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The Sickness at Athens1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

E. Watson Williams
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Extract

Thucydides wrote his history after his return from exile in 404 b.c. (i. 22). It is not easy therefore to be sure to what extent his account of the great Sickness depends on notes made at the time, some twenty-five years before, and how much on memory—especially of his personal sufferings, from which it seems he recovered without any of the ‘signs’ which he implies ‘marked’ all survivors. He tells us that he has described only the general features of the Sickness (ii. 51), since the symptoms varied much from case to case; perhaps he realized how difficult it is for anyone, even an experienced physician, who has suffered from some severe and unusual illness (ii. 50) not to consider his own symptoms characteristic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 1957 , pp. 98 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1957

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References

page 98 note 2 i. 23; ii. 31, 47, 50–54, 57–59, 61, 64; iii. 3, 87; vi. 12, 26; &c.

page 98 note 3 i.e. not enteric, dysentery, phthisis, malaria, &c.

page 98 note 4 οἱ ⋯ρετ⋯ς τι μεταποιούμενοι.

page 98 note 5 ὢστε κα⋯ κτείνειν (ii. 51); i.e., if it did not kill him the first time.

page 98 note 6 Cf. i. 138, ii. 20, &c. There is no suggestion of disbelief.

page 99 note 1 i.e. a sea-borne disease.

page 99 note 2 γευσάμενα: Shrewsbury, J. F. D., ‘The Plague of Athens’, Bull. Hist. Med. xxiv (1950), 01, twice (pp. 14, 23) renders ‘touched them’.Google Scholar

page 99 note 3 It had already crossed from Carthage to Rome: Livy iv. 21, 25, 26, &c.

page 99 note 4 Salway, A. and Dell, W., ‘Plague at Athens’, Greece & Rome, Second Series, ii (1955), 62–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I assume this is what they mean, though I cannot construe the first paragraph on p. 64.

page 99 note 5 Except very briefly as regards measles and bubonic plague.

page 99 note 6 Poisoning had already been rejected, ii. 48.

page 99 note 7 J. F. D. Shrewsbury, loc. cit., pp. 3 ff.

page 99 note 8 Page, D. L., Class. Quarterly, N.S. iii (1953), 119.Google Scholar

page 100 note 1 Collier, D., History of the Plague at Athens (London, 1857).Google Scholar

page 100 note 2 Shrewsbury misquotes Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, ascribing to the small-pox epidemic of 1520 (vol. v, ch. 6) the ghastly mortality from starvation in 1521, vol. vi, chs. 7, 8.

page 100 note 3 ταλαιπωρία. The word regularly implies hard physical work or bodily exhaustion: ‘the Athenians, exhausted by the Sickness’ (iii. 3); ‘the Mytilenean envoys arrived prostrated by the voyage’ (? seasick, iii. 4); ‘I'm worn out—my husband coughed all night’ (Aristophanes, Eccles. 54).

page 100 note 4 ⋯ναταῖοι κα⋯ ⋯βδομαῖοι—a very curious phrase. Lucretius translates ‘eighth or ninth day’; Page (twice) ‘seventh or ninth’: both evidently feeling ‘ninth or seventh’ awkward. I venture to suggest ⋯κταῖοι κα⋯ ⋯βδομαῖοι, ‘they died on the sixth day or the seventh’, what we should call the fifth or sixth.

page 101 note 1 Finley, J. H., Thucydides (London, 1947), p. 158.Google Scholar Cf. ‘Wheat and barley are sometimes attacked but ergot is very rare on oats’ (‘Ergot’, Min. of Agriculture Bulletin, 1950).

page 101 note 2 Ehlers, E., ‘Ignis Sacer’; Encyclop. scient, des aide-mém. (Paris, 1806)Google Scholar; L'Ergotisme (Paris, 1902).

page 101 note 3 There are many records of cannibalism.

page 102 note 1 Gabbai, H., –. Lisbonne, , and Pourquier, H., ‘Ergot Poisoning at Saint-Esprit’, Brit. Med.Journ., 15 09 1953, p. 650.Google Scholar Sweating the most prominent symptom, vomiting and/or diarrhoea in 30 per cent.

page 102 note 2 οὔτ' ἄγαν θερμόν ν, οὔτε χλωρόν.

page 102 note 3 The age-old tradition that swarms of rats, &c., presage human epidemics is due to the habit of such creatures when sick of leaving their burrows; so that thousands may suddenly appear, dying and dead, in a town beneath which they had long dwelt almost unnoticed.

page 102 note 4 1 Sam. v. 9; ? Iliad i. 36, 50.

page 102 note 5 ‘The Lord shall smite thee with the botch of Egypt, … with the buboes whereof thou canst not be healed’, Deut. xxviii. 27.

page 102 note 6 History of the Franks, x. 30 (? AS. Chronicle, a.d. 671).

page 102 note 7 Decameron, i. 1.

page 102 note 8 Gasquet, Cardinal F. A., The Great Pestilence (London, 1906), pp. 2, 19, 26Google Scholar, &c. (‘birds would not eat the corpses’, p. 139); the Emperor John Canta-cazune, who lost his son Andronicus, uses almost exactly the words of Thucy-dides.

page 102 note 9 Manson, 's Tropical Diseases (13th ed., London, 1950), p. 276.Google Scholar

page 102 note 10 Epidemics, iii. 3, 4.