Book 2, Chapter 7 — Second Year of the War—The Plague of Athens—Position and Policy of Pericles—Fall of Potidæa
A disease no doctor can identify tears through a city already locked behind its own walls.
Summary
Thucydides describes the plague with a specificity unprecedented in ancient literature. It began in Ethiopia, spread through Egypt and Libya, and struck Athens in the summer of 430 BCE, entering first through Piraeus and then spreading into the city proper. He catalogs the symptoms in sequence — head, eyes, throat, chest, vomiting, convulsions, extremities — and notes that the physicians, having no experience of the disease, died in the greatest numbers of all, attending the sick without knowing how to protect themselves. He records his own survival explicitly, and explains that only those who had recovered could safely tend the dying.
The social effects of the plague are as devastating as the medical ones. With death apparently random and recovery the gift of chance rather than virtue, the normal restraints on behavior dissolve. Men who had committed crimes felt that the law would not have time to punish them. Men who had lived correctly felt that their correctness had been no protection. The result was a kind of desperate presentism — spend today's pleasures today, for tomorrow is uncertain — that Thucydides reads as the breakdown of the civic culture Pericles had praised in the Funeral Oration. The distance between chapters 6 and 7 is the distance between an ideal and its undoing.
Pericles died in 429 BCE, two years into the war, probably of a lingering form of the plague. Thucydides's assessment of him at the point of death is one of the few moments where the historian's own judgment shows clearly through the text. Pericles, he says, was first among citizens in a time when Athens was becoming an empire in fact though still a democracy in form; his successors, driven by personal ambition and the need to please the demos, pursued inconsistent policies and lost what Pericles had been winning. The argument — that Athens's strategic failure after 429 was fundamentally a failure of political leadership rather than of military capacity — is one of the History's central claims, and it is introduced here, at Pericles's death, as a frame for everything that follows.
- Book 1Book 1 opens not with battle but with argument.
- Book 1The immediate causes of the war begin with Epidamnus — a small colony on the Adriatic whose civil strife triggers a chain of interventions that pulls Corinth against Corcyra and Corcyra toward Athens.
- Book 1The congress at Lacedaemon is the Peloponnesian War's diplomatic overture.
- Book 1The Pentecontaetia — the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War — is Thucydides's compressed account of how Athens turned from war-leader to empire.
- Book 1Chapter 5 is the last diplomatic chapter before war breaks out.
- Book 2The war formally begins with the Theban attack on Plataea.
- Book 2The plague of Athens is the History's most famous sustained passage outside the Funeral Oration.
- Book 2Chapter 8 covers the third year of the war across multiple theatres.
- Book 3Book 3 opens with the revolt of Mytilene, the largest and most strategically significant of the Athenian allied cities.
- Book 3Two episodes in Book 3's second half illustrate what civil and inter-state war does to the norms that normally govern violence.
- Book 3Chapter 11 follows the Athenian general Demosthenes through a remarkable arc: from the catastrophic defeat in Aetolia, where he led light-armed Athenian troops into wooded hill country they were utterly unequipped to fight in and lost the greater part of them, to the brilliant campaign in Acarnania, where he used his knowledge of irregular warfare, learned at severe cost, to ambush and nearly annihilate a Peloponnesian and Ambraciot force.
- Book 4The Pylos campaign is the tactical and psychological turning point of the war's first decade.
- Book 4Chapter 13 moves across multiple theatres in the war's seventh and eighth years.
- Book 4Book 4's final chapter belongs to Brasidas — the one Spartan commander who combined military brilliance with political intelligence, the qualities Sparta as an institution consistently undervalued.
- Book 5The tenth year of the war produces one of history's more striking coincidences of elimination.
- Book 5The peace after Cleon and Brasidas is a peace in name only.
- Book 5The Melian Dialogue is ten pages in most editions and has been discussed for two and a half thousand years.
- Book 6Book 6 opens with the debate and vote on the Sicilian Expedition — one of the History's great scenes of collective irrationality.
- Book 6While the Athenian expedition crosses the sea, Syracuse holds its own debate about whether to believe the threat.
- Book 6With Alcibiades gone and Lamachus increasingly the operational commander, the Athenian force finally moves seriously against Syracuse in the expedition's second year.
- Book 7Book 7 opens with the Athenian position deteriorating on every front simultaneously.
- Book 7Demosthenes arrives with the reinforcements and immediately does what Nicias had been unable to do: he assesses the situation, decides on a bold stroke, and acts.
- Book 7Book 7's final chapters are the most sustained tragic narrative in classical literature.
- Book 8Book 8 opens with Athens after Sicily — a city that could not believe what it had done to itself, then could not stop the consequences.
- Book 8Chapter 25 covers one of the strangest episodes in Athenian history: the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, in which a conspiracy of four hundred men overthrows the Athenian democracy at the city's moment of maximum strategic vulnerability.
- Book 8The History's final chapter covers the collapse of the Four Hundred, the restoration of a modified democracy in Athens, the recall and rehabilitation of Alcibiades, and the Athenian naval victory at Cynossema — a victory that demonstrates Athens's ability to recover even now.