History of the Peloponnesian War

And now, when you have made due lament, each for his own dead, depart."

Such were the funeral ceremonies that took place during this winter, the close of which brought the first year of this war to an end.

At the very beginning of summer the Peloponnesians and their[*](430 B.C.) allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before[*](Thuc. 2.10.2.) invaded Attica, under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, and establishing themselves proceeded to ravage

the country. And before they had been many days in Attica the plague[*](It is perhaps impossible to identify the plague of Athens with any known disease. Grote describes it as an eruptive typhoid fever. It has perhaps more symptoms in common with typhus than with any other disease.) began for the first time to show itself among the Athenians. It is said, indeed, to have broken out before in many places, both in Lemnos and elsewhere, though no pestilence of such extent nor any scourge so destructive of human lives is on

record anywhere. For neither were physicians able to cope with the disease, since they at first had to treat it without knowing its nature, the mortality among them being greatest because they were most exposed to it, nor did any other human art avail. And the supplications made at sanctuaries, or appeals to oracles and the like, were all futile, and at last men desisted from them, overcome by the calamity.

The disease began, it is said, in Ethiopia beyond Egypt, and then descended into Egypt and Libya and spread over the greater part of the King's territory.

Then it suddenly fell upon the city of Athens, and attacked first the inhabitants of the Peiraeus, so that the people there even said that the Peloponnesians had put poison in their cisterns; for there were as yet no public fountains there. But afterwards it reached the upper city also, and from that time the mortality became much greater.

Now any one, whether physician or layman, may, each according to his personal opinion, speak about its probable origin and state the causes which, in his view, were sufficient to have produced so great a departure from normal conditions: but I shall describe its actual course, explaining the symptoms, from the study of which a person should be best able, having knowledge of it beforehand, to recognize it if it should ever break out again. For I had the disease myself and saw others sick of it.