jenna Colclough 2019). In the summer of 430 BC, when Athens “made war upon the Chalcideans…and…Potidaea…,” the disease “devoured the army” and “Agnon…came back with his fleet, having, of four thousand men, in less than forty days, lost one thousand and fifty to the plague” (2.58.3). These days, quarantined in our homes and ever alert to the media’s latest reports on COVID-19, infectious disease is never far from our thoughts. From 2010 to 2015, there were 3,248 cases of the plague reported worldwide, resulting in 584 deaths, says … 2015 Mar 10;7(3):1100-12. doi: 10.3390/v7031100. Xenopsylla cheopis was the most effective flea species for transmittal. Earthquakes were also suffered, “at the same time,” in Athens, Euboea and Boeotia (Thuc. Infect Dis Clin North Am. The emotional, social and religious impact of the Athens Plague was pervasive. So when early civilizations encroached on the habitats of these flea-ridden rodents, the bacterium naturally jumped to humans. The effect of the disease on Athens’ military and civilian population was apparently devastating, based on the mortality figures Thucydides provides. The plague killed at least 100,000 people. The city’s wells were often interconnected, as shown during the Metro excavations (1992-1997), and it already had an aqueduct built by Peisistratus (6th c. BC) – sections of which were unearthed at the Syntagma and Evangelismos stations. Experts believe that the name “Black Plague” was a mistranslation of the Latin word “atra mors” which could mean either “terrible” or “black.” It was originally estimated that on average, a third of the population of affected areas was wiped out by the plague over its most destructive decade between 1346 and 1353, but … “As soon as summer returned [430 BC], the Peloponnesian army…invaded Attica… They had not been there many days when the plague broke out at Athens for the first time. The plague of Thebes, a historical epidemic in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. In or near the Athenian Agora, John Camp notes (2001), statues were erected to Apollo and Herakles in their role as “Alexikakos” – Averter of Evil. Prevention and treatment information (HHS). Ancient microbial typhoid (Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi) DNA was extracted from 3 skeletons. Athenians, however, have been through all this before, more than 2,400 years ago. Consuming cereals contaminated with fungus would have had dire consequences; as would exposure to still-infectious human and animal corpses left lying about, and contact with scavengers that unwittingly poisoned themselves, including birds and particularly dogs (Thuc. But what sort of disease was it exactly? Black rats were the most common at this time, and carried the bacteria called Yersinia pestis, which caused the plague. What the Greeks called the “plague” ( loimos) features in some memorable passages in Greek literature. An overloaded sewage system probably further added to the Athenians’ problems. Plague-ridden fleas hitched a ride on the black rats that sna… War-time Athens’ cramped, hellish conditions were notorious, with Aristophanes jesting that residents even lived in casks, crevices and dovecots, blinded with smoke (Knights 795). In 430 BC, a plague struck the city of Athens, which was then under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). DNA testing of three adult teeth revealed at least three individuals in the mass grave had likely perished from typhoid fever (Manolis Papagrigorakis et al. The plague devastated Athens for many years—Thucydides reckoned it took fifteen years to recover—but his account suggests that the damage … According to a 2010 study published in Nature, DNA show… This site needs JavaScript to work properly. In seeking divine favor, the Athenians made appeals especially to Apollo and Artemis, the traditional bringers of plague. Many causes for the Athens Plague have been proposed by modern scholars and medical experts, including typhus, smallpox, typhoid fever, measles, bubonic plague, anthrax, scarlet fever, Rift Valley fever, Avian (bird) flu and even the Ebola virus! Children received more careful treatment, while eight infants were interred in ceramic pots. (c) 2009 Mount Sinai School of Medicine. However, “the plague” and its effects have long been overblown. Also, the Spartans remained longer in their (430 BC) invasion of Attica “than they had done any time before and wasted even the whole territory…[over a period of] almost forty days” (2.57.2). Ebola in 1976). The plague of Athens began 1 year after the war started, and the epidemic continued in southern Greece for 4 years. Moreover, his description of Pericles’ final illness does not match Thucydides’ characterization of “the plague,” which rapidly dispatched its victims in 7-9 days or soon afterward (2.49.6). Thucydides reports “dying men lay tumbling one upon another in the streets…” (2.52.2). The first outbreak of plague swept across England in 1348-49. After the second invasion of Athens by the Peloponnesians, the Athenians began putting more blame on Pericles for declaring and leading a war that brought great suffering to the people of Athens.
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