The conception of pestilence as a punishment for sin is as prominent in
Greek as in Hebrew literature. We have seen it in the Homeric story,
and we see it again, where we should less expect it, in Sophocles.
Pestilence still centres round the personality of Apollo, but whereas
in Homer Apollo stays the plague, in Sophocles he is appealed to only
for knowledge, whereby to stay it. Homer endows him with special power,
Sophocles only with special knowledge. In Homer he is the god of the
bright light (φοῖβος), that dispels the darkness of pestilence: in
Sophocles his is the light that illumines the dark places of mind.
The _Oedipus Tyrannus_ seems to have been first publicly performed
between 429-420 B.C., possibly therefore before the plague of Athens
had finally died out. Sophocles is certainly not describing the plague
of Athens in the guise of a Theban plague, but it must needs have
coloured his thoughts as well as those of his audience. His description
of the pestilence blighting the crops, and causing murrain among cattle
and disease and death among men, suggests one of the famine plagues
common in ancient history. Hesiod[41] was not unaware of them (λιμὸν
ὁμοῦ καὶ λοιμόν). Sophocles is the first writer to attempt even in
outline a description of pestilence, and in doing so he has drawn the
picture of pestilence sent by the gods for the punishment of sin. The
way of atonement is sought for at Delphi, and pending this knowledge
supplication is made to Athena, Artemis, and Apollo, the deities who
control pestilence and have the plague-stricken city in their special
keeping. Here is the invocation to Apollo, the Delian Healer:
Shower from the golden string
Thine arrows, Lycian King.
O Phoebe, let thy fiery lances fly
Resistless, as they rove
Through Xanthus’ mountain-grove!
O Theban Bacchus of the lustrous eye,
With torch and trooping Maenads and bright crown,
Blaze on the god whom all in Heaven disown.[42]
Set in this archaic atmosphere the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ reads strange
beside the realistic record of Thucydides, published only a few years
later. But Sophocles has given only in outline what Thucydides has
given in arresting detail.
* * * * *
To the historian, the physician, and the man of letters, the account
given by Thucydides of the plague of Athens, in the course of the
Peloponnesian War, must stand for all time as one of the most
remarkable documents in the whole annals of pestilence. In view of
the much greater strength of the Lacedaemonian land-force, it was the
unwavering policy of Pericles to keep the Athenians within their walls,
allowing the Lacedaemonians to exhaust themselves in devastating Attic
territory, while retaliating on the coasts of Peloponnesus by the
Athenian fleet. Each year, at the approach of the Lacedaemonian army,
the inhabitants of Attica flocked within the walls of Athens, bringing
with them all their movable property, after sending their sheep and
cattle to Euboea and the neighbouring islands, so that the added horror
of a great epizootic was averted. The greater number encamped in the
vacant spaces of the city and Piraeus, and in and around the numerous
temples. Some housed their families in the towers and recesses of
the city walls, or in sheds, cabins, tents, or even tubs, disposed
throughout the course of the long walls. This was the overcrowded state
of beleaguered Athens, when pestilence broke out in the second year of
the Peloponnesian War (430 B.C.), putting the policy of Pericles to a
crucial test.
After ravaging the plain, the Peloponnesians devastated the coastlands
of Attica, first on the south coast, and then on the north. Pericles
forthwith equipped an Athenian naval squadron, and launched his
counterstroke against the Peloponnese. This fleet carried 4,000
hoplites and 300 cavalry, who ravaged the district round Epidaurus,
and other towns on the adjacent coast. It seems, however, despite the
rumour to the contrary, which Thucydides faithfully records, that
neither the pestilence nor the operations of this expeditionary force
actually accelerated the departure of the Lacedaemonians, for they
stayed 40 days, which was longer than any other stay. Pestilence broke
out in this expeditionary force, and is doubtless the reason that it
returned without accomplishing more. Plutarch indeed says that the
Athenians would have captured Epidaurus, but for this outbreak of
sickness.
The Athenians also sent another fleet this same summer against Potidaea
in Thrace, which was already undergoing a siege at the hands of an
Athenian army. Pestilence worked fearful havoc in this supplementary
force and spread from it to the troops who were already there,
involving a mortality of 1,050 out of a total of 4,000 hoplites, so
that the expedition was compelled to return and leave the siege to the
troops that were there before them.
In their despair the Athenians vented their angry feelings on Pericles,
just as persons in a delirium, says Plutarch,[43] turn on their
physician or their father. They urged that the pestilence was due to
cooping up in the city in stifling huts a rural population accustomed
to an open-air existence, so that they conveyed infection to one
another. But popular resentment subsided as quickly as it arose. In a
noble speech, which Thucydides reproduces at length, Pericles weaned
them to a better mind. His own domestic sufferings may have stirred
their sympathy. He lost of the pestilence his only two legitimate sons,
Xanthippus and Paralus, his sister, and many relatives and friends.
The death of his favourite son, Paralus, left him with no legitimate
heir to maintain the family and the hereditary sacred rites. ‘That
blow’, says Plutarch,[44] ‘crushed him to earth. He struggled indeed to
preserve his wonted impassiveness and to maintain his serene composure.
But, as he laid a wreath upon the body and looked upon his dead, the
anguish of it all overwhelmed him, and he burst out wailing and sobbing
bitterly—a thing which in all his life he had never before done.’ The
spectacle of this proud, reserved man, this man who had stood firm as
a rock amid the rising tide of popular resentment, humbled before God,
humiliated before man, as the iron seared his innermost soul, is one of
the most moving pictures in all history and literature.
My God has bowed me down to what I am,
My solitude and grief have brought me low.
‘Shortly after this, it appears, the pestilence laid hold on Pericles.
The attack was not, as in other cases, sharp and severe. It took the
form of an ailment, slight but protracted through a variety of phases,
which slowly wasted his strength and undermined the vigour of his
mind.’ But if we may judge by the accounts of his death-bed given by
Plutarch himself, and by Theophrastus in his _Ethics_, his mind was
free from any taint of insanity.
The first outbreak of pestilence lasted for two years, from the
spring of 430 B.C. to that of 428 B.C., then came a partial, but not
complete, abatement for one and a half years, followed by another
outbreak in 427 B.C. which lasted a year. ‘To the power of Athens’,
says Thucydides, ‘certainly nothing was more ruinous. Not less than
4,400 Athenian hoplites, who were on the roll, died, and also 300
horsemen, and an incalculable number of the common people’, estimated
by Diodorus Siculus[45] at 10,000 freemen and slaves. Bury[46] puts the
total number of Athenian burghers (of both sexes and all ages) at the
commencement of the Peloponnesian War at 100,000, and this total was
reduced by the pestilence to some 80,000 or less. The metic class and
the slaves he estimates roundly at 30,000 and 100,000 respectively,
but beyond the unreliable statement of Diodorus Siculus, we have no
index of their reduction. In accepting the verdict of Thucydides on the
disastrous effects of the pestilence on the power of Athens, we must
not forget that there were other influences at work, conspiring to this
same result, the consequences of which Pericles had pointed out clearly
in his speech before the war. Had it not been for these, Athens would
beyond doubt have rallied quickly from the blow, as we shall see that
other cities have habitually done in like case with hers.
The circumstances under which the epidemic broke out a second time in
Athens cannot have differed greatly from those prevailing at its first
onset, for though it was winter and the Lacedaemonian army was not in
the field, the surrounding country had been devastated, and most of the
peasantry must still have been cooped up, in a state of overcrowding,
within the walls. As the pestilence lingered on in Athens, superstition
laid fast hold on the populace, under the stress of their protracted
sufferings. On the advice of the oracle, they decided to purify
the island of Delos, which formerly had been dedicated to Apollo,
but latterly had been used as a burial-ground. All the dead were
transferred to a neighbouring island Rhene, and a law was passed
forbidding henceforth the burial of a corpse or the birth of a child
in Delos. The neglected panegyric festival of Apollo was also revived
in the island. No stone was left unturned to appease the god, who, the
Athenians now were persuaded, had sent them the distemper.
Earthquakes and inundations lasted, as did the pestilence, throughout
the summer of 426 B.C. Diodorus Siculus seems to suggest that the
earthquakes were sent by Apollo, who had been duly propitiated, to
divert the Lacedaemonians from the invasion of Attica. Actually they
did effect this, for Agis, King of Sparta, though already arrived
at the isthmus, accepted the omen and led his army back. Neither
Thucydides nor Diodorus Siculus asserts any direct causal relation
between the earthquakes and the pestilence—a belief, which if now
vaguely foreshadowed, took definite form only at a later date.
The following is the full narrative[47] of the pestilence, as given by
Thucydides:
‘As soon as summer returned, the Peloponnesian
army, comprising as before two-thirds of the force
of each confederate state, under the command of the
Lacedaemonian king Archidamus, the son of Zeuxidamus,
invaded Attica, where they established themselves and
ravaged the country. They had not been there many days
when the plague broke out at Athens for the first time.
_It_ is said to have previously smitten many places,
particularly Lemnos, but there is no record of _so
great_ a pestilence occurring elsewhere, or of _such_
a destruction of human life. For a while physicians,
in ignorance of the nature of the disease, sought to
apply remedies; but it was in vain, and they themselves
were among the first victims, because they oftenest
came into contact with it. No human art was of any
avail, and as to supplications in temples, enquiries of
oracles, and the like, they were utterly useless, and
at last men were overpowered by the calamity and gave
them all up. The disease is said to have begun south of
Egypt in Ethiopia: thence it descended into Egypt
and Libya, and after spreading over the greater part
of the Persian empire, suddenly fell upon Athens. It
first attacked the inhabitants of the Piraeus, and it
was supposed that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the
cisterns, no conduits having as yet been made there.
It afterwards reached the upper city, and then the
mortality became far greater. As to its probable origin
or the causes which might or could have produced such a
disturbance of nature, every man, whether a physician
or not, will give his own opinion. But I shall describe
its actual _character_, and the symptoms by which
any one who knows them beforehand may recognize the
disorder, should it ever reappear. For I was myself
attacked, and witnessed the sufferings of others.
The season was admitted to have been remarkably
free from ordinary sickness; and if anybody was already
ill of any other disease, it was absorbed in this.
Many who were in perfect health, all in a moment, and
without any apparent reason, were seized with violent
heats in the head and with redness and inflammation of
the eyes. Internally the throat and the tongue were
quickly suffused with blood, and the breath became
unnatural and fetid. There followed sneezing and
hoarseness; in a short time the disorder, accompanied
by a violent cough, reached the chest; then fastening
lower down, it would move the stomach and bring on all
the vomits of bile to which physicians have ever given
names; and they were very distressing. An ineffectual
retching producing violent _straining_ attacked most of
the sufferers; some as soon as the previous symptoms
had abated, others not until long afterwards. The body
externally was not so very hot to the touch, nor yet
pale: it was of a livid colour inclining to red, and
breaking out in pustules and ulcers. But the internal
fever was intense: the sufferers could not bear to have
on them even the finest linen garment. They insisted on
being naked, and there was nothing which they longed
for more eagerly than to throw themselves into cold
water. And many of those who had no one to look after
them actually plunged into the cisterns, for they were
tormented by unceasing thirst, which was not in the
least assuaged whether they drank little or much. They
could not sleep: a restlessness which was intolerable
never left them. While the disease was at its height
the body, instead of wasting away, held out amid these
sufferings in a marvellous manner, and either they died
on the seventh or ninth day, not of weakness, for their
strength was not exhausted, but of internal fever,
which was the end of most; or, if they survived,
then the disease descended into the bowels and there
produced violent ulceration; severe diarrhoea at
the same time set in, and at a later stage caused
exhaustion, which finally with few exceptions carried
them off. For the disorder which had originally settled
in the head passed gradually through the whole body,
and, if a person got over the worst, would often seize
the extremities and leave its mark, attacking the privy
parts and the fingers and the toes; and some escaped
with the loss of these, some with the loss of their
eyes. Some again had no sooner recovered than they were
seized with a forgetfulness of all things and knew
neither themselves nor their friends.
The malady took a form _beyond description_, and
the fury with which it fastened upon each sufferer
was too much for human nature to endure. There was
one circumstance in particular which distinguished it
from ordinary diseases. The birds and animals which
feed on human flesh, although so many bodies were
lying unburied, either never came near them, or died
if they touched them. This was proved by a remarkable
disappearance of the birds of prey, who were not to be
seen either about the bodies or anywhere else: while in
the case of the dogs the fact was even more obvious,
because they live with man.
Such was the general nature of the disease: I
omit many strange peculiarities which characterized
individual cases. None of the ordinary sicknesses
attacked any one while it lasted, or if they did, they
ended in the plague. Some of the sufferers died from
want of care, others equally who were receiving the
greatest attention. No single remedy could be deemed a
specific: for that which did good to one did harm to
another. No constitution was of itself strong enough
to resist or weak enough to escape the attacks: the
disease carried off all alike and defied every mode of
treatment. Most appalling was the despondency which
seized upon any one who felt himself sickening: for he
instantly abandoned his mind to despair and, instead of
holding out, absolutely threw away his chance of life.
Appalling too was the rapidity with which men caught
the infection: dying like sheep if they attended on one
another: and this was the principal cause of mortality.
When they were afraid to visit one another, the
sufferers died in their solitude, so that many houses
were empty because there had been no one left to take
care of the sick; or if they ventured they perished,
especially those who aspired to heroism. For they went
to see their friends without thought of themselves and
were ashamed to leave them, even at a time when the
very relations of the dying were at last growing weary
and ceased to make lamentations, overwhelmed by the
vastness of the calamity. But whatever instances there
may have been of such devotion, more often the sick
and the dying were tended by the pitying care of those
who had recovered, because they knew the course of the
disease and were themselves free from apprehension.
For no one was ever attacked a second time, or with
a fatal result. All men congratulated them, and they
themselves, in the excess of their joy at the moment,
had an innocent fancy that they could not die of any
other sickness.
The crowding of the people out of the country into
the city aggravated the misery; and the newly-arrived
suffered most. For, having no houses of their own, but
inhabiting in the height of summer stifling huts, the
mortality among them was dreadful, and they perished
in wild disorder. The dead lay as they had died, one
upon another, while others hardly alive wallowed in the
streets and crawled about every fountain craving for
water. The temples in which they lodged were full of
the corpses of those who died in them: for the violence
of the calamity was such that men, not knowing where to
turn, grew reckless of all law, human and divine. The
customs which had hitherto been observed at funerals
were universally violated, and they buried their dead
each one as best he could. Many, having no proper
appliances, because the deaths in their household
had been so frequent, made no scruple of using the
burial-place of others. When one man had raised a
funeral pile, others would come, and throwing on their
dead first, set fire to it; or when some other corpse
was already burning, before they could be stopped would
throw their own dead upon it and depart.
There were other and worse forms of lawlessness
which the plague introduced at Athens. Men who had
hitherto concealed their indulgence in pleasure now
grew bolder. For seeing the sudden change—how the rich
died in a moment, and those who had nothing immediately
inherited their property—they reflected that life and
riches were alike transitory, and they resolved to
enjoy themselves while they could, and to think only
of pleasure. Who would be willing to sacrifice himself
to the law of honour when he knew not whether he would
ever live to be held in honour? The pleasure of the
moment and any sort of thing which conduced to it took
the place both of honour and of expediency. No fear
of God or law of man deterred a criminal. Those, who
saw all perishing alike, thought that the worship or
neglect of the Gods made no difference. For offences
against human law no punishment was to be feared: no
one would live long enough to be called to account.
Already a far heavier sentence had been passed and was
hanging over a man’s head: before that fell, why should
he not take a little pleasure?
Such was the grievous calamity which now afflicted
the Athenians: within the walls their people were
dying, and without, their country was being ravaged. In
their troubles they naturally called to mind a verse
which the elder men among them declared to have been
current long ago:
A Dorian war will come and a plague with it.
There was a dispute about the precise expression:
some saying that _limos_, a famine, and not _loimos_,
a plague, was the original word. Nevertheless,
as might have been expected, for men’s memories
reflected their sufferings, the argument in favour of
_loimos_ prevailed at the time. But if ever in future
years another Dorian war arises which happens to be
accompanied by a famine, they will probably repeat
the verse in the other form. The answer of the oracle
to the Lacedaemonians when the God was asked “whether
they should go to war or not”, and he replied “that if
they fought with all their might, they would conquer,
and that he himself would take their part”, was not
forgotten by those who had heard of it, and they quite
imagined that they were witnessing the fulfilment of
his words. The disease certainly did set in immediately
after the invasion of the Peloponnesians, and did not
spread to the Peloponnesus in any degree worth speaking
of, while Athens felt its ravages most severely, and
next to Athens the places which were most populous.
Such was the history of the plague.’
A careful study, line upon line and word by word, of the description
which Thucydides has given of the clinical features of the Athenian
pestilence, viewing it on the one hand in the light of the medical
knowledge of the time, and on the other in the light of the revelations
of modern pathology, can hardly fail to bring home to an unbiased
judgement the conviction that we have to do with typhus fever. It is
true that it bears a close resemblance to Oriental plague, but whereas
the objections to this diagnosis seem to us to be insuperable, we
shall hope to show that those which hitherto have appeared obstacles
to the diagnosis of typhus fever, are either artificial or based upon
an incorrect interpretation of the text. The confusion of typhus fever
and Oriental plague prevailed down to comparatively modern times even
among medical writers; not only is there a striking resemblance in the
clinical picture of the two diseases, but they have been constantly
commingled in one and the same epidemic. This is no matter for
surprise, when we remember that the flea is the chief agent in the
propagation of one disease, and the body-louse of the other.
There is scarcely a single writer of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or
eighteenth centuries on the subject of fevers, who has not commented on
the concurrence of malignant fevers with epidemics of Oriental plague.
It is true that they do not all identify the malignant fevers as
typhus, simply because typhus, though distinguished as a morbid entity
by Fracastorius as early as 1546, did not become generally recognized
throughout Europe until the eighteenth century, and even then its
identity was obscured under a multiplicity of synonyms. Ambroise Paré,
in 1568, described a pestilential fever as prevailing in France along
with true plague, in which the skin was marked with spots, like the
bites of fleas or bugs. Vilalba says that on several occasions during
the sixteenth century a spotted fever called Tabardiglio, which is
now known to have been typhus, was rife in Spain at the same time as
plague, and was much confused with it. According to Lotz a malignant
spotted fever was present in London in 1624, which turned to plague
in 1625, and back again to spotted fever in 1626. Similarly Sydenham
states that the Great Plague of London was preceded and followed by a
pestilent fever, which from his description was clearly typhus, and he
remarks that it differed from the plague only in the milder character
of its symptoms. According to Diemerbroeck spotted fever (typhus)
preceded plague in Holland in 1636, and its malignity increased
progressively, until finally it became converted into true plague. The
same is true of the plague of Marseilles in 1720, of the plague of
Aleppo in 1760, and of the plague of Moscow in 1771. Hancock, in 1821,
asserted that nearly all the most remarkable plagues of the last two
centuries had been preceded by typhus. So much for the confusion of
these two diseases, due to their concurrence.
Murchison, whose treatise on typhus stands out as a monument of acute
and accurate observation, traces out in detail the resemblance of the
two diseases. It is no matter only of a general clinical resemblance,
such as is common to most acute infectious fevers, though that is
striking enough, but beyond this there is a remarkable similarity in
particular symptoms, in clinical course, and in complications. There
is a tendency to regard buboes as a distinctive feature of plague, but
these are found in a small moiety of cases of typhus fever. On the
other side of the picture, the petechial eruptions of typhus, its most
distinctive feature, are common enough in plague.
It is tempting to shirk the difficulty of a differential diagnosis
by assuming that in Athens, as so often elsewhere, there was a
simultaneous outbreak of typhus and plague, but the whole evidence
points strongly to the presence of typhus, and typhus only. We will
endeavour to present the evidence fairly and simply, so that every
reader may form his own conclusion, by reference to the appended
narrative of Thucydides.
Starting in Ethiopia rumour had it that the disease spread northwards
to Egypt and Libya, and thence over the greater part of the Persian
Empire, which at that time included almost all of Western Asia, then
suddenly it swooped down upon Athens. The same disease was said to have
previously attacked Lemnos and many other places, but with much less
severity. With Lemnos Thucydides will have had close acquaintance, for
it lay in the direct route to Thrace, where he owned property. He is
careful to say that he gives this information as well as that of its
starting-point and lines of extension only on hearsay evidence. If it
were really part of one vast pandemic, it is surprising that he should
have no more certain knowledge of its incidence. True, pestilence
was raging this self-same year in Rome, but it must not be assumed
that it was necessarily of the same character as that at Athens. All
through the fifth century Rome was seldom without pestilence, and
Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus record a succession of epidemics,
some of several years’ duration, following hard one upon another. If
the origin in Ethiopia and the subsequent lines of advance are to
be accepted, this would certainly constitute a weighty argument in
favour of Oriental plague. Of late years an endemic focus of plague
has been located in Central Africa, and in its spread the disease
was following established routes of commerce, as has habitually been
the case. Pandemicity too is an inherent tendency of plague. Typhus
has followed for the most part the march of armies, and in the wake
of famine, and has shown but little tendency to adhere to the beaten
routes of commerce. Typhus has in some instances extended at one and
the same time over a wide region, but for the most part it has been
over contiguous tracts of land. Thus Hildebrand recorded an epidemic
spreading to the whole of Germany, Galicia, Hungary and the Austrian
crown-lands.
Thucydides has laid it down that the plague of Athens was an unknown
disease. Now there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that bubonic
plague was recognized, in its sporadic form, as a clinical entity at
the time of Thucydides. The language of a passage in the 2nd Book of
the Epidemics, a treatise of the Hippocratic school, seems hardly
susceptible of any other interpretation: ὁι ἐπὶ βουβῶσι πυρετοὶ κακόν,
πλὴν τῶν ἐφημέρων, καὶ οἰ ἐπὶ πυρετοῖσι βουβῶνες κακίονες (‘fever
supervening on buboes is a bad sign, except they be ephemeral: but
buboes supervening on fever still worse’). The allusions also to
buboes in Aristophanes are so numerous as almost to preclude any other
conclusion: and it cannot be argued that these were an aftermath of
the epidemic, for Thucydides[48] implicitly asserts the complete
disappearance of the disease.
The outbreak of the pestilence first in the Piraeus suggests
importation by sea. Sea-carriage is far more characteristic of plague
than of typhus, though typhus has been imported often enough from
Ireland into England, and was also brought back to England by the
troops from Corunna, and to France by the French troops from the
Crimea. On the other hand, it was in Piraeus chiefly that the displaced
peasantry were crowded together promiscuously in small stifling
habitations, affording just those conditions in which typhus has
habitually arisen and become epidemic.
Among those epidemic diseases, that in past times have devastated
beleaguered cities, typhus unquestionably holds pride of place. Granada
in 1489, Metz in 1552, Montpellier in 1623, Reading in 1643, Genoa
in 1799, Saragossa in 1808, Dantzig and Wilna in 1813, and Torgau in
1814 all tell the same tale. With our lately acquired knowledge of the
transmission of typhus fever by the agency of body-lice, it is easy to
understand the prevalence of the disease in epidemic virulence among a
beleaguered and overcrowded garrison. Murchison, whose knowledge and
experience of typhus were unequalled, unhesitatingly identified the
plague of Athens as typhus, both because of this special circumstance
of its occurrence and because of the clinical picture as a whole.
The passing remarks of Thucydides on the causation of the pestilence
show him not only superior to the superstitious credulity of some of
his fellow countrymen, but far in advance of the most enlightened
medical opinion of his day. There were still some in Athens, who put
their faith in supplications in temples and inquiries of oracles: but
these measures were now weighed in the balance and found wanting. The
stern probation of the Persian wars had taught the lesson, that victory
was the reward of the strong, not the recompense of the devout; and
with this knowledge perished the whole fabric of Greek polytheism. So
now most of the populace ascribed the pestilence to natural causation:
the Lacedaemonians surely had poisoned the wells. From this day
onwards, right down to modern times, this phantom of poison dogs the
footsteps of pestilence.
Thucydides leaves no doubt whatever as to his own views: he has done
for good and all with supernatural causation, though he confesses his
inability to identify the precise cause, leaving that for others to
speculate about. He states and accepts without reserve contagion from
man to man. In this his great contemporary, Hippocrates, lags far
behind him. The mind of the Father of Medicine was still in bondage
to the early Greek physicists. Conceiving disease to be caused in man
by bodily disturbance, referable either to the character of the air
inspired or of the food and drink ingested, it was inevitable that,
in the causation of epidemic disease, Hippocrates should assign chief
importance to changes in the atmosphere, to which all alike would
be equally exposed. He does indeed recognize the possibility of its
contamination with alien putrid effluvia, but for all that it is the
mere physical changes in its constitution, which in his view are of
paramount importance. Of contagion from man to man he had not the
vaguest conception, and to him, as well as to Galen, and even to our
own Sydenham, the sole criterion of epidemicity was the incidence of
disease on a large number of persons at the same time.
To the student of the history of medicine it will be no matter for
surprise that Thucydides should have seen with undimmed vision, what
Hippocrates saw as yet only through a glass darkly. Medicine in every
age has been the bond-servant of plausible preconceptions, and it is
humiliating to professional self-complacency to scan the long array
of lay writers from Thucydides onwards, who accepted contagion as a
proven fact, before the scales fell from the eyes of obscurantist
Science. Out of many we may enumerate Aristotle, Lucretius, Diodorus
Siculus, Vergil, Ovid, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Livy, Seneca, Silius
Italicus, the elder Pliny, and Plutarch: while not till Aretaeus of
Cappadocia, in the second century after Christ, do we meet clear and
unequivocal acceptance in any medical author. Science, untempered by
letters, is apt to induce a mental myopia, and we men of medicine would
do well to reflect on the story of Archimedes, who, while drawing
mathematical figures in the sand, overlooked to the cost of his life
the fact, that the city had fallen into the hands of the enemy.
Though Thucydides was the first of extant writers to enunciate clearly
the doctrine of contagion, there is reason to think that Oriental
medicine had already grasped the idea. The Levitical ordinances seem
to recognize it in the case of leprosy. It is true that these had not
reached their final recension till after the time of Thucydides, but at
the same time they represent a body of much older tradition.
Thucydides is careful to state that the season was not a sickly one,
for Hippocrates himself attributed pestilence to heat and south winds
distempering the atmosphere, and following the example of Acron and
Empedocles of Agrigentum, essayed to alter the constitution of the
atmosphere, in a season of pestilence, by kindling large fires. Acron
aimed only at reducing its humidity, but Hippocrates may have sought
to destroy by fumigation putrid effluvia, engendered by the heat
in the air. His example was scrupulously followed in the Plague of
London in 1666, and in that of Marseilles in 1720. A comparison of
Thucydides with Diodorus Siculus redounds but little to the credit of
the latter. Diodorus submits three distinct agencies as producing the
plague of Athens by their concerted action. First, that so much rain
had fallen in the preceding winter, that the soil had become saturated
and waterlogged: following upon this an unusually hot summer led to
the exhalation from the soil of putrid effluvia, that contaminated the
air. In fact pestilence was a product of the marsh miasma. Empedocles
of Agrigentum was reputed to have delivered Selinus from a pestilence,
in the fifth century B.C., by draining its marshes, and an extant
coin commemorates the event: and Hippocrates clearly recognized the
association of periodic (i. e. malarial) fevers with marshes.
Secondly, he cites lack of good food as a contributory cause, for
the rain had also damaged the grain. This was not an unreasonable
proposition, for the prevalence of the ergot fungus in rye grain
after a wet season has given rise to many and widespread epidemics of
ergotism.
Thirdly, the Etesian winds did not blow, so that the air became
superheated, inflaming men’s bodies with all sorts of burning
distempers. It is enough for Diodorus that Hippocrates, Lucretius, and
others had postulated these causes of pestilence, to secure for them
acceptance in the sober record of his history. Thucydides declines
even to discuss such vague hypotheses, and chooses for himself the
better part of describing the actual symptoms of the disease, as he
had experienced them in his own person, and witnessed them in the
sufferings of others, so that any one familiar with them might be able
to recognize the disorder at once, in the event of its reappearance.
To Thucydides then is due the credit not only of the first detailed
description of an actual visitation of pestilence, but of a description
that breathes in every line the true spirit of history, the recording
of past events as a medium for the surer forecasting of the future—the
spirit that animates him in all his historical writing to give ‘a true
picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which
may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things’—the
whole duty of the historian, which not even Herodotus had recognized
to the full before him. So anxious is he that his readers shall see
things as he saw them, and learn the same lessons from them as he has
learnt, that he is willing on occasion to manipulate his narrative,
as when he brings forward the great Funeral Speech of Pericles into
immediate juxtaposition to the narrative of the pestilence, assuredly
so as to heighten the dramatic effect. So vivid and so forcible is
his picture of the plague, that it is difficult to believe that some
ten years had elapsed before he set pen to paper, and some thirty or
more before the whole attained its present form. It is no matter for
surprise that Lucretius, Procopius, Boccaccio, and Froissart should
have paid the homage of conscious imitation to this virile narrative.
(See Appendix.)[49]
Thucydides was the first to draw a picture of the demoralization
of society in the presence of pestilence—a theme that became a
commonplace with later historians of plague. The futility of the
physicians, the merciless march of the pestilence, the sufferings
of the sick, the neglect of the dead, the pollution of temples, the
sacrilegious funeral rites, these scenes and the like throng the
kaleidoscope of human misery. The sacred ties of kinship yielded under
the cruel emotion of fear. Lawlessness prevailed everywhere, for men
seeing the uncertainty of life and riches resolved to enjoy themselves,
while they could. Those who saw all perishing alike thought that
worship or neglect of the gods made no difference.
It is difficult to determine what traces of the pestilence are to be
found in contemporary Greek art and architecture. By some the statue
of Health Athena, set up by the Athenians just outside the eastern
portico of the Propylaea, is believed to have commemorated the passing
of the plague of Athens. Her cult was much older than this, and perhaps
derives from some primitive conception of an Earth Mother, the great
protectress of all her children, as in Christian hagiology the Madonna
of Health shelters them from plague and pestilence.
Pausanias[50] regards the romantic temple of Apollo at Bassae as
a memorial of the deliverance of Phigalia from an offset of this
plague of 430 B.C. He seems to infer this from the dedication of the
temple to Apollo, under his surname the Helper (Ἐπικούριος). On the
other hand, we know from Thucydides[51] that the plague scarcely
touched Peloponnesus. It is unlikely also that an Athenian architect,
Ictinus, who as Pausanias says built it, would have worked for the
Peloponnesians during the war with Athens.
The same doubt attaches to the attribution of the temple of Apollo
the Helper at Elis, and that of Pan the Deliverer in Troezen, and the
tradition appears in each case to be referable to the surname of the
god, coupled with the dates at which they were erected.
Pausanias[52] says that a statue of Apollo, Averter of Evil
(Ἀλεξίκακος), by Calamis, was erected in Athens as a memorial of
deliverance from the plague, but this cannot be the case, as Calamis
was dead before the plague commenced.
Such dedications were, however, common enough. When Epimenides freed
Athens from pestilence he cleansed the city and set up a shrine to
the Eumenides, and the people of Tanagra[53] similarly showed their
gratitude to Hermes the Ram-bearer (Κριοφόρος) by entrusting to Calamis
the erection of a statue in his honour.
Poussin painted a ‘Plague of Athens’, a much cherished picture now in
the gallery of Sir Frederick Cook at Richmond. It is a dull wooden
composition, and compares most unfavourably with his ‘Plague of
Ashdod’, in spite of the close similarity of incident and episode that
it depicts.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] _Works_, 243.
[42] Tr. L. Campbell.
[43] _Life of Pericles._
[44] Tr. W. R. Frazer.
[45] xii. 58.
[46] _History of Greece._
[47] Jowett’s _Thucydides_. We have ventured to introduce one or two
slight modifications into Professor Jowett’s translation, indicating
them by italics. In medicine it makes a world of difference, whether
a disease is the _same_ or _similar_: its _course_ too, is something
quite distinct from its character.
[48] ii. 48 end.
[49] The discussion of clinical details has been relegated to an
Appendix, as they are rather of medical than of literary or artistic
interest. They are, nevertheless, essential to a full appreciation of
the merits of the description that Thucydides gives of the pestilence.
[50] viii. 41. 7.
[51] ii. 54.
[52] i. 3. 3.
[53] Pausanias, ix. 22. 1.