The Plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War

The Plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides' Description Of The Plague

In the early fifth century, the Greeks, evidently contrary to all odds, organised to beat the numerically far better forces of the expansive Persian empire in two invasions, in 490 (the assault of Marathon), and afresh in 480. This sobering know-how directed several Greek towns to connect simultaneously with Athens in a ocean association for the dual reason of penalizing the hubris of the Persians and profiting some recompense for the destruction's of the war. Over time, although, Athens turned this association into an equipment of its own imperial power, enforcing its will upon its partners, now become topics, and in an open way appropriating the capital of the association for the creation of monuments of imperial splendor (notably, the Parthenon).

This routinely supplied a focal issue for the jealousies and rivalries of the diverse Greek poleis, and particularly for the Spartans, the accepted experts of infantry (hoplite) warfare. The outcome was an expanded conflict, lasting from 431 to 404 BCE that pitted the hoplite forces of the Peloponnesus, Sparta and its partners, contrary to the maritime superiority of Athens and its allies.  

Thucydides is our prime source for this war. He was an upper-class Athenian and dwelled through the conflict (or almost though it is unclear when he past away, but he left his work unfinished). 

While assisting as general he was exiled for approaching late to an commitment, and as a outcome he expended much of the conflict in exile in the to the north Aegean where his family had land the identical territory in which the medical practitioners who created the Epidemics were traveling. He was highly cognizant of the thoughtful currents of the time, and both surgery and rhetoric have leveraged his production of the war.

According to Thucydides, at the start eagerness for the conflict was high. Large figures of juvenile men on both edges who had no know-how of conflict glimpsed it as an excursion and a promise source of profit. But even the first year of the conflict conveyed deficiency and hardship to the Athenians, much of it initiated by the fundamental scheme supported by the Athenians' present political foremost, Pericles, to rely mostly on Athenian naval supremacy: convey all the persons in Attica into the town and leave behind the outlying rural areas to decimation by the Spartans, relying upon the navy to provide the town with nourishment and other necessities that would be conveyed through the fortified corridor from the dock of the Pireus into the town itself (the Long Walls).

In the winter next the first year of the conflict, morale had dropped substantially in Athens. It was at the year's public burial (held every year for men who had dropped in assault in the course of the year) that Pericles spoke the well renowned burial oration that is so often cited as summing up the vastness of Periclean Athens (Thuc.2.34-46). Pericles' talk was an encomium on Athenian democracy ...