Excerpt: June 05, 2020. "THE ANTHENIAN PLAGUE" (A.Glass 2020)
(Philipp von Foltz (1852) depicting Pericles's Funeral Oration)
"...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 populous. It was documented by the Greek historian Thucydides that the plague entered the port of Piraeus..."
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