The Plague of Athens

A cautionary tale, from a long time ago

In the year 430 BC, the city of Athens was under siege. One year prior, the lacedaemonians— that was the name for inhabitants of Sparta— had marched on the city of Athens. Athens was a democracy, and a radical one at that, hell-bent on exporting its ideological fervor — rule by vote of the people, no matter what was decided.

Athens was prepared, in advance, for this assault from the military powerhouse of Sparta. This was in an era before walls of a certain size could be meaningfully breached. Siegecraft didn't exist yet. If the city had strong enough walls, nobody was getting in. Athens had taken this approach to fortification a remarkable step further:

They had built not only walls around the city, but an entire walled corridor to the sea, and subsequently built walls around the port, so they couldn't be cut off from supplies.

In the 400 BC era, most assaults of a city turn into a siege, and that siege turned into the waiting game, where eventually everyone behind the walls in the city would starve to death. This brutal waiting game was, in the minds of the Athenians, obviated by access to food from the sea, augmented by their Mediterranean-dominating navy. Yes, triremes!

The ruler of Athens at the time, Pericles, a remarkable orator and politician, made sure that the city couldn't be starved out.

The Spartans built their deeply undemocratic oligarchy on a bedrock of military culture. No one really wanted to fight them in the open field. Getting into an actual war also sucked. Most of the people fighting a war were farmers—unlike Sparta’s professional soldiers—and if you're busy grabbing a spear and standing in a phalanx, you're not farming your crops.

The city of Athens was surrounded by verdant farmland—vast orchards of grapes, olives, and other riches of Attica surrounded them. It was good earth, and it nourished them. As much as they loathed the Spartan thugs destroying their grape vines, it was better than fighting a military so disciplined, just a few years earlier, only 300 men held back the entire Persian horde.

Pericles proposed a solution—a stalemate he was sure they would win. With access to food and supplies from the sea, and with no meaningful Spartan navy to challenge their dominance on the Mediterranean, Athens could wait, safely, smugly even, behind its tremendous walls.

The first year of War on the Attica peninsula passed uneventfully, more or less. The Spartans arrived to do battle, the Athenians retreated, and the plan that Pericles proposed was Wise.

The fortress that was Athens could not be starved out.

Something else happened in the process, which was that the city of Athens, which usually had around 100,000 people, doubled in population. For our modern audience, we might recognize that the complete lack of sanitation, germ theory, or an understanding sickness as something other than the revenge of the gods.

In the second year of the war, while the people of Athens stayed safe from the Spartans behind their walls, people start getting sick.

Horribly, deathly ill. People started dying. And then more. And then more. The great historian of this war, Thucydides himself, fell ill. He described:

a plague so severe and deadly that no one could recall anywhere its like, and physicians ignorant of its nature not only were helpless but themselves died the fastest, having had the most contact with the sick.

The Spartans seemed immune, outside the city walls, and rumors circulated that it was the water that was poisoned. Eventually, between 75,000 and 100,000 people died, which was on the order of 25% of all the people who lived in the city.

It's hard, in our modern age, with vaccines and ventilators and antibiotics to remember how utterly terrifying this degree of sickness and death could be. People utterly and completely lost it in the city of Athens. Pericles himself lost his life to the plague. People abandon their morals, their codes, their high minded ideals, as Thucydides wrote:

"The catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.”

There is a little more terrifying than inexplicable illness. Even when we explain it, as we so routinely do today? Suspicion can rise up, mimetically infecting us with indifference to all that binds us. The plague of Athens reminds us that when terror grips our hearts, there is little room for our better angels in the scramble to survive.

Thucydides wrote of the nihilism amidst the death:

those who tended to the ill were most vulnerable to catching the disease, which meant that many people died alone because no one was willing to risk caring for them.

Traditional and high minded ideals were thrown to the wind:

people ceased fearing the law since they felt they were already living under a death sentence. Likewise, people started spending money indiscriminately. Many felt they would not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of wise investment, while some of the poor unexpectedly became wealthy by inheriting the property of their relatives. He also wrote that people refused to behave honorably because most did not expect to live long enough to enjoy a good reputation for it.¹

I'm writing this, today, for no particular reason, of course. It's not like the events of that city under siege to millennia ago, gripped by fierce disease, has any relevance our world. It's merely a curiosity, an artifact of what it was, something strange to muse at. Unless of course, H5N1, Marburg, or some other fearsome plague rears its ugly head. We might be dragged back to our primeval state, yet again?

One of the most important triumphs of modern medicine is the ability to explain why. We have medicines, some of the time. The most potent medicine may be a sense that someone understands. In ancient Athens, we only had the survivors, like Thucydides himself:

For instance, he says that those who tended to the ill were most vulnerable to catching the disease, which meant that many people died alone because no one was willing to risk caring for them.

Physicians and scientists can stand against the darkness, with understanding as our candle.

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Thank you for reading, I even wrote a song about this era of history about 20 years ago.

1. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.53