to declare war on Athens. The Athenians had a great fleet but a poorly trained army, whereas the Spartans were an effective military power on the land but lacked a fleet, and so were not a sea power. Pericles, the leader of the Athenians, decided to rely mainly on Athenian naval supremacy. His strategy was to bring all the people in Attica into the city, abandon the outlying countryside to destruction by the Spartans, and rely on the navy to supply the city with food and other necessities that would be carried through the fortified corridor from the port of Piraeus into the city itself. The hope was that Sparta would eventually be worn out and frustrated. Sparta did invade Attica from the north, and the Athenians gathered themselves and remained secure within the walled fortifications of their city. But when the Spartans destroyed the olive and grape orchards in the outlying countryside, the source of Athens’ wealth came into jeopardy. Further, as the large numbers of peasants from the countryside sought refuge within Athens, the city became overcrowded. In 430 B.C. disaster struck. An epidemic that started in Ethiopia moved into Egypt, and from there it was brought by ship to Piraeus. The epidemic raged for about 2 years and killed about a fourth of the Athenians, including, in 429 B.C., Pericles.
In 1994-1995 a mass grave was uncovered prior to construction of a subway station just outside Athens’ ancient cemetery. There were some 90 skeletons, 10 belonging to children; the grave may have contained as many as 150 people. The skeletons in the graves were placed helter-skelter with no soil between them, and the bodies were placed in the pit within a day or two, suggesting burial in a state of panic. The grave was dated to between 430 and 426 B.C. It is believed these are the remains of Athenians killed by the plague. The historian Thucydides, himself a survivor of the plague, wrote:
The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. … The catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law. All the funeral ceremonies which used to be observed were now disorganized, and they buried the dead as best they could. Many people, lacking the necessary means of burial because so many deaths had already occurred in their households, adopted the most shameless methods. They would arrive first at a funeral pyre that had been made by others, put their own dead upon it and set it alight; or, finding another pyre, they would throw the corpse that they were carrying on top of the other one and go away. … Seeing how quick and abrupt were the changes of fortune which came to the rich who suddenly died and to those who had previously been penniless … people began openly to venture on acts of self indulgence which before they used to keep in the dark. … No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshiped them or not, when one saw the good and bad dying indiscriminately.
What was this devastating plague? Despite Thucydides’ detailed description, the precise identity of the disease is not known. It was clearly not the bubonic plague, for the characteristic symptom of the bubo (swelling of the lymph nodes in the region of the groin and armpits) is not found in Thucydides’ description. Other suggested candidates are measles, typhus, Ebola, mumps, and even toxic shock syndrome. The case for typhus seems strongest both epidemiologically—the age group is similar—and from the standpoint of the symptoms. Typhus is characterized by fever, pustules, and a rash of the extremities; it is known as a “doctors’ disease” from its frequent incidence among caregivers. But the fit is not exact. The rash in Thucydides’ description does not precisely match that of typhus, nor does the state of mental confusion.
The plague of Athens demoralized the citizenry, destroyed the fighting power of the Athenian navy, and prevented the launching of an attack against Sparta. Though the war dragged on for many more years, the spirit of Athens had already been broken, and by 404 B.C. defeat was complete. Sparta deprived Athens of her navy, and her land defenses were razed to the ground. The plague of Athens clearly changed the course of history.
The Roman Fever
Of the antiquity of human malaria there is no doubt. Enlarged spleens, presumably due to malaria, have been found in Egyptian mummies more than 3,000 years old, and the Ebers papyrus (1570 B.C.) mentions fevers. More recently, evidence of malaria has been detected in lung and skin samples from mummies dating from 3204 B.C. to 1304 B.C. Clay tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal (2000 B.C.), king of Assyria, mention enlarged spleens, headaches, as well as periodic chills and fever, indicating that more than 4,000 years ago the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers was already malarious. Malaria probably came to Europe from Africa via the Nile Valley or resulted from closer contact between Europeans and the people of Asia Minor. Early Greek poems from the end of the 6th century B.C. describe intermittent fevers, and Homer’s Iliad (ca. 750 B.C.) mentions malaria, as do the writings of Aristophanes (445-385 B.C.), Plato (427-387 B.C.), and Sophocles (496-406 B.C.). The Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) discussed in his Book of Epidemics the two kinds of malaria, one with recurrent fevers every third day (benign tertian) and another with fevers on the fourth day (quartan), which are today called Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium malariae. He also noted that those living near marshes had enlarged spleens, but he never speculated as to the relationship. Indeed, Hippocrates believed that the intermittent fevers were the result of an imbalance in the body’s fluids (bile, blood, and phlegm) brought about by drinking stagnant marsh water. Hippocrates recognized that at harvest time, when Sirius the Dog Star was dominant in the night sky, fever and misery would soon follow. From the historical descriptions, malaria was obviously present in Greece but probably had little influence on military campaigns. Only once in his account of the Peloponnesian War did Thucydides refer to an illness suggestive of malaria, which affected the Athenian army encamped on marshy grounds while besieging Syracuse.
Hippocrates did not describe the deadly malignant tertian malaria (Plasmodium falciparum), and so we suspect that it did not exist or was rare. It has been speculated that although this kind of malaria was periodically brought into southern Europe from North Africa and Asia Minor, such infections were infrequent due to the absence of a suitable mosquito vector in the Mediterranean. With greater agricultural activities, including deforestation and soil erosion, conditions arose that favored the establishment of a suitable habitat on the shores of Europe for several Asian and North African species of Anopheles mosquitoes. Over time, the competence of the mosquito to transmit the disease increased, and so the highly virulent P. falciparum came to be established in Europe by the second century A.D., and from that time onward it plagued the Romans.
The great age of Greek expansion lasted 200 years (750 to 550 B.C.). Greek colonization took place along the shores of the Aegean and Black Seas, west into Sicily and southern Italy, and by 750 B.C. colonies had been established on the west coast of Italy as far north as the Bay of Naples. The Ionian Greeks from Asia Minor sailed and traded farther west, along the coast of the Mediterranean, reaching present-day Spain. The Greeks also traded with inland villages, moving up the Rhone River into Gaul and even as far north as England and Ireland. It was the practice of the Greeks to keep to themselves and to remain apart from the indigenous peoples; and so, as extensions of the homeland, the colonies were one of the means by which Greek civilization was spread to other parts of the world. The flourishing trade with the colonies also became the means by which infectious diseases could be transmitted to the naive populations in distant lands.
In ~2000 B.C. the Latins, a group to which the Romans belonged, and of Indo-European origin, possibly with forebears in central Asia, migrated first into central Europe and then to the northernmost part of Italy. By 1000 B.C. they had settled on the ~700-square-mile volcanic Latium plain, bounded on the north by the Tiber River. The soil was rocky but fertile, and the Latins prospered as farmers. Then, in ~800 B.C., the Etruscans coming out of Asia Minor landed on the coast north of the Tiber, from whence they moved inland, and by 600 B.C. they dominated all of Italy from the Alps in the north to Salerno in the south; here, though, they were halted by the already established Greek colonies. The Etruscans, a highly civilized people who were traders and merchants, brought to the Romans their first contact with the eastern
