Thucydides and the Politics of Plague

he paper analyses Thucydides’ description of the plague which ravaged Athens for two years, in 430–429 bc. In the first part of the paper, a detailed comparison with the medical, Hippocratic, corpus is provided, proving that the historian was familiar with that tradition and its methods. The second part of the paper, however, argues that the relationship with the medical tradition does not play a prominent role in the Thucydidean account. What matters most for him is the exploration of the social consequences of the pandemic. The plague uncovers a more violent and greedy dimension, an unsocial and anti-political aspect of human nature which remains hidden in peaceful times. By insisting on this point, Thucydides can thus oppose the common belief that human society had progressed from an unsecure and violent past which was dominant in fifth-century Athens.