The Anthenian Plague

("Plague in an Ancient City".  Michiel Sweerts, circa 1652–1654)

The ancient Greeks had a complex structure of Gods and myths, which were intertwined as a bases of metaphor and action to maintain a democracy.  Despite the philosopher Socrates, who believed that democracy may end up as more of a hindrance than not, the Hellenic governing system to which the people were given a voice through their representatives, was proven essential in Greek politics.

However, wars and plagues, more particularity the scourge of epidemics proved to be more of an undoing to the Greek political structure, a challenge that put into question not only democracy but the gods and the superstitious belief, that they hold, at times, an aggressive disregard towards humanity.  When the Athens plague of the 4th century struck the city state, it broke apart the core aspect of what appeared on the surface as a cohesive society.  While the prolonged war with the Spartans known as the “Peloponnesian war” began to erode confidence in Athens, prior to the conflict and disease that ravished the Greek state.  It was Pericles, the Athenian statesman and leader of Athens - who was seen as a strong leader, assisting in building the city state up into what was considered a golden age of prosperity.  Education, the arts, literature and construction projects, all initiated by Pericles to portray Athens as a powerful city within the region, people were treated equally and fairly under law.  There was what, although some historians have disputed, a feigned idealism of widespread contentedness.  That Pericles was simply an ego driven populist, in attempt at monopolizing trading power over the conjoining states, he went to war with Sparta. 

In prelude to the first year of the war in 430 BC, Pericles had already imprinted his willingness to deny any negotiation with the Spartans, instead reinstating his belief that Athens was morally and socially superior to Sparta, convincing the Athenians that that state would be able to withstand threats and even war with Spartans.  When war was declared, the murkiness to its initial reasons remained fixed within a fog of war, however, the fear of conflict forced many families from the rural regions to descend onto Athens, thus, the mass migration into the city ensured, causing overpopulation throughout.  In the second year of the Peloponnesian war, with cramped living conditions throughout the city, with the poor huddled together and lack of hygiene, the plague struck.  Although historians have not be able to discern what pathogen it was, its ferocity was brutal on the city state, killing one third of the populus.  It was documented by the Greek historian Thucydides that the plague entered the port of Piraeus, having already effected the regions of Egypt, Libya and Persia.  The densely populated Athens would record the most deaths.

There is a similarity in its history, which resonates in conjunction with all plagues and viral outbreaks.  That misinformation, fear and denial exasperates the epidemic.  The  ancient Greeks followed closely with the writings from the 8th Century Illiad poem by Homer,  that plagues were sent down from the god Apollo, as punishment to human arrogance.   In an attempt at understanding the devastation of what a plague and war can entail for a society.  Yet, it would be the philosophers such as Socrates and more importantly Thucydides, who caught the plague and recovered, offered a rational and detailed account of how it threw Athens into utter turmoil.  Struggling to emerge in its later years as a beacon of democracy and progress. 

The Athenaen plague not only changed Greek society, it restructured its relevance as a power.