and those of their allies, led by Archidamus, their king. They
proceeded, ravaging the country as they went, as far as Acharnae (close
to Athens), where they encamped, imagining that the Athenians would
never endure to see them there, but would be driven by pride and shame
to come out and fight them. However, Pericles thought that it would be a
very serious matter to fight for the very existence of Athens against
sixty thousand Peloponnesian and Boeotian heavy-armed troops, and so he
pacified those who were dissatisfied at his inactivity by pointing out
that trees when cut down quickly grow again, but that when the men of a
state are lost, it is hard to raise up others to take their place. He
would not call an assembly of the people, because he feared that they
would force him to act against his better judgment, but, just as the
captain of a ship, when a storm comes on at sea, places everything in
the best trim to meet it, and trusting to his own skill and seamanship,
disregarding the tears and entreaties of the seasick and terrified
passengers, so did Pericles shut the gates of Athens, place sufficient
forces to insure the safety of the city at all points, and calmly carry
out his own policy, taking little heed of the noisy grumblings of the
discontented. Many of his friends besought him to attack, many of his
enemies threatened him and abused him, and many songs and offensive
jests were written about him, speaking of him as a coward, and one who
was betraying the city to its enemies. Cleon too attacked him, using the
anger which the citizens felt against him to advance his own personal
popularity.
Pericles was unmoved by any of these attacks, but quietly endured all
this storm of obloquy. He sent a fleet of a hundred ships to attack
Peloponnesus, but did not sail with it himself, remaining at home to
keep a tight hand over Athens until the Peloponnesians drew off their
forces. He regained his popularity with the common people, who suffered
much from the war, by giving them allowances of money from the public
revenue, and grants of land; for he drove out the entire population of
the island of Aegina, and divided the land by lot among the Athenians. A
certain amount of relief also was experienced by reflecting upon the
injuries which they were inflicting on the enemy; for the fleet as it
sailed round Peloponnesus destroyed many small villages and cities, and
ravaged a great extent of country, while Pericles himself led an
expedition into the territory of Megara and laid it all waste. By this
it is clear that the allies, although they did much damage to the
Athenians, yet suffered equally themselves, and never could have
protracted the war for such a length of time as it really lasted, but,
as Pericles foretold, must soon have desisted had not Providence
interfered and confounded human counsels. For now the pestilence fell
among the Athenians, and cut off the flower of their youth. Suffering
both in body and mind they raved against Pericles, just as people when
delirious with disease attack their fathers or their physicians. They
endeavored to ruin him, urged on by his personal enemies, who assured
them that he was the author of the plague, because he had brought all
the country people into the city, where they were compelled to live
during the heat of summer, crowded together in small rooms and stifling
tents, living an idle life too, and breathing foul air instead of the
pure country breeze to which they were accustomed. The cause of this,
they said, was the man who, when the war began, admitted the masses of
the country people into the city, and then made no use of them, but
allowed them to be penned up together like cattle, and transmit the
contagion from one to another, without devising any remedy or
alleviation of their sufferings.
Hoping to relieve them somewhat, and also to annoy the enemy, Pericles
manned a hundred and fifty ships, placed on board, besides the sailors,
many brave infantry and cavalry soldiers, and was about to put to sea.
The Athenians conceived great hopes, and the enemy no less terror from
so large an armament. When all was ready, and Pericles himself had just
embarked in his own trireme, an eclipse of the sun took place, producing
total darkness, and all men were terrified at so great a portent.
Pericles sailed with the fleet, but did nothing worthy of so great a
force. He besieged the sacred city of Epidaurus, but, although he had
great hopes of taking it, he failed on account of the plague, which
destroyed not only his own men, but every one who came in contact with
them. After this he again endeavored to encourage the Athenians, to whom
he had become an object of dislike. However, he did not succeed in
pacifying them, but they condemned him by a public vote to be general no
more, and to pay a fine which is stated at the lowest estimate to have
been fifteen talents, and at the highest fifty. This was carried,
according to Idomeneus, by Cleon, but, according to Theophrastus, by
Simmias; while Heraclides of Pontus says that it was effected by
Lacratides.
He soon regained his public position, for the people's outburst of anger
was quenched by the blow they had dealt him, just as a bee leaves its
sting in the wound; but his private affairs were in great distress and
disorder, as he had lost many of his relatives during the plague, while
others were estranged from him on political grounds. Yet he would not
yield, nor abate his firmness and constancy of spirit because of these
afflictions, but was not observed to weep or mourn, or attend the
funeral of any of his relations, until he lost Paralus, the last of his
legitimate offspring. Crushed by this blow, he tried in vain to keep up
his grand air of indifference, and when carrying a garland to lay upon
the corpse he was overpowered by his feelings, so as to burst into a
passion of tears and sobs, which he had never done before in his whole
life.
Athens made trial of her other generals and public men to conduct her
affairs, but none appeared to be of sufficient weight or reputation to
have such a charge intrusted to him. The city longed for Pericles, and
invited him again to lead its counsels and direct its armies; and he,
although dejected in spirits and living in seclusion in his own house,
was yet persuaded by Alcibiades and his other friends to resume the
direction of affairs.
After this it appears that Pericles was attacked by the plague, not
acutely or continuously, as in most cases, but in a slow wasting
fashion, exhibiting many varieties of symptoms, and gradually
undermining his strength. As he was now on his death-bed, the most
distinguished of the citizens and his surviving friends collected round
him and spoke admiringly of his nobleness and immense power, enumerating
also the number of his exploits, and the trophies which he had set up
for victories gained; for while in chief command he had won no less than
nine victories for Athens.
Events soon made the loss of Pericles felt and regretted by the
Athenians. Those who during his lifetime had complained that his power
completely threw them into the shade, when after his death they had made
trial of other orators and statesmen, were obliged to confess that with
all his arrogance no man ever was really more moderate, and that his
real mildness in dealing with men was as remarkable as his apparent
pride and assumption. His power, which had been so grudged and envied,
and called monarchy and despotism, now was proved to have been the
saving of the State; such an amount of corrupt dealing and wickedness
suddenly broke out in public affairs, which he before had crushed and
forced to hide itself, and so prevented its becoming incurable through
impunity and license.
GREAT PLAGUE AT ATHENS
B.C. 430
GEORGE GROTE
(Almost at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, when the prosperity
of Athens had placed her at the height of her power and given her
unquestioned supremacy among the Grecian states, her strength was
greatly impaired by a visitation against which there was nothing in
military prowess or patriotic pride and devotion that could prevail.
It is one of the tragic contrasts of history--the picture of Athens, in
her full triumph and glory, smitten, at a moment when she needed to put
forth her full strength, by a deadly foe against whose might mortal arms
were vain. Her citizens were rejoicing in her social no less than her
military preëminence, and they had already been trained in the hardships
necessary to be endured in defence of an invaded country. Again they
were prepared to undergo whatever service might be laid upon them in her
behalf. They could foresee the arduous tasks and inevitable sufferings
of a great war, but had no warning of an impending calamity far worse
than those which even war, though always attended with horrors, usually
entails. Pericles had lately delivered his great funeral oration at the
public interment of soldiers who had fallen for Athens. "The bright
colors and tone of cheerful confidence," says Grote, whose account of
the plague follows, "which pervaded the discourse of Pericles, appear
the more striking from being in immediate antecedence to the awful
description of this distemper."
The death of Pericles himself, who directly or indirectly fell a victim
to the prevailing pestilence, marked a grievous crisis for Athens in
what was already become a measureless public woe. During the autumn of
the year B.C. 427 the epidemic again broke out, after a considerable
intermission, and for one year continued, "to the sad ruin both of the
strength and the comfort of the city.")
At the close of one year after the attempted surprise of Plataea by the
Thebans, the belligerent parties in Greece remained in an unaltered
position as to relative strength. Nothing decisive had been accomplished
on either side, either by the invasion of Attica or by the flying
descents round the coast of Peloponnesus. In spite of mutual damage
inflicted--doubtless in the greatest measure upon Attica--no progress
was yet made toward the fulfilment of those objects which had induced
the Peloponnesians to go to war. Especially the most pressing among all
their wishes--the relief of Potidaea--was in no way advanced; for the
Athenians had not found it necessary to relax the blockade of that city,
The result of the first year's operations had thus been to disappoint
the hopes of the Corinthians and the other ardent instigators of war,
while it justified the anticipations both of Pericles and of Archidamus.
A second devastation of Attica was resolved upon for the commencement of
spring; and measures were taken for carrying it all over that territory,
since the settled policy of Athens, not to hazard a battle with the
invaders, was now ascertained. About the end of March or beginning of
April the entire Peloponnesian force--two-thirds from each confederate
city as before--was assembled under the command of Archidamus and
marched into Attica. This time they carried the work of systematic
destruction not merely over the Thriasian plain and the plain
immediately near to Athens, as before; but also to the more southerly
portions of Attica, down even as far as the mines of Laurium. They
traversed and ravaged both the eastern and the western coast, remaining
not less than forty days in the country. They found the territory
deserted as before, all the population having retired within the walls.
In regard to this second invasion, Pericles recommended the same
defensive policy as he had applied to the first; and apparently the
citizens had now come to acquiesce in it, if not willingly, at least
with a full conviction of its necessity. But a new visitation had now
occurred, diverting their attention from the invader, though enormously
aggravating their sufferings. A few days after Archidamus entered
Attica, a pestilence or epidemic sickness broke out unexpectedly at
Athens.
It appears that this terrific disorder had been raging for some time
throughout the regions round the Mediterranean; having begun, as was
believed, in Ethiopia--thence passing into Egypt and Libya, and
overrunning a considerable portion of Asia under the Persian government.
About sixteen years before, there had been a similar calamity in Rome
and in various parts of Italy. Recently it had been felt in Lemnos and
some other islands of the Aegean, yet seemingly not with such intensity
as to excite much notice generally in the Grecian world: at length it
passed to Athens, and first showed itself in the Piraeus. The progress
of the disease was as rapid and destructive as its appearance had been
sudden; while the extraordinary accumulation of people within the city
and long walls, in consequence of the presence of the invaders in the
country, was but too favorable to every form of contagion. Families
crowded together in close cabins and places of temporary
shelter--throughout a city constructed, like most of those in Greece,
with little regard to the conditions of salubrity and in a state of
mental chagrin from the forced abandonment and sacrifice of their
properties in the country, transmitted the disorder with fatal facility
from one to the other. Beginning as it did about the middle of April,
the increasing heat of summer further aided the disorder, the symptoms
of which, alike violent and sudden, made themselves the more remarked
because the year was particularly exempt from maladies of every other
description.
Of this plague--or, more properly, eruptive typhoid fever, distinct
from, yet analogous to, the smallpox--a description no less clear than
impressive has been left by the historian Thucydides, himself not only a
spectator but a sufferer. It is not one of the least of his merits, that
his notice of the symptoms, given at so early a stage of medical science
and observation, is such as to instruct the medical reader of the
present age, and to enable the malady to be understood and identified.
The observations with which that notice is ushered in deserve particular
attention. "In respect to this distemper (he says), let every man,
physician or not, say what he thinks respecting the source from whence
it may probably have arisen, and respecting the causes which he deems
sufficiently powerful to have produced so great a revolution. But I,
having myself had the distemper, and having seen others suffering under
it, will state _what it actually was_, and will indicate in addition
such other matters as will furnish any man, who lays them to heart, with
knowledge and the means of calculation beforehand, in case the same
misfortune should ever occur again."
To record past facts, as a basis for rational prevision in regard to the
future--the same sentiment which Thucydides mentions in his preface, as
having animated him to the composition of his history--was at that time
a duty so little understood that we have reason to admire not less the
manner in which he performs it in practice than the distinctness with
which he conceives it in theory. We infer from his language that
speculation in his day was active respecting the causes of this plague,
according to the vague and fanciful physics, and scanty stock of
ascertained facts, which was all that could then be consulted. By
resisting the itch of theorizing from one of those loose hypotheses
which then appeared plausibly to explain everything, he probably
renounced the point of view from which most credit and interest would be
derivable at the time. But his simple and precise summary of observed
facts carries with it an imperishable value, and even affords grounds
for imagining that he was no stranger to the habits and training of his
contemporary Hippocrates, and the other Asclepiads of Cos.
It is hardly within the province of a historian of Greece to repeat
after Thucydides the painful enumeration of symptoms, violent in the
extreme and pervading every portion of the bodily system, which marked
this fearful disorder. Beginning in Piraeus, it quickly passed into the
city, and both the one and the other was speedily filled with sickness
and suffering, the like of which had never before been known. The
seizures were sudden, and a large proportion of the sufferers perished
after deplorable agonies on the seventh or on the ninth day. Others,
whose strength of constitution carried them over this period, found
themselves the victims of exhausting and incurable diarrhoea afterward;
with others again, after traversing both these stages, the distemper
fixed itself in some particular member, the eyes, the genitals, the
hands, or the feet, which were rendered permanently useless, or in some
cases amputated, even where the patient himself recovered.
There were also some whose recovery was attended with a total loss of
memory, so that they no more knew themselves or recognized their
friends. No treatment or remedy appearing, except in accidental cases,
to produce any beneficial effect, the physicians or surgeons whose aid
was invoked became completely at fault. While trying their accustomed
means without avail, they soon ended by catching the malady themselves
and perishing. The charms and incantations, to which the unhappy patient
resorted, were not likely to be more efficacious. While some asserted
that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns of water, others
referred the visitation to the wrath of the gods, and especially to
Apollo, known by hearers of the _Iliad_ as author of pestilence in the
Greek host before Troy. It was remembered that this Delphian god had
promised the Lacedaemonians, in reply to their application immediately
before the war, that he would assist them whether invoked or uninvoked;
and the disorder now raging was ascribed to the intervention of their
irresistible ally; while the elderly men further called to mind an
oracular verse sung in the time of their youth: "The Dorian war will
come, and pestilence along with it." Under the distress which suggested,
and was reciprocally aggravated by these gloomy ideas, prophets were
consulted, and supplications with solemn procession were held at the
temples, to appease the divine wrath.
When it was found that neither the priest nor the physician could retard
the spread or mitigate the intensity of the disorder, the Athenians
abandoned themselves to despair, and the space within the walls became a
scene of desolating misery. Every man attacked with the malady at once
lost his courage--a state of depression itself among the worst features
of the case, which made him lie down and die, without any attempt to
seek for preservatives. And although at first friends and relatives lent
their aid to tend the sick with the usual family sympathies, yet so
terrible was the number of these attendants who perished, "like sheep,"
from such contact, that at length no man would thus expose himself;
while the most generous spirits, who persisted longest in the discharge
of their duty, were carried off in the greatest numbers. The patient was
thus left to die alone and unheeded. Sometimes all the inmates of a
house were swept away one after the other, no man being willing to go
near it: desertion on the one hand, attendance on the other, both tended
to aggravate the calamity. There remained only those who, having had the
disorder and recovered, were willing to tend the sufferers.
These men formed the single exception to the all-pervading misery of the
time--for the disorder seldom attacked anyone twice, and when it did the
second attack was never fatal. Elate with their own escape, they deemed
themselves out of the reach of all disease, and were full of
compassionate kindness for others whose sufferings were just beginning.
It was from them too that the principal attention to the bodies of
deceased victims proceeded: for such was the state of dismay and sorrow
that even the nearest relatives neglected the sepulchral duties, sacred
beyond all others in the eyes of a Greek. Nor is there any circumstance
which conveys to us so vivid an idea of the prevalent agony and despair
as when we read, in the words of an eyewitness, that the deaths took
place among this close-packed crowd without the smallest decencies of
attention--that the dead and the dying lay piled one upon another not
merely in the public roads, but even in the temples, in spite of the
understood defilement of the sacred building--that half-dead sufferers
were seen lying round all the springs, from insupportable thirst--that
the numerous corpses thus unburied and exposed were in such a condition
that the dogs which meddled with them died in consequence, while no
vultures or other birds of the like habits ever came near.
Those bodies which escaped entire neglect were burnt or buried without
the customary mourning, and with unseemly carelessness. In some cases
the bearers of a body, passing by a funeral pile on which another body
was burning, would put their own there to be burnt also; or perhaps, if
the pile was prepared ready for a body not yet arrived, would deposit
their own upon it, set fire to the pile, and then depart. Such indecent
confusion would have been intolerable to the feelings of the Athenians
in any ordinary times.
To all these scenes of physical suffering, death, and reckless despair
was superadded another evil, which affected those who were fortunate
enough to escape the rest. The bonds both of law and morality became
relaxed, amid such total uncertainty of every man both for his own life
and that of others. Men cared not to abstain from wrong, under
circumstances in which punishment was not likely to overtake them, nor
to put a check upon their passions, and endure privations, in obedience
even to their strongest conviction, when the chance was so small of
their living to reap reward or enjoy any future esteem. An interval,
short and sweet, before their doom was realized--before they became
plunged in the widespread misery which they witnessed around, and which
affected indiscriminately the virtuous and the profligate--was all that
they looked to enjoy; embracing with avidity the immediate pleasures of
sense, as well as such positive gains, however ill-gotten, as could be
made the means of procuring them, and throwing aside all thought both of
honor and of long-sighted advantage. Life and property being alike
ephemeral, there was no hope left but to snatch a moment of enjoyment,
before the outstretched hand of destiny should fall upon its victims.
The picture of society under the pressure of a murderous epidemic, with
its train of physical torments, wretchedness, and demoralization, has
been drawn by more than one eminent author, but by none with more
impressive fidelity and conciseness than by Thucydides, who had no
predecessor, nor anything but the reality, to copy from. We may remark
that amid all the melancholy accompaniments of the time there are no
human sacrifices, such as those offered up at Carthage during pestilence
to appease the anger of the gods--there are no cruel persecutions
against imaginary authors of the disease, such as those against the
Untori (anointers of doors) in the plague of Milan in 1630.
Three years altogether did this calamity desolate Athens: continuously,
during the entire second and third years of the war--after which
followed a period of marked abatement for a year and a half; but it then
revived again, and lasted for another year, with the same fury as at
first. The public loss, over and above the private misery, which this
unexpected enemy inflicted upon Athens, was incalculable. Out of twelve
hundred horsemen, all among the rich men of the state, three hundred
died of the epidemic; besides forty-four hundred _hoplites_ out of the
roll formally kept, and a number of the poorer population so great as to
defy computation. No efforts of the Peloponnesians could have done so
much to ruin Athens, or to bring the war to a termination such as they
desired: and the distemper told the more in their favor, as it never
spread at all into Peloponnesus, though it passed from Athens to some of
the more populous islands. The Lacedaemonian army was withdrawn from
Attica somewhat earlier than it would otherwise have been, for fear of
taking the contagion.