Thucydides
The Plague at Athens — Thucydides 2.47-54
Ἡ ἐν Ἀθήναις λοιμός · The plague struck in 430 BCE and returned in 427. Thucydides wrote after the war ended in 404.
In the second summer of the war a disease came to Athens and killed a large part of the population inside the walls. Thucydides caught it, survived, and wrote down the symptoms in order so that it could be recognised if it ever returned. Then he wrote down what it did to the way people behaved, which is the part nobody has been able to improve on.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Richard Crawley (1840-1893), Welsh poet and fellow of Worcester College, produced in 1874 the version that most English readers still meet. It is the readable Thucydides — vigorous, rhythmic, willing to break a monstrous Greek period into English sentences that move — and most of the Thucydides phrases people quote are Crawley's phrasing rather than Thucydides'. The cost is that Thucydides is not actually a fluent writer. His Greek is notoriously knotted, and where he is hardest Crawley is often clearest, which quietly removes something. On the clinical passage Crawley reaches for the medical English of his own century, so symptoms arrive in Victorian diagnostic vocabulary that reads more settled than the Greek.