Dan Snow's History Hit - The Plague of Athens

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

In 430 BC, in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, the powerful city-state of Athens was struck down by a disastrous plague. Athenians fell sick with a dizzying array of symptoms, from fevers and vomiting to painful pustules that broke out all over people's bodies. In total it killed roughly a third of the city's population and caused a total breakdown in Athenian society.Dan is joined by Alastair Blanchard, Deputy Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He explains the repercussions of this terrible epidemic and discusses some of its possible causes.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Ella Blaxill.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was the spring of 430 BC. People in Piraeus, the port of ancient Athens, began to fall ill at an alarming rate. They suffered from a dizzying array of symptoms and a shockingly high proportion of them died. Athens was at war with Sparta at the time. A Spartan army lurked beyond the city walls. The streets of Athens, the alleyways, the squares, were packed with people sheltering from the enemy. The city was teeming with humans and livestock. The disease spread rapidly from Piraeus along the walls that connected the port to the city and then tore through Athens itself.

It's the first great plague in recorded history that we have a very detailed account of. This historian Thucydides wrote about it extensively in his History of the Peloponnesian War. He said it was so great a plague that no one had ever heard of higher mortality in any outbreak anywhere ever before. He says at first neither the physicians were able to cure it through ignorance of what it was, but they died fastest themselves as being the men that most approached the sick. Supplications to the gods and inquiries of oracles didn't work either. They all proved unprofitable. He describes dying men lay tumbling one upon another in the streets and men half dead about every conduit through desire of water.

The temples, also where they dwelt in tents, were full of the dead that died within them. People, he says, felt so oppressed with the violence of the calamity. Not knowing what to do, men grew careless, both of holy and profane things. The greatest misery of all was the dejection as people found themselves becoming sick and gave themselves up without making any resistance. The plague tore through Athens in this, the second year of its long war with Sparta. It gave Athens a body blow from which arguably she would never recover and she went on to lose that war, although it would take decades. Joining me on the podcast today to talk about this extraordinary plague and how lucky we are to have Thucydides' detailed account of it

is Professor Alistair Blanchard. He's the deputy head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He is a specialist in classical history. He's going to talk me through the Great Plague of Athens. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Alistair, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Delighted to be joining you. Can we start by Athens itself? I've just come back from Athens.

I sat on the Areopagus. I watched the sun go down over the Pnyx. What's the size, the scale of peak Athens? So just before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. So Athens was probably one of the largest cities in the Greek world at this point in time. It dwarfs all its competitors. So we're talking with a population of about 250,000 people, probably, and its height. So an extraordinarily powerful city, particularly when you consider the size of most other Greek cities. So most other Greek cities have populations of about 30,000 to 40,000. So really, Athens stands head and shoulders above every other Greek city-state.

And speaking of head and shoulders, there's lots of wonderful tall statues, one of which you can see on the top of the Acropolis from Cape Sunium, the sunlight flashing off Athena's armour. I mean, it's a beautiful city as well, right? I mean, it's been beautified during that 5th century BC. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, when the plague breaks out, Athens is at its very height. It's bounced back after being sacked by the Persians during the Persian War. And on the back of the success of defeating the Persians, it's expanded itself into this extraordinary empire, which stretches throughout the Aegean. It controls militarily a huge area. It's really the leader of all of the Greek city-states within the Aegean.

And it's wealthy. It's drawn huge numbers of metics, that is to say foreign citizens, who've come to Athens to work and make their fortune. It's rebuilt itself into a city of gleaming marble and fantastic artwork. This is the point at which, you know, Pheidias is carving the golden ivory statues that you find in the Parthenon. So it's an extraordinary, wealthy, powerful, gorgeous city.

Now, we don't want to get too dragged into the Peloponnesian War, which is an episode, of course, an entire series in its own right. But perhaps we could be like Thucydides. Briefly, Sparta was jealous of the power of Athens, and that's why the war happened. Why did Sparta and Athens end up going to war, seemingly so soon after their very successful coalition to defeat the Persian invaders in 480 and 479? Yes, look, the issue is, as you say, fear is driving this, and in particular, fear not only on the part of Sparta, but also on the part of its very influential allies. So in particular,

the city-state of Corinth is increasingly worried about an expansionist Athens. Athens in this period is embarking on bolder and bolder moves. It's expanding its influence in places like Egypt, for example, and we're seeing expeditions to Egypt. But increasingly also, it's looking to increase its power westwards and also over land. You see, up until now, Athens has been very much interested in controlling the sea lanes. But now it's increasingly looking to increase its power over mainland Greece. And when it does that, it really is encroaching on the area that has always been Sparta's great area of influence when it does that, it really is encroaching on the area that has always been Sparta's great area of influence. So we're seeing it really stepping on Sparta's

toes. We see it impacting on important allies like, for example, Corinth and Aegina and other kinds of allies of Sparta. So it's really starting to irritate Sparta and causing Sparta to have fear. And, you know, Sparta is always a very precarious city. And it's a precarious plot because it's dependent on controlling the helots, the people who it controls. And it's always very worried that someone might cause the helots to revolt. So it's worried that Athens might be planning that kind of attack. So Athens and Sparta go to war. It's a little bit like, if people want a bit of a metaphor, Napoleon dominating the continent of Europe and Britain controlling the sea. Athens a great naval power, but found it pretty hard to defeat Spartan

armies on the land, didn't it? And so just describe the kind of character of the war in those first couple of years. The character of the war is really set by the leading Athenian statesman Pericles, The character of the war is really set by the leading Athenian statesman, Pericles, who decides on this strategy, which is that Athens will gather its citizens from its countryside and retreat behind its walls and instead pursue a largely naval campaign. And so Sparta will make annual land invasions of Attica, but it will meet no resistance. The Athenians won't meet Sparta on pitched land battles because they know that were they to do so, they would almost certainly lose. Sparta is the dominant land power in this region. And so instead, Athens decides to play to its particular strengths,

which is its navy. And so it embarks on naval raids and uses and exploits its naval resources. It knows that it can rely on its navy to in fact provide it with grain and all the resources that will allow it to survive an extended siege. So Athens is very much trapped behind its walls, but using its navy to its best advantage. So as you say, Athens is sort of trapped behind its walls. And it's at that moment, isn't it really, that the plague arrives in Athens. Tell us what happened. We've got, fortunately for us, a really wonderful description of the plague because one

of the great historians, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, actually suffers from the plague. So he's a survivor of the plague, he's a plague survivor. And so he describes the symptoms of the plague very well. He has a real interest in the plague. And so he gives a very detailed description of how the plague arrives in Athens. He says, you know, it begins first in Ethiopia and it moves down the Nile to Egypt, he says, and then across to Libya. And then it leaps the Mediterranean and arrives first in the port of Athens at its Piraeus and then spreads throughout the city. And so this plague arrives in Athens in 430 BC and it has this dramatic effect on the population. And Thucydides gives us a step-by-step description of the symptoms and how they affected the people.

And it's from those that we've always been wrestling with trying to work out what the actual plague was. Yes, I've got the description here. As you say, it's a very long description, isn't it? It said people were in perfect health and it suddenly came upon them an extreme ache in their heads, redness, inflammation of the eyes. Their tongues grew bloody, noisome and unsavoury. There was sneezing and hoarseness, a mighty cough. I mean, it sounds like it's of everything. Then there's vomiting and strong convulsions. Their bodies outwardly to the touch were neither very hot nor pale, but reddish, livid and beflowered with little pimples and whelks,

but so burned inwardly as not to endure any of the lightest clothes or linen garment to be upon them, not anything but mere nakedness, but rather most willingly to have cast themselves into cold water. Do we know what it might be? Part of the problem is, in fact, that Thucydides' description is too detailed. He gives us so many symptoms. I mean, you've touched on the main ones, but you're only at day seven, right, of the progress of the disease. We've still got diarrhea to come. We're still going to lose fingers, toes, genitals, blindness, of the progress of the disease. We've still got diarrhea to come. We're still going to lose fingers, toes, genitals, blindness, memory loss. I mean, we've got a whole list of symptoms.

We've got too many symptoms, basically. And that's the real problem with this is we have this fantastically detailed description by a survivor of the symptoms that he's seeing. And yet it's very hard to get that to map onto any particular disease. And what people think is happening here is what this disease is describing is a feature that's actually known from a number of epidemics, is that what we have is called comorbidities. That is to say that what happens is that when you're affected by a plague, you also become susceptible to a whole series of other diseases. Your bodies are weakened. And so what we see is a number of diseases. And so what possibly Thucydides is describing is actually the effect of multiple diseases affecting the bodies. There are also very strange kind of outlier symptoms that he

describes. So he describes, for example, about the fact that carrion birds and dogs won't eat the bodies. And that, you know, if in fact a dog eats the body, it then promptly dies. So again, there's all these kind of strange symptoms he's describing as well. And so what the trick is, and where most of the academic discussion seems to occur, is how do you, as it were, sort out those various symptoms into individual diseases? And there are a number of candidates for the diseases. I mean, I think the one that people think probably is most likely is typhus. So a bacterial infection that's transmitted by lice. And that would explain a number of the very distinctive features that Thucydides describes. It would account for the extraordinary thirst, where people are so thirsty, they're kind of throwing themselves down wells to try and slake their thirst.

It would account for the delirium. It would account for the loss of fingers and toes, the mental impairment. It would also seem to roughly give us the right kind of mortality rate as well, which we imagine that about 30% of the population died. That would be probably epidemic of typhus would do that, but it doesn't account for all of the symptoms. So there are a number of other things. I mean, smallpox, so rather than bacterial, a virus is suggested, and that would account for the high level of contagion. It would give you the blindness and the pustules that he describes, as well as the sort of pneumonia and the encephalitis, you know, would give you your memory loss. But some of the other symptoms he describes,

like backache, for example, just aren't a feature of smallpox. There are other more exotic things. I mean, people have thought perhaps maybe a viral hemorrhagic fever. And this is particularly people who are influenced by the description of it coming from Ethiopia across. So viral hemorrhagic fevers coming out of Africa. Other things are, you know, people who are quite interested in this idea that it crosses species. So, you know, it affects both dogs and humans. And that, again, is hard for things like typhus. So, you know, possibly, you know, there's been suggestions it might be ergot poisoning. So the fungus that affects grains, that would affect both dogs and humans, or glanders, we know, a bacterial infection which affects both horses and people. So there are a number of debates about it.

And particularly typhus disease that we know famously would rip through large groups of people thrown together, poor understanding of drinking water and sewage. I mean, Athens is full of people that have come in from the surrounding countryside, isn't it? There's people sheltering in the city from this Spartan siege. Yes, yes. And I think it's important to distinguish between typhus, which is transmitted by lice in close quarters, and the disease typhoid. Both of them, of course, bacterial infections, but typhus is transmitted by lice. It's typhoid, which is transmitted by poor food or water that comes into contact with faecal matter. And typhoid can be spread person to person.

Typhus, you have to rely on the lice. But I mean, both of them have extraordinary high fatality rates, and both of them have been put forward as, in fact, potential causes of the death. And you're absolutely right to point to the fact that people are living in close quarters. This is one of the byproducts of Pericles' grand strategy of bringing people in from the countryside, is that they're all living in very close quarters in shanty towns along the great walls of Athens, which has become crowded with these individuals. You're listening to Dan Snow's history, talking about the Athenian plague in 430 BC. More coming up. research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So you're saying perhaps a third of the population dying. I mean, the descriptions and theusides are appalling, but also absolutely fascinating, given what we know about subsequent plagues and pandemics, because he describes people's sense of hopelessness. He describes the licentiousness, the drinking, the partying, the loosening of sexual and other morals, which we, because we're all practiced in our pandemic history now,

we see happening during various other great pandemics in our past. I mean, it is a fascinating snapshot of a city gripped by this disease. Look, and that's what makes this account so wonderful. It's not only is he a fantastic observer of the individual symptoms, he's also a great observer of society. And he gives a fantastically wonderful detailed description of precisely the effects that are happening on Athens at this point, and the way in which we see a complete breakdown of all the norms of society, and the way in which this disease just breaks people's spirits. So he says, you know, one of the most terrible things is the way in which this disease just breaks people's spirits. So he says, you know, one of the most terrible things is the way in which people are struck by this extraordinary

profound despair, that they see no kind of future, that they really lose the power to resist. And this, he said, actually makes them far more prey to the disorder than anything else. And, you know, seeing the awful kind of specter of people just dying like animals, like sheep all around you. And also the tremendous way in which disease affects the good and rewards the evil. He said, you know, this is the real thing is, you know, if you're a kind person who goes to look after your neighbours, then you're more likely to fall prey to the disease. It's the selfish, the people who ignore their community, who actually survive. So he says, you know, this is absolutely goes against,

you know, everything that people have been taught about kind of how they should behave. And it really challenges them in their belief in justice and the gods. This is a real profound shock to all the kind of ways in which people think the world should work. What are the political consequences? Perhaps we should start with the man who, well, in some ways, perhaps had some responsibility for this, the man whose strategy Athens was pursuing. Pericles himself, the great man, dies in the plague, doesn't he? Yeah, absolutely. He's probably the most important victim of the plague, is Pericles. And the great hypothetical is what would have happened in the Peloponnesian War is Pericles. And the great hypothetical is what would have happened

in the Peloponnesian War had Pericles survived, because he's the great culture hero of Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War. And ultimately, Athens will lose the Peloponnesian War, will fall to Sparta. And people often wonder, you know, what would it have been like if Pericles had still been at the helm? And certainly Thucydides gives you a very strong impression that actually, you know, history might be very different had Pericles still been in charge. He regards the generation of politicians that come after Pericles as demagogues, people who, rather than restraining people's appetites and restraining the bad judgment of people people actually feed it and feed the worst excesses of democracy. And so Thucydides, who's not a great fan of democracy,

it should be said, partly because he himself was a general who'd been exiled by democracy, regards actually the kind of demagogues of, you know, after Pericles as the real problem. Would Pericles have been stupid, hubristic enough to launch the Sicilian expedition, which destroyed the main fleet and a hugely important army of Athens? Exactly. And this was, you know, according to Thucydides, the greatest military disaster that the Athenians saw during the war, or indeed history ever saw, he claims, was the tremendous loss of life and the huge number of expenses that occurred as a result of the Sicilian expedition. And he sees it precisely as a failure of leadership, that leaders give in to the passions of the masses. It's an illogical, rash, stupid kind

of expedition that's totally unnecessary and leads to this tremendous loss of life, this tremendous loss of prestige, this tremendous loss of prestige, and really was regarded as a kind of turning point in the Peloponnesian War. Ah, dear. Yep. The Alcibiades, your Nike ass, they're no Pericles. So Pericles dies. What are the other consequences of the plague? I mean, it's been so interesting comparing the aftermath of COVID to some aftermaths of previous pandemics. I mean, do we see anything similar or different in terms of how Athens, its approach, its partisan politics, its religiosity, what changes in Athens as a result of the plague?

According to Thucydides, the religiosity of the Athenians takes a huge kind of hit that people begin to doubt the nature of the gods and the presence of the gods. There's some evidence, in fact, that Thucydides is possibly wrong about this, that in fact, actually, if nothing else, we see an increase in religiosity, that people become increasingly devout and regard, in fact, actually the plague as some sort of punishment. And, you know, in that respect, it's interesting to think of a play like, for example, Oedipus, the play that's produced a year or so after the start of the plague. And it opens with a plague in Thebes and the people are looking for the cause of the plague. And ultimately, of course, they discover that, in fact, it's Oedipus, the king of Thebes, who has responsible for murdering his father and sleeping with his mother.

And it's, in fact, that act of impiety that has resulted in the outbreak of the plague. And so, you know, Oedipus is a play which is very much about the presence of the divine and the causes of the plague. We know that also there were a number of oracles, for example, that were in circulation that talked about how a plague would break out. And indeed, certainly Sparta seems to have taken the view that in fact the plague was a symbol that gods like Apollo, for example, who were particularly associated with plague, are on their side. If you think of Homer's Iliad, the opening, it opens in fact with a plague being sent upon the Greek forces

by Apollo whose plague-bearing arrows are being fired into the Greeks. So the sense that the gods are the cause of the plague was really deeply rooted in Greek mindset. And so, you know, it seems to be an increase, in fact, in religiosity as a result of the plague. What I always think about the plague is that it's in the second year of the Peloponnesian War. It's in 430 BC. I mean, the fighting goes on and off for another 25 years. I mean, the Athenians, it must have been devastating for Athens. And yet they're actually able to stagger on. I mean, what impact do you think it had on their ability to survive, to make war?

It's a really interesting question because, as you say, it doesn't seem to stop them. And I think that's partly to do with the nature of the Athenian Empire, which is because it's in fact this empire that's structured around the series of relationships between Athens and its allies, where the allies are essentially beholden to the Athenians. They're able to rely on, in fact, the resources of the empire in a way that allows them to continue on. Also, you know, they're a naval empire as well. And that's a particular kind of empire that, again, provided they can man the ships, the empire can still continue. And also, remember, their strategy is not a series of attacks.

It's an entirely defensive strategy in this first phase of the war. So, again, that allows them to survive as well and continue. Is there any account of the plague reaching other parts of Greece? And if not, does that suggest it is something to do with the packed conditions within the walls of Athens? It's sort of peculiar to Athens' situation. Yeah, so we do know that the plague is affecting other city-states apart from Athens, but certainly not to the same degree. And I think this really points to an important thing about plague, which is that plague is largely, and particularly epidemics, pandemics,

are largely a public health issue. And that means that, you know, it's things like sanitation, it's things like healthy living conditions that are really a huge determinant in how a plague will affect a community. And it's because Athens is, you know, crowded behind these walls, and because it's not able to move out into the countryside, it really becomes a centre for terrible death and loss. But it's the public health conditions in Athens that are the issue, I think. Athens will go on to lose the Peloponnesian War. Tell us, what does the city suffer? What's the post-war settlement look like for Athens? Right, yes, yeah, the war continues. And initially, in fact, it looks like everything's going well for Athens. After the tremendous

horrors of the plague, they happen to have a huge number of successes. And in particular, I guess one of the really important successes is at Pylos, where they managed to capture a large number of Spartans. And it's this success, really, that eventually allows Athens to bring Sparta to the negotiating table and the negotiator peace, which seems to at least be favorable towards Athens. And it's really a result of Athens losing that peace and indulging in kind of terribly speculative ventures like the Sicilian expedition, which will ultimately lead to their defeat. They don't have, and this is Thucydides' point, they don't seem to have leaders who are going to restrain their natural imperialist and

expansionist tendencies. And so they engage in reckless encounters in Sicily, engage in stupid treaties with other powers in central Greece. And this causes all sorts of problems. And then eventually they will turn on their own democracy. They will experiment with new forms of government. They attempt a kind of limited oligarchy for a time. And then having torn themselves apart and rejecting their leaders and blaming their leaders unfairly, they will eventually fall victim to Sparta. But only once Sparta becomes a naval power. This is, I think, the really important thing to note is that Athens becomes a bit of a land power, but it's Sparta

becoming a naval power, which becomes the real turning point. So Sparta gets assistance from Persia, the other great power in the region, which helps fund a navy led by figures like Lysander, power in the region, which helps fund a navy led by figures like Lysander, who will destroy the Athenian navy. And that will eventually be the death of Athens, really. Once it loses its navy, it's game over for Athens. When Sparta finally learned how to make war on the sea, then that was it for Athens. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. How can people follow you and learn more about these subjects? I regularly post on Twitter and stuff and people are very welcome to follow me there.

And also I do a number of podcasts and online lectures and things. So people are always welcome to try and track me down that way. Brilliant. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Good to speak to you. you