430BCE

Eruption of Athenian plague during second year of Peloponnesian War, when Athens was under siege by Sparta, and Athenians seeking protection from Spartan invaders crowded inside the city walls. From Thucydides’ description of the epidemic in his history of the war, we understand it as “a virgin soil epidemic with a high attack rate and an unvarying course in persons of different ages, sexes, and nationalities” (R. J. Littman). But the plethora of symptoms recorded by Thucydides – sudden onset of headache and inflammation of eyes and throat, followed by sneezing, hoarseness, and violent coughing; then vomiting, fever, restlessness, sleeplessness, and emergence of genderized blistering rash; and final stage of diarrhea, sometimes accompanied by blindness and necrosis – do not map onto a single modern diagnosis. The weight of evidence, however, tends toward a diagnosis of epidemic typhus or smallpox, with smallpox the more likely possibility (Bock). If not malignant, confluent smallpox, the cause of the epidemic may well have been “an organism now extinct, or at least one that has evolved over two millennia in ways that make it no longer deadly” (Hanson, 72).