Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean (500 BCE600 CE) by Kristi Upson-Saia;

Author:Kristi Upson-Saia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520299702
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2023-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 37 Scanning electron microphotograph depicting a mass of Yersinia pestis bacteria, the pathogen responsible for the sixth-century Justinianic plague and the fourteenth-century bubonic plague (i.e., Black Death). This bacterium was found in the foregutte (the first part of the digestive tract) of a flea who was a vector for the disease. Photo credit: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH. Wikimedia Commons.

TEXT 18. THUCYDIDES, HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR SELECTION (2.47–54)

Thucydides (c. 460–395 BCE) was an Athenian general and historian. He lived through the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) fought between Athens and Sparta, serving on the Athenian side until he was exiled from Athens, and then observing the remainder of the war as a noncombatant. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War draws from his own observations and conjectures, as well as from his interviews with eyewitnesses. The selection below provides a detailed account of what happened to Athens in the summer of 430 BCE. The Athenians withdrew from the countryside and took refuge inside the city’s defensive walls (they were still kept well-supplied by ships via the connecting port of Peiraeus). Meanwhile, the attacking Spartan forces controlled the land outside the walls. This led to overcrowding in Athens, and created conditions where infectious diseases could spread easily. Thucydides’s account describes an epidemic that broke out in Athens, killing many people and leading to a deterioration of the city’s social norms and institutions. Thucydides, who was himself infected, describes the characteristics of the illness, demonstrating familiarity with the language and concepts of the Hippocratic physicians active in Athens during his lifetime.

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