Euripides' Hippolytus, or virtue rewarded

Summary

In March 428 b.c., when Euripides' Hippolytus was played for the first time in the theater of Dionysus at Athens, the plague, or rather its first onset, was just coming to an end. Thucydides, one of the few who caught it and recovered, tells us what the scene in the city was like. We must remember that Athens had now for three years been fighting Sparta and her allies, and that the citizens had taken refuge within the walls. I quote from Jowett's translation (2. 52):

The crowding of the people out of the country into the city aggravated the misery; and the newly-arrived suffered the most. For, having no houses of their own, but inhabiting in the height of summer stifling huts, the mortality among them was dreadful, and they perished in wild disorder. The dead lay as they had died, one upon another, while others hardly alive wallowed in the streets and crawled about every fountain craving for water. The temples in which they lodged were full of the corpses of those who died in them; for the violence of the calamity was such that men, not knowing where to turn, grew reckless of all law, human and divine.