Connected with this reciprocal indulgence of individual diversity, was not only the hospitable reception of all strangers at Athens, which Periklês contrasts with the xenêlasy or jealous expulsion practised at Sparta,—but also the many-sided activity, bodily and mental, visible in the former, so opposite to that narrow range of thought, exclusive discipline of the body and never-ending preparation for war, which formed the system of the latter. His assertion that Athens was equal to Sparta, even in her own solitary excellence,—efficiency on the field of battle,—is doubtless untenable; but not the less impressive is his sketch of that multitude of concurrent impulses which at this same time agitated and impelled the Athenian mind,—the strength of one not implying the weakness of the remainder: the relish for all pleasures of art and elegance, and the appetite for intellectual expansion, coinciding in the same bosom with energetic promptitude as well as endurance: abundance of recreative spectacles, yet noway abating the cheerfulness of obedience even to the hardest calls of patriotic duty: that combination of reason and courage which encountered danger the more willingly from having discussed and calculated it beforehand: lastly, an anxious interest as well as a competence of judgment in public discussion and public action, common to every citizen rich and poor, and combined with every man’s own private industry. So comprehensive an ideal of many-sided social development, bringing out the capacities for action and endurance, as well as those for enjoyment, would be sufficiently remarkable, even if we supposed it only existing in the imagination of a philosopher: but it becomes still more so when we recollect that the main features of it at least were drawn from the fellow-citizens of the speaker. It must be taken, however, as belonging peculiarly to the Athens of Periklês and his contemporaries; nor would it have suited either the period of the Persian war, fifty years before, or that of Demosthenês, seventy years afterwards. At the former period, the art, the letters, and the philosophy, were as yet backward, while even the active energy and democratical stimulus, though very powerful, had not been worked up to the pitch which they afterwards reached: at the latter period, although the intellectual manifestations of Athens subsist in full or even increased vigor, we shall find the personal enterprise and energetic spirit of her citizens materially abated. As the circumstances, which I have already recounted, go far to explain the previous upward movement, so those which fill the coming chapters, containing the disasters of the Peloponnesian war, will be found to explain still more completely the declining tendency shortly about to commence. Athens was brought to the brink of entire ruin, from which it is surprising that she recovered at all,—but noway surprising that she recovered at the expense of a considerable loss of personal energy in the character of her citizens.
And thus the season at which Periklês delivered his discourse lends to it an additional and peculiar pathos. It was delivered at a time when Athens was as yet erect and at her maximum for though her real power was, doubtless, much diminished, compared with the period before the thirty years’ truce, yet the great edifices and works of art, achieved since then, tended to compensate that loss, in so far as the sense of greatness was concerned; and no one, either citizen or enemy, considered Athens as having at all declined. It was delivered at the commencement of the great struggle with the Peloponnesian confederacy, the coming hardships of which Periklês never disguised either to himself or to his fellow-citizens, though he fully counted upon eventual success. Attica had been already invaded; it was no longer “the unwasted territory,” as Euripidês had designated it in his tragedy Medea,[269] represented three or four months before the march of Archidamus,—and a picture of Athens in her social glory was well calculated both to rouse the pride and nerve the courage of those individuals citizens, who had been compelled once, and would be compelled again and again, to abandon their country-residence and fields for a thin tent or confined hole in the city.[270] Such calamities might, indeed, be foreseen: but there was one still greater calamity, which, though actually then impending, could not be foreseen: the terrific pestilence which will be recounted in the coming chapter. The bright colors, and tone of cheerful confidence, which pervade the discourse of Periklês, appear the more striking from being in immediate antecedence to the awful description of this distemper: a contrast to which Thucydidês was, doubtless, not insensible, and which is another circumstance enhancing the interest of the composition.
CHAPTER XLIX.
FROM THE BEGINNING OE THE SECOND YEAR DOWN TO THE END OF THE THIRD YEAR OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR.
At the close of one year after the attempted surprise of Platæa by the Thebans, the belligerent parties in Greece remained in an unaltered position as to relative strength. Nothing decisive had been accomplished on either side, either by the invasion of Attica, or by the flying descents round the coast of Peloponnesus: in spite of mutual damage inflicted,—doubtless, in the greatest measure upon Attica,—no progress was yet made towards the fulfilment of those objects which had induced the Peloponnesians to go to war. Especially, the most pressing among all their wishes—the relief of Potidæa—was noway advanced; for the Athenians had not found it necessary to relax the blockade of that city. The result of the first year’s operations had thus been to disappoint the hopes of the Corinthians and the other ardent instigators of war, while it justified the anticipations both of Periklês and of Archidamus.
A second devastation of Attica was resolved upon for the commencement of spring; and measures were taken for carrying it all over that territory, since the settled policy of Athens not to hazard a battle with the invaders was now ascertained. About the end of March, or beginning of April, the entire Peloponnesian force—two-thirds from each confederate city, as before—was assembled under the command of Archidamus, and marched into Attica. This time they carried the work of systematic destruction, not merely over the Thriasian plain and the plain immediately near to Athens, as before; but also to the more southerly portions of Attica, down even as far as the mines of Laurium. They traversed and ravaged both the eastern and the western coast, remaining not less than forty days in the country. They found the territory deserted as before, all the population having retired within the walls.[271]
In regard to this second invasion, Periklês recommended the same defensive policy as he had applied to the first; and, apparently, the citizens had now come to acquiesce in it, if not willingly, at least with a full conviction of its necessity. But a new visitation had now occurred, diverting their attention from the invader, though enormously aggravating their sufferings. A few days after Archidamus entered Attica, a pestilence, or epidemic sickness, broke out unexpectedly at Athens.
It appears that this terrific disorder had been raging for some time throughout the regions round the Mediterranean; having begun, as was believed, in Æthiopia,—thence passing into Egypt and Libya, and overrunning a considerable portion of Asia under the Persian government: about sixteen years before, too, there had been a similar calamity in Rome and in various parts of Italy. Recently, it had been felt in Lemnos and some other islands of the Ægean, yet seemingly not with such intensity as to excite much notice generally in the Grecian world: at length it passed to Athens, and first showed itself in the Peiræus. The progress of the disease was as rapid and destructive as its appearance had been sudden; whilst the extraordinary accumulation of people within the city and long walls, in consequence of the presence of the invaders in the country, was but too favorable to every form of contagion. Families crowded together in close cabins and places of temporary shelter,[272]—throughout a city constructed, like most of those in Greece, with little regard to the conditions of salubrity,—and in a state of mental chagrin from the forced abandonment and sacrifice of their properties in the country, transmitted the disorder with fatal facility from one to the other. Beginning as it did about the middle of April, the increasing heat of summer farther aided the disorder, the symptoms of which, alike violent and sudden, made themselves the more remarked because the year was particularly exempt from maladies of every other description.[273]
Of this plague,—or, more properly, eruptive typhoid fever,[274] distinct from, yet analogous to, the smallpox,—a description no less clear than impressive has been left by the historian Thucydidês, himself not only a spectator but a sufferer. It is not one of the least of his merits, that his notice of the symptoms, given at so early a stage of medical science and observation, is such as to instruct the medical reader of the present age, and to enable the malady to be understood and identified. The observations, with which that notice is ushered in, deserve particular attention. “In respect to this distemper (he says), let every man, physician or not, say what he thinks respecting the source from whence it may probably have arisen, and respecting the causes which he deems sufficiently powerful to have produced so great a revolution. But I, having myself had the distemper, and having seen others suffering under it, will state what it actually was, and will indicate, in addition, such other matters, as will furnish any man, who lays them to heart, with knowledge and the means of calculation beforehand, in case the same misfortune should ever again occur.”[275] To record past facts, as a basis for rational prevision in regard to the future,—the same sentiment which Thucydidês mentions in his preface,[276] as having animated him to the composition of his history,—was at that time a duty so little understood, that we have reason to admire not less the manner in which he performs it in practice, than the distinctness with which he conceives it in theory. We may infer from his language that speculation in his day was active respecting the causes of this plague, according to the vague and fanciful physics and scanty stock of ascertained facts, which was all that could then be consulted. By resisting the itch of theorising from one of those loose hypotheses which then appeared plausibly to explain everything, he probably renounced the point of view from which most credit and interest would be derivable at the time: but his simple and precise summary of observed facts carries with it an imperishable value, and even affords grounds for imagining, that he was no stranger to the habits and training of his contemporary, Hippokratês, and the other Asklepiads of Cos.[277]
It is hardly within the province of an historian of Greece to repeat after Thucydidês the painful enumeration of symptoms, violent in the extreme, and pervading every portion of the bodily system, which marked this fearful disorder. Beginning in Peiræus, it quickly passed into the city, and both the one and the other was speedily filled with sickness and suffering, the like of which had never before been known. The seizures were perfectly sudden, and a large proportion of the sufferers perished, after deplorable agonies, on the seventh or on the ninth day: others, whose strength of constitution carried them over this period, found themselves the victims of exhausting and incurable diarrhœa afterwards: with others again, after traversing both these stages, the distemper fixed itself in some particular member, the eyes, the genitals, the hands, or the feet, which were rendered permanently useless, or in some cases amputated, even where the patient himself recovered. There were also some whose recovery was attended with a total loss of memory, so that they no more knew themselves or recognized their friends. No treatment or remedy appearing, except in accidental cases, to produce any beneficial effect, the physicians or surgeons whose aid was invoked became completely at fault; while trying their accustomed means without avail, they soon ended by catching the malady themselves and perishing: nor were the charms and incantations[278] to which the unhappy patient resorted, likely to be more efficacious. While some asserted that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns of water, others referred the visitation to the wrath of the gods, and especially to Apollo, known by hearers of the Iliad as author of pestilence in the Greek host before Troy. It was remembered that this Delphian god had promised the Lacedæmonians, in reply to their application immediately before the war, that he would assist them whether invoked or uninvoked,—and the disorder now raging was ascribed to the intervention of their irresistible ally: while the elderly men farther called to mind an oracular verse sung in the time of their youth: “The Dorian war will come, and pestilence along with it.”[279] Under the distress which suggested, and was reciprocally aggravated by, these gloomy ideas, prophets were consulted, and supplications with solemn procession were held at the temples, to appease the divine wrath.