In February I'll be teaching a 4-session course for our local ElderCollege: Perspectives on Pandemics. The first session will deal with outbreaks we know of in antiquity, and one of the most momentous of those was the plague of Athens. While it was not a pandemic, its focus on Athens weakened the city's military strength, demoralized and divided the population, and killed its leader Pericles; Athens and its empire never recovered, and eventually lost the war to Sparta and its allies.
Background: In the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430 BCE), Sparta's army invaded Attica. Pericles adopted a defensive strategy, bringing rural residents into Athens. These tended to crowd into Piraeus, the harbour district, living in shacks and huts. Meanwhile, Pericles focused on building up the Athenian navy. His policies were unpopular, especially with wealthy landowners whose farms were now ravaged by the Spartans, and he was even ousted from power on a charge of embezzlement. Later he was re-elected to power, but he and members of his family contracted the plague also, and he died of it.
Could it have been the ancestor of some modern disease, or an early variant of a modern disease? Or is it more likely a one-off that mercifully died out? Here are the symptoms as described by Thucydides (who survived it) in the Penguin Books edition translated by Rex Warner, 1954.
“At the beginning the doctors were quite incapable of treating the disease because of their ignorance of the right methods. In fact mortality among the doctors was the highest of all, since they cam more frequently in contact with the sick.”
Origins: Ethiopia to Egypt, Libya, and much of Persia. Appeared suddenly in Athen in Piraeus (which was crowded with rural refugees who lacked adequate housing); then in upper city. That year saw no other serious outbreaks, but all who had any kind of previous illness caught the plague.
“In other cases, however, there seemed to be no reason for the attacks. People in perfect health began to have burning feelings in the head; their eyes became red and inflamed; inside their mouths there was bleeding from the throat and tongue, and the breath became unnatural and unpleasant.
“The next symptoms were sneezing and hoarseness of voice, and before long the pain settled on the chest and was accompanied by coughing. Next the stomach was afflicted with stomaches aches and with vomitings of every kind of bile that has been given a name by the medical profession, all this being accompanied by great pain and difficulty. In most cases there were attacks of ineffectual retching, producing violent spasms; this sometimes ended with this stage of the disease, but sometimes continued long afterwards.
“Externally the body was not very hot to the touch, no was there any pallor; the skin was rather reddish and livid, breaking out into small pustules and ulcers. But inside there was a feeling of burning, so that people could not bear the touch even of the lightest lien clothing, but wanted to be completely naked, and indeed most of all would have liked to plunge into cold water. Many of the sick who were uncared for actually did so, plunging into the water-tanks in an effort to relieve a thirst which was unquenchable …. Then all the time they were afflicted with insomnia and the desperate feeling of not being able to keep still.
“In the period when the disease was at its height, the body, so far from wasting away, showed surprising powers of resistance to all the agony, so that there was still some strength left on the seventh or eighth day, which was the time when, in most cases, death came from the internal fever. But if people survived this critical period, then the disease descended to the bowels, producing violent ulcerations and uncontrollable diarrhea, so that most of them died later as a result of the weakness caused by this.
“For the disease, first setting in the head, went on to affect every part of the body in turn, and even when people escaped its worst effects, it still left its trace on them by fastening upon the extremities of the body. It affected the genitals, the fingers, and the toes, and many of those who recovered lost the use of these members; some, too, went blind. There were some also who, when they first began to get better, suffered from a total loss of memory, not knowing who they were themselves and being unable to recognize their friends.”
Psychological effects: “The most terrible thing of all was the despair into which people fell when they realized that they had caught the plague; for they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness, and by giving in in this way, would lose their powers of resistance. Terrible, too, was the sight of people dying like sheep through having caught the disease as a result of nursing others.”
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