Latest / The History of Greece: Philosophy, Empire, and Endless Reinvention — Fexingo History / The Athenian Plague: How Disease Destroyed Pericles' Golden Age
Transcript
- Lucas: So far in this series we've talked a lot about Athenian power — the navy, the empire, the monuments. But there's a story we haven't touched yet, and it's one that Thucydides himself thought was as important as any battle. I'm talking about the plague that hit Athens in 430 BC, right in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. Luna: The one that killed Pericles? Lucas: Exactly. But it did a lot more than that. It arrived in the second year of the war, when the city was already packed with refugees from the countryside — Pericles had ordered everyone to retreat behind the Long Walls, so Athens became a crowded, unsanitary pressure cooker. And then the plague struck. Luna: What did they think it was at the time? Lucas: They had no idea. Thucydides, who survived it himself, gives a harrowing account. He describes it starting with sudden fever, redness and inflammation of the eyes, then the throat and tongue turned bloody and foul-smelling. Then came sneezing, hoarseness, coughing, and violent convulsions. The skin broke out in blisters and ulcers. People died within seven to nine days. Those who survived often lost their fingers, toes, or eyesight. Some even lost their memory. Luna: It sounds like something out of a horror story. Lucas: It was. And because no one knew the cause, they tried everything — prayers, oracles, amulets — nothing worked. Thucydides says people just gave up, convinced they were going to die. And the social fabric tore apart. With death everywhere, people stopped fearing the gods or human laws. They started living for the moment — spending money recklessly, indulging in pleasures, because why not? Nobody expected to be around to face the consequences. Luna: So the plague didn't just kill people — it killed their sense of morality? Lucas: That's exactly what Thucydides argues. He says it was the worst thing that happened to Athens, worse than any military defeat, because it broke the spirit of the city. And it hit the leadership at the worst possible time. Pericles himself fell ill in 429 BC and died. With him gone, the city fell into the hands of demagogues like Cleon, who pushed for more aggressive — and sometimes disastrous — policies. The plague is one of the reasons Athens lost the war, even though it had all the resources to win. Luna: Do modern historians have any idea what the disease actually was? Lucas: That's been a huge debate for centuries. The symptoms Thucydides describes don't perfectly match any modern disease. Ebola has been suggested, but that's rare and didn't hit the Mediterranean. Smallpox is a possibility, but the transmission pattern doesn't fit. Lately, the leading candidate is typhoid fever. In the 1990s, a team of researchers examined teeth from a mass grave in the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens — the one that's been dated to the plague years — and they found DNA traces of Salmonella typhi, which causes typhoid. Luna: So typhoid might be the answer. Lucas: It's plausible. But there's also a theory it was typhus — a louse-borne disease that thrives in crowded, unsanitary conditions, which Athens certainly had. The thing is, Thucydides specifically says that birds and dogs that ate the dead also died, and that's not typical of typhoid. So some scholars argue for a viral hemorrhagic fever like Ebola — but that seems unlikely because it would have burned out too quickly. We may never know for sure. What we do know is that the plague changed Athens forever. Luna: It's interesting — you mentioned Thucydides survived it. His account is so clinical, almost like a modern medical report. Lucas: He was a pioneer in that sense. He wanted to describe it precisely so that if it ever happened again, people would recognize it. And he also used it to make a bigger point about human nature — that civilization is a thin veneer, and under extreme stress, people revert to selfishness and chaos. In that way, his plague narrative is as much a philosophical meditation as it is a historical record. Luna: Speaking of things that are worth preserving — you know, it's funny, we spend all this time talking about history, trying to understand how people coped with disaster. And honestly, if today's episode was worth a coffee to you, there's a link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That kind of support helps us keep doing this, ad-free, just following the threads we find interesting. Lucas: Yeah, it really does. And those small contributions add up — they let us keep digging into stories like this one. So if you've been getting something out of these conversations, that's the place. Lucas: Anyway, back to the plague. One of the most striking details Thucydides records is the breakdown of funeral rituals. Normally, Athenian families were very careful about proper burial — it was a religious duty. But during the plague, bodies were piling up in the streets. People threw corpses onto other people's funeral pyres. Some just left them to rot. The normal social order just disintegrated. Luna: It must have felt like the end of the world. Lucas: For many, it probably was. Athens lost perhaps a third of its population — estimates range from 75,000 to 100,000 dead. And the war dragged on for another 25 years. The city never really recovered its fourth-century glory. So the plague is one of those hinge moments — if it hadn't happened, would Athens have won the Peloponnesian War? Would the Golden Age have lasted longer? We can't know, but it's a haunting question. Luna: And it's a reminder that disease has shaped history just as much as battles and leaders. Lucas: Absolutely. The plague of Athens is a case study in how a pathogen can bring down a superpower. And Thucydides' account is the first great piece of epidemic writing in Western literature — it influenced how later generations, like Boccaccio and Defoe, described their own plagues. So in a way, the memory of it has lasted even longer than the suffering.