The p east of Athens this is how the epidemic that hit the city became known from Athens between 430 BC and 427 BC, causing great mortality among the local population. The reports recount the symptoms and agony of those who fell ill and speak of the despair of the population in the face of the chaos that has ensued. Pericles, the leader of Athens, was one of those who died from the disease.
Historians are still debating which disease struck Athens and there are different theories. Some theories suggest smallpox; others, measles, typhoid, typhus, etc. Reports, however, are limited and scientific studies are inconclusive. This epidemic is believed to have caused the death of about 1/3 of the Athenian population .
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Emergence of the disease
The most important accounts of the plague in Athens were made by the Greek Thucydides, a historian who became famous for reporting the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides lived in Athens when the epidemic began and saw up close the destruction wrought by the disease. He also became ill, but survived.
According to Thucydides' account, the disease that struck Athens from 430 BC. began in the region south of Egypt--which he named Ethiopia. From there, it reached regions of North Africa, the Persian Empire and, finally, reached Greece. Thucydides linked the appearance of the disease in Attica (a region where Athens was located) with the arrival of Spartan troops in the region.
This was because the plague of Athens happened at the very beginning of the Peloponnesian War , conflict between Sparta and Athens that took place between 431 BC. and 404 BC. This conflict was caused by the strengthening of the city of Athens and the fear of Sparta in the face of this scenario.
In Athens, the plague was first recorded in the zone port (Piraeus) and then reached the upper part of the city. Once established in Athens, it was identified that the disease acted more strongly in densely inhabited regions. In addition, to make the situation worse for the Athenians, because of the war, Pericles had ordered the population of the countryside to move inside the walls of Athens.
This great accommodation of people was the ideal scenario for the disease, easily perceived as contagious , was disseminated. Thucydides says that the inhabitants of the countryside settled in tents, as there were not enough houses for everyone, and were quickly decimated, causing a large amount of corpses to accumulate in the Athenian streets.
Symptoms
The symptoms of the disease were also recorded by Thucydides and allow us to have a basic idea of the severity of the epidemic that took place in Athens. He mentions that the disease afflicted both healthy people and people who manifested other diseases. He further says that the sick usually died in about 7 to 9 days . Here is an excerpt from Thucydides' account:
[…] people were attacked first by intense heat in the head and redness and inflammation in the eyes, and the inner parts of the mouth (both the throat and tongue) immediately turned the color of blood and began to exhale an abnormal and foul-smelling breath. In the next stage, sneezing and hoarseness appeared, and a short time later the illness descended to the chest, followed by a strong cough. When the disease took hold in the stomach, it became disturbed, and vomiting of bile of all the types mentioned by the doctors occurred, followed also by terrible discomfort, in many cases, retching followed, producing violent convulsions, which sometimes stopped quickly, at times. times long after|2| .
Thucydides also mentioned redness , as well as the formation of small ulcers in the patient's body. According to him, the patients felt a extreme heat and some threw themselves into the cold water to combat this sensation. There were also many who suffered from insomnia, and those who had bowel problems suffered from violent diarrhea, which quickly led to death.
Finally, he suggests that many of those who survived the disease were left with sequelae in their private parts, fingers and/or joints, while others manifested amnesia. Another detail that Thucydides identified, which was an important observation from a medical point of view, was that the birds that fed on the flesh of the corpses also died and those who were cured of the disease did not contract it again or, when they did contract it, they only manifested mild symptoms. .
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Athens during the plague
As we can already see, the plague that hit Athens had a hard impact on the population of the city. Historians believe that the disease found virgin soil in the Greek city, a term used to refer to a place that manifested a certain disease for the first time. People were divided in believing that the disease was a punishment from the gods, while others believed that the Spartans had poisoned the local water.
The doctors were the first group to succumb to the disease, precisely because they maintained direct contact with the sick. In addition, the doctors had no idea what the disease was, which reinforces the idea that the disease found virgin soil in Athens. Therefore, the medical treatments used to care for patients failed. When medicine failed, people went after religion and begged for mercy from the gods in religious temples, which, of course, had no effect either.
The number of sick people was so great and people's fear of having contact with patients was such that many of those who got sick died in isolation without getting any kind of medical care. The large number of dead caused corpses to be scattered in houses, streets and religious temples.
This high death toll it also led to the partial abandonment of funeral rites, since some families were no longer able to build pyres to burn the bodies of the dead. Many used a pyre belonging to another family to throw the body of a corpse, while others chose to bury the dead in whatever way possible.
Thucydides reports a hedonistic behavior on the part of the Athenian population, because, fearing death, many threw themselves into a life of pleasure. Thus, they satisfied all their wishes and acted in a way that did not care about the consequences of their actions, as they believed that they would die at any moment.
What disease struck Athens?
The disease that struck Athens during the plague was – and still is – the subject of debate between historians and scientists. A number of studies have been conducted, but even today there is no concrete evidence that make it possible to identify which specific disease hit this city so violently. The most accepted theories work with four hypotheses:
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smallpox;
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measles;
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exanthematic typhus;
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typhoid fever.
One of the most recent was typhoid fever, a hypothesis raised by Greek scientist Manolis Papagrigorakis in 2006. Papagrigorakis found a mass grave in an ancient Athens cemetery called Kerameikos . In that study, DNA samples obtained from the teeth of the dead identified the presence of the bacteria that causes typhoid fever. This study, however, is criticized by other scientists, who claim that the evidence raised is fragile. This helps us to understand the complexity of this question and the difficulty of getting concrete answers about the disease that has spread through Athens.
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Consequences
After three years of duration (430-427 BC), the great consequence of the plague of Athens, of course, was the quanti ity high of dead . Statistics gathered by experts determine that around 1/3 of the Athenian population died plague victim (data may have slight variations up or down). It is believed that Athens had between 250,000 and 300,000 inhabitants when it was hit|3| .
Thus, through these studies, it is stated that between 70,000 and 100,000 people died, although historians emphasize the difficulty of working with numbers in the case of the plague of Athens. Among those killed by the plague was the Athenian leader, Pericles , who died in 429 BC. He was known for being a great military strategist and was responsible for the growth and strengthening of the Delian League, in addition to being the creator of the Parthenon , a religious temple dedicated to the goddess Athena.
Notes
|1| THUCIDIDES. History of the Peloponnesian War. Brasília:Editora da UnB, 2001, p. 117-118.
|2| Ditto, p. 115-116.
|3| The Plague at Athens, 430-427 BCE. To access, click here.