Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

To the historian, the physician, and the man of letters, the account given by Thucydides of the plague of Athens, in the course of the Peloponnesian War, must stand for all time as one of the most remarkable documents in the whole annals of pestilence. In view of the much greater strength of the Lacedaemonian land-force, it was the unwavering policy of Pericles to keep the Athenians within their walls, allowing the Lacedaemonians to exhaust themselves in devastating Attic territory, while retaliating on the coasts of Peloponnesus by the Athenian fleet. Each year, at the approach of the Lacedaemonian army, the inhabitants of Attica flocked within the walls of Athens, bringing with them all their movable property, after sending their sheep and cattle to Euboea and the neighbouring islands, so that the added horror of a great epizootic was averted. The greater number encamped in the vacant spaces of the city and Piraeus, and in and around the numerous temples. Some housed their families in the towers and recesses of the city walls, or in sheds, cabins, tents, or even tubs, disposed throughout the course of the long walls. This was the overcrowded state of beleaguered Athens, when pestilence broke out in the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430 b.c.), putting the policy of Pericles to a crucial test.

After ravaging the plain, the Peloponnesians devastated the coastlands of Attica, first on the south coast, and then on the north. Pericles forthwith equipped an Athenian naval squadron, and launched his counterstroke against the Peloponnese. This fleet carried 4,000 hoplites and 300 cavalry, who ravaged the district round Epidaurus, and other towns on the adjacent coast. It seems, however, despite the rumour to the contrary, which Thucydides faithfully records, that neither the pestilence nor the operations of this expeditionary force actually accelerated the departure of the Lacedaemonians, for they stayed 40 days, which was longer than any other stay. Pestilence broke out in this expeditionary force, and is doubtless the reason that it returned without accomplishing more. Plutarch indeed says that the Athenians would have captured Epidaurus, but for this outbreak of sickness.

The Athenians also sent another fleet this same summer against Potidaea in Thrace, which was already undergoing a siege at the hands of an Athenian army. Pestilence worked fearful havoc in this supplementary force and spread from it to the troops who were already there, involving a mortality of 1,050 out of a total of 4,000 hoplites, so that the expedition was compelled to return and leave the siege to the troops that were there before them.

In their despair the Athenians vented their angry feelings on Pericles, just as persons in a delirium, says Plutarch,[43] turn on their physician or their father. They urged that the pestilence was due to cooping up in the city in stifling huts a rural population accustomed to an open-air existence, so that they conveyed infection to one another. But popular resentment subsided as quickly as it arose. In a noble speech, which Thucydides reproduces at length, Pericles weaned them to a better mind. His own domestic sufferings may have stirred their sympathy. He lost of the pestilence his only two legitimate sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, his sister, and many relatives and friends. The death of his favourite son, Paralus, left him with no legitimate heir to maintain the family and the hereditary sacred rites. ‘That blow’, says Plutarch,[44] ‘crushed him to earth. He struggled indeed to preserve his wonted impassiveness and to maintain his serene composure. But, as he laid a wreath upon the body and looked upon his dead, the anguish of it all overwhelmed him, and he burst out wailing and sobbing bitterly—a thing which in all his life he had never before done.’ The spectacle of this proud, reserved man, this man who had stood firm as a rock amid the rising tide of popular resentment, humbled before God, humiliated before man, as the iron seared his innermost soul, is one of the most moving pictures in all history and literature.

My God has bowed me down to what I am, My solitude and grief have brought me low.

‘Shortly after this, it appears, the pestilence laid hold on Pericles. The attack was not, as in other cases, sharp and severe. It took the form of an ailment, slight but protracted through a variety of phases, which slowly wasted his strength and undermined the vigour of his mind.’ But if we may judge by the accounts of his death-bed given by Plutarch himself, and by Theophrastus in his Ethics, his mind was free from any taint of insanity.

The first outbreak of pestilence lasted for two years, from the spring of 430 b.c. to that of 428 b.c., then came a partial, but not complete, abatement for one and a half years, followed by another outbreak in 427 b.c. which lasted a year. ‘To the power of Athens’, says Thucydides, ‘certainly nothing was more ruinous. Not less than 4,400 Athenian hoplites, who were on the roll, died, and also 300 horsemen, and an incalculable number of the common people’, estimated by Diodorus Siculus[45] at 10,000 freemen and slaves. Bury[46] puts the total number of Athenian burghers (of both sexes and all ages) at the commencement of the Peloponnesian War at 100,000, and this total was reduced by the pestilence to some 80,000 or less. The metic class and the slaves he estimates roundly at 30,000 and 100,000 respectively, but beyond the unreliable statement of Diodorus Siculus, we have no index of their reduction. In accepting the verdict of Thucydides on the disastrous effects of the pestilence on the power of Athens, we must not forget that there were other influences at work, conspiring to this same result, the consequences of which Pericles had pointed out clearly in his speech before the war. Had it not been for these, Athens would beyond doubt have rallied quickly from the blow, as we shall see that other cities have habitually done in like case with hers.

The circumstances under which the epidemic broke out a second time in Athens cannot have differed greatly from those prevailing at its first onset, for though it was winter and the Lacedaemonian army was not in the field, the surrounding country had been devastated, and most of the peasantry must still have been cooped up, in a state of overcrowding, within the walls. As the pestilence lingered on in Athens, superstition laid fast hold on the populace, under the stress of their protracted sufferings. On the advice of the oracle, they decided to purify the island of Delos, which formerly had been dedicated to Apollo, but latterly had been used as a burial-ground. All the dead were transferred to a neighbouring island Rhene, and a law was passed forbidding henceforth the burial of a corpse or the birth of a child in Delos. The neglected panegyric festival of Apollo was also revived in the island. No stone was left unturned to appease the god, who, the Athenians now were persuaded, had sent them the distemper.

Earthquakes and inundations lasted, as did the pestilence, throughout the summer of 426 b.c. Diodorus Siculus seems to suggest that the earthquakes were sent by Apollo, who had been duly propitiated, to divert the Lacedaemonians from the invasion of Attica. Actually they did effect this, for Agis, King of Sparta, though already arrived at the isthmus, accepted the omen and led his army back. Neither Thucydides nor Diodorus Siculus asserts any direct causal relation between the earthquakes and the pestilence—a belief, which if now vaguely foreshadowed, took definite form only at a later date.

The following is the full narrative[47] of the pestilence, as given by Thucydides: