What kind of plague killed pericles

The epidemiological analysis excludes common source diseases and most respiratory diseases. The first category includes typhus, arboviral diseases, and plague, and the second category includes smallpox. Both measles and explosive streptococcal disease appear to be much less likely candidates. In , a mass grave was discovered that belonged to the plague years.

Instead, survivors looked for already burning funeral pyres, adding friends and relatives to the blaze. No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence. Many Athenians blamed the calamity on their Spartan enemies, spreading dark rumors of poisoned reservoirs. Yet Thucydides swiftly dismissed such speculation. After all, Athens was a naval power, an imperial capital, and a trading city whose fleets ranged across the ancient world; the contagion, he wrote, probably spread from Ethiopia to Libya to Persia before finally reaching Greece, where Athens—a global port for commercial ships—was its first stop.

And, once it arrived, its damage knew no bounds, doing terrible harm to democracy itself. For anyone hopeful that democracy is the best system for coping with the current coronavirus pandemic, the Athenian disaster stands as a chilling admonition. As Plato knew, political regimes are as fragile as any other human structure, and all fall in time. The plague devastated Athens for many years—Thucydides reckoned it took fifteen years to recover—but his account suggests that the damage to democracy lasted far longer.

The stakes of our own vulnerability are no different. Pericles went before his people and made it clear to the fuming mob before him that their anger was misplaced and that they had to rise above it. When asked whether society has been able to rise above and do what's right for the collective, Kinch Hoekstra, chancellor's professor of political science and law at University of California, Berkeley, said the results are mixed.

Orwin praised Pericles for his ability to maintain that popular trust without descending into "a game of competitive fomenting of mistrust," characteristic of populistic democratic politics. Kinch Hoekstra is chancellor's professor of political science and law at University of California, Berkeley.

He is the author of Thucydides and the Politics of Necessity. Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science, classics and Jewish studies at the University of Toronto. For our excerpts, we drew from a edition called Thucydides: The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. It is edited and translated by Jeremy Mynott. Written by Showwei Chu. Two of the most powerful city-states in ancient Greece—Sparta and Athens—went to war in B.

Tensions between the two had been simmering for decades before boiling over into war. When Spartan troops would invade Attica the peninsula where Athens and its allies were located , Athenians responded with naval attacks on politically sensitive points in the Peloponnese. A medical mystery to this day, this ancient epidemic would be the most influential factor to shape the war and decide which city-state would be the final victor.

In spring B. The malady spread quickly. Reports circulated of similar outbreaks on the island of Lemnos, in the north Aegean, and other locations. In Piraeus, rumours spread that when the Spartans had arrived they had poisoned the wells there so that Athenians were sickened by drinking contaminated water.

In a matter of weeks, the disease had spread to the heart of the city and was affecting people of all ages and backgrounds and in unprecedented proportions. The strategy of the Athenian leader Pericles to bring people from rural Attica into the walled city of Athens, only increased the rate of contagion.

The illness, whatever it was, did not affect the Spartans to the same degree as the Athenians. In total, it is estimated that between 25 and 35 percent of the population of Athens would perish as a result of the plague when it ended five years later. Discover how ancient Sparta created a deadly military machine. The main source of information about the epidemic comes from the historian Thucydides, who not only witnessed the events first-hand but survived the disease himself.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides believes the plague originated in eastern Africa, in the lands of ancient Ethiopia present-day Sudan. From there, the sickness travelled north to Egypt and Libya and east to the Persian Empire before reaching Greece. Extreme insomnia followed. Thucydides reports that many patients died within seven to nine days of being infected. If they made it through the first stage, they might then suffer severe ulceration of the bowels accompanied by diarrhoea; the ensuing weakness generally proved fatal.

The main problems in treating the disease was its novelty and its contagiousness. Doctors had never experienced anything quite like it, leaving their expertise powerless against the epidemic. The contagious disease took a toll on those who cared for the sick.