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The speech glossed over certain unpleasant characteristics and some inconvenient qualities, but its theme, that Athens had been going through a golden age thanks largely to its democratic constitution, seems to have been true enough.
But there was another, much less palatable truth that was about to strike the Athenians. In the summer of 430 during the Peloponnesians’ second invasion when farmers crowded the city and lived huddled in shacks and stifling tents, people began to fall ill and die. The symptoms of the epidemic were horrific, as Thucydides, who had been infected himself and survived, described in detail. Perfectly healthy men and women suddenly began to have burning feelings in the head; their eyes became red and inflamed; inside their mouths their throats and tongues bled, and they had unpleasant breath.
Next came sneezing and hoarseness of voice, and before long victims developed a chest pain and a cough, and then a stomachache. They vomited up every kind of bile.
The skin reddened and broke out into pustules. It felt cool to the touch, but inside sufferers felt burning hot. After seven or eight days a severe diarrhea set in and was often fatal. Thucydides writes: “Nothing did the Athenians so much harm as this or so reduced their strength for war.”
We are not sure what the infection was. It seems to have originated in Egypt and spread through the Persian Empire. Its symptoms resembled those of pneumonic plague, measles, typhoid, and other diseases, but fit none of them exactly. One thing is sure; the “plague,” which is what people called it, was often lethal. The death toll is uncertain. Thucydides gives totals for the cavalry and infantry classes—4,400 infantry out of the 13,000 for the field army. In addition, at Potidaea 1,050 men died in forty days. Three hundred cavalrymen died out of an active total of 1,200. The poor probably suffered most and for them there are no figures. It has been estimated that between one quarter and one third of the population died. It was a terrible blow.
“It was the one thing I didn’t predict,” remarked a despondent Pericles. The plague raged for two summers, took a break, and then resumed in 427 before finally running its course.
Few doubted that the war and the plague were connected and that the gods were punishing Athens for some offense. Everyone could recall the anger of Apollo in Homer’s Iliad, and the punitive plague he inflicted with his twanging arrows on the Greek army before Troy.
Sophocles’ new tragedy, Oedipus the King, was performed at the Great Dionysia of 429 when the plague was at its height. It was no accident that it opens with Apollo at his murderous work again. The play didn’t win first prize, but many see it as his masterpiece. Aristotle wrote in his study of the art of fiction, Poetics, that it best matched his prescription for how drama should be made.
Its hero, Oedipus, becomes king of Thebes by unknowingly killing his father and marrying his mother. Because of the pollution he brings to his kingdom, a terrible pestilence descends on the city. The audience understood all too well the horrors of which the Chorus sings:
Beyond all telling, the city
Reeks with the death in her streets, death-bringing.
None weeps, and her children die,
None by to pity.
Mothers at every altar kneel,
Golden Athena, come near to our crying!
Apollo, hear us and heal!
It was only when the pollution was traced back to Oedipus and he had blinded himself and been expelled from the city that the infection subsided.
People remembered an old prophecy that said:
War with the Dorians [the Spartans were Dorians] and death will come at the same time.
They also recalled that before deciding on war, Sparta had received a favorable response from the oracle at Delphi. Its words appeared to be coming true and it was noticed that the plague scarcely touched the Peloponnese. In the winter of 426 Athens carried out ceremonies of purification at the island of Delos, birthplace of Apollo. All the tombs of those who had died on Delos were dug up and it was proclaimed that in future no deaths or births, both of which were pollutant events, were to be permitted on the island. A five-yearly festival was revived, the Delian Games, and horse racing was added as a new competition.
It comes as little surprise that at this juncture the will of the demos wobbled. Peace feelers were extended to Sparta, although they came to nothing. Probably in September 430, Pericles was suspended from his post as strategos to which he had been elected in the spring, and charged with misappropriation of public funds. He was found guilty and fined fifty talents. He became depressed and spent his time lying about at home. Young Alcibiades and others had to persuade him to resume political work. In the spring, he was reelected, “as is the way with crowds,” Thucydides observed sourly. Pericles was back in office at the start of the new official year in midsummer 429.
The Olympian was felt to be indispensable and he was against wobbling. As always he spoke truth to power—that is, to the demos. “Your empire is, not to mince words, a tyranny,” he advised. “It may be that it was wrong to take it, but to let it go now would be unsafe.”
Pericles was not only unfairly blamed for the plague, he also caught it. He passed the crisis but the disease lingered, and in the autumn of 429 he died. His two unsatisfactory sons had also been infected and preceded him to the grave a year before. So that his direct line should survive, he persuaded the authorities to make Pericles, his unsuffraged child by Aspasia, an Athenian citizen (the young man had fallen foul of the nationality law his own father had introduced all those years ago, which allowed the franchise only to children both of whose parents were Athenian).
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Pericles was a great man. Thucydides, who was hard to please, admired him. He gave him a fine eulogy.
Being powerful because of his rank, ability, and known integrity, he exercised an independent control over the masses, and was not so much led by it as himself led it. As he did not win power by improper methods he did not have to flatter them….In short, what was nominally a democracy became rule by the first citizen. His successors were more on the same level as one another, and each of them strove to become the leader.
However, as Pericles himself must have recognized, his career ended in failure. This had less to do with the plague than with his war strategy. It was defensive and wars are seldom won without attack, without looking for the enemy and fighting him. He underestimated the devastating impact on public morale of the annual invasions of the homeland. When he reassured the demos before the war that Athens had huge financial reserves, he was factually correct. But here is a puzzle. The city was indeed much richer than its opponents, but Pericles knew as well as anybody else that maritime warfare was prohibitively expensive. By the time of his death the reserves were already running low, and hostilities had hardly opened.
Pericles was cautious by nature and there is only one plausible explanation for his faulty prognosis. His war strategy was that there would be no war—or, rather, a war with very little fighting and one that was likely to end quickly, as soon as Sparta had realized that there were no practical measures they could take to damage the Athenian Empire. In sum, Pericles had been betting on a draw.
It looked as if he was going to lose his stake.
The seemingly endless and ruinous siege of Potidaea did not end until its capture in 430. Costly naval expeditions were needed to counteract the effect on morale of the annual invasion of Attica. Allowance had to be made for future unknowns both known and unknown—in this case it was the plague, but further surprises could be anticipated. These would almost certainly include more bank-breaking rebellions in the empire. Worst of all, the enemy showed no sign of submission. So how was the war actually to be won?