Ever since Athens in 430 BC, we’ve been learning how to deal with mass plagues

Now seems like as good of a time as any to hope Covid-19 stays away. That’s what I was thinking when I was reading last night about the Athens plague of 430 BC. Much like Covid (so far), that plague bounced back strong a couple of times in the immediate four-year aftermath of its initial outbreak. By the time it was over, between 25 percent and a third of the city-state’s population had been wiped out.

To this day, nobody really knows what caused it or where it came from. Some posit it arrived via food through the port.

In the words of Thucydides, a general during the Pelopponesian wars who documented the time and was called “the father of scientific history,” in the collection Eyewitness to History:

“I had the disease myself. Suddenly and while in good health, men were seized first within intense heat of the head, and redness, and inflammation of the eyes, and the parts inside the mouth, both the throat and the tongue, immediately became blood-red and exhaled an unnatural and fetid breath.”

Convulsions, vomiting, and a deep thirst that couldn’t be quenched followed for most. Eventual death after a week or so of this was the course of the day. For those with the mysterious disease, if they lasted beyond that time, they would likely get ulcers and diarreah that would cause them to be so weak that they died too. Some lost their fingers, toes, privates, and eyes, and many simply died from trying to nurse their sick loved ones back to health but instead got infected themselves.

Although the plague was nowhere near as globally devastating as Covid, it did indeed have a higher mortality rate and it led to Sparta’s conquering of Athens, with social, religious, and civic structures being completely broken down by lawlessness.

A hastily assembled mass grave offers some of the proof to this. In the 1990s, as the city was building a subway terminal, it was discovered and the terminal plans were cancelled.

Much as we love our conspiracy theories today, Thucydides wrote that many citizens believed the gods were stating their preference for the Spartans, but Thucydides found no actual evidence that this was the case.

As advanced as Athens was in terms of governing, it did not yet have nearly the healthcare-governance system we have today, which, for now, should keep us a little safer from suffering from the kinds of high levels of population destruction faced by Athens in those dark days nearly 2,500 years ago.