The story gradually changes into a shocking story about moral corruption, which serves as a mirror to the "Funeral Speech of Pericles", in which the virtues of the Athenians have been praised. One would expect that after the description of the disease, the historian would have made a remark about the consequences that the plague had for the war. Thucydides' elder colleague Herodotus of Halicarnassus would have said that "the gods wanted it" or something like it, but Thucydides refuses to do so. (A mass grave discovered in 1994 illustrates the terrible death rate the disease has been identified as typhoid fever.) What is remarkable is the complete absence of any explanation: the historian offers a clinical description of the symptoms, but does not discuss the cause of the disease. Thucydides on the Plague The skull of an eleven year old girl, victim of the plague, found in the Kerameikos cemetery archaeologists have called her Myrthis.Īmong the most famous parts of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is his account of the plague that killed nearly a third of the Athenian population in the summer of 430 and caused greater loss of human life than the rest of the Archidamian War.
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