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.

Among 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. (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