Plague of Athens (430 BC): The Epidemic That Killed Pericles

The Plague of Athens was an epidemic that broke out in the summer of 430 BC, in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, while Athens was crowded with refugees sheltering from Spartan invasions. It returned in 427/426 BC and killed an estimated quarter to a third of the city’s people, including the statesman Pericles. The historian Thucydides, who caught the disease and survived, left a vivid eyewitness account that is still studied by historians and doctors.

Background: a crowded city at war

When the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC, Pericles persuaded the Athenians not to face the stronger Spartan army in open battle. Instead, the rural population of Attica abandoned their farms and moved inside the walls of Athens and the Long Walls that ran down to the port of Piraeus. The fleet would keep the city supplied by sea.

The strategy made military sense, but it packed tens of thousands of people into temporary shelters, shrines and huts in the summer heat. Water was limited and sanitation poor. When the Spartans invaded Attica again early in the summer of 430 BC, the conditions were ideal for an infectious disease to spread.

Outbreak and spread

Thucydides says the disease was believed to have started in Ethiopia, beyond Egypt, and then spread to Egypt, Libya and much of the Persian Empire. In Athens it appeared first in Piraeus, the busy port, so suddenly that people claimed the Spartans had poisoned the cisterns. From there it moved into the upper city, where deaths were far more numerous.

The disease struck the strong and the weak alike. Doctors, who did not know what it was, died in great numbers because they were most exposed to the sick. Prayers at temples and consultations of oracles brought no relief, and people eventually gave them up.

The epidemic also spread to the Athenian army. An expedition sent to besiege Potidaea in 430 BC lost 1,050 of its 4,000 hoplites to the disease in about forty days, according to Thucydides.

Thucydides’ description of the symptoms

Thucydides deliberately described the illness in detail, saying he would set out its nature so that it might be recognised if it ever struck again. His account remains the main evidence for identifying the disease.

According to him, healthy people were suddenly seized by violent heat in the head and redness and inflammation of the eyes. The throat and tongue became bloody, and the breath unnatural and foul. Sneezing and hoarseness followed, then a severe cough. When the illness reached the stomach it brought vomiting of bile and painful retching.

The skin was reddish and livid, breaking out in small blisters and ulcers. Inside, the patients burned so fiercely that they could not bear even the lightest clothing, and many threw themselves into water tanks to cool down. They suffered constant thirst and sleeplessness. Most died on the seventh or ninth day. Those who survived the first phase often died later of severe diarrhoea and weakness.

Some survivors lost fingers, toes or genitals, others their eyesight, and some lost their memory entirely. Thucydides also observed that birds and animals that fed on corpses either avoided them or died, and that people who had recovered did not catch the disease a second time in a fatal form. This is one of the earliest written observations of acquired immunity.

Social collapse

Thucydides was as interested in the social effects as in the medical ones. Despair, he wrote, was the most terrible part of the disease, because those who believed they were infected lost the will to resist. People who nursed the sick caught the illness and died, so that many sufferers were abandoned.

The dead piled up in houses and temples. Normal funeral customs broke down: families placed their own dead on pyres built for others, or threw a body onto a burning pyre and left. With life seemingly so short, many people stopped respecting the law and the gods, spending money freely on pleasure because neither fear of divine punishment nor human courts seemed to matter.

The death of Pericles

Only months after his Funeral Oration, the epidemic turned many Athenians against Pericles, whose strategy had crowded them into the city. In 430 BC they sent envoys to seek peace with Sparta, which was refused, and they fined Pericles and removed him from office as general. Soon afterwards they re-elected him.

Pericles lost his two legitimate sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, as well as his sister and many friends to the plague. He died in the autumn of 429 BC, about two and a half years after the war began. Thucydides judged that his successors lacked his authority and foresight, and that this contributed to Athens’ later defeat.

What was the disease?

Identifying the disease from a 2,400-year-old description has proved extremely difficult. Diseases change over time, and Thucydides’ symptoms do not fit any single modern illness perfectly. Among the many suggestions are:

• Typhus, which spreads in crowded wartime conditions and causes fever, rash and gangrene of the extremities.
• Smallpox, which fits the skin eruptions and the immunity of survivors.
• Measles, which may have been more deadly in a population with no previous exposure.
• Typhoid fever, supported by a DNA study published in 2006.
• Viral haemorrhagic fevers, including suggestions of an Ebola-like disease.

In 1994-1995, workers building the Athens metro found a mass grave near the ancient Kerameikos cemetery, with about 150 bodies buried hastily and dated to around 430-426 BC. A Greek team led by Manolis Papagrigorakis analysed dental pulp from some of the skeletons and reported DNA sequences similar to the typhoid bacterium. Other researchers questioned the methods and the interpretation, so the identification remains uncertain.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Hippocrates ended the plague by lighting bonfires. This story appears only in much later sources and is regarded as legend. Thucydides says no medicine or human skill helped.
• Myth: it was the bubonic plague. The word “plague” here simply means a deadly epidemic. Thucydides’ symptoms do not match bubonic plague well, and most scholars rule it out.
• Fact: the cult of Asclepius came to Athens soon after. The worship of the healing god Asclepius was formally introduced to Athens in 420/419 BC, possibly reflecting the shock of the epidemic.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 431 BC, spring: the war begins; the people of Attica move inside the walls.
• 430 BC, summer: the epidemic breaks out in Piraeus during the second Spartan invasion.
• 430 BC: the Athenians fine Pericles and remove him from office, then re-elect him.
• 429 BC, autumn: Pericles dies.
• 427/426 BC, winter: the disease returns for at least a year.
• 420/419 BC: the cult of Asclepius is introduced to Athens.
• 1994-1995: a mass grave of the plague years is found in the Kerameikos.

Why it matters

The Plague of Athens killed Pericles, weakened Athenian manpower for a generation and helped turn the course of the war against Sparta. Thucydides’ account of it is one of the first careful descriptions of an epidemic and its effects on society, and it still frames how historians and doctors write about disease in times of crisis.