Attic plague

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The Attic plague raged in the years 430-426 BC. During the Peloponnesian War in Athens , the capital of the ancient region of Attica .

The Greek historian Thucydides , who fell ill himself, reports on the course of this epidemic . It is therefore also called the Plague of Thucydides or Plague of Thucydides . To understand the term it must be mentioned that the Latin pestis as well as the Greek λοιμός loimós stands for a contagious disease, but today's knowledge about the pathogenesis of infectious diseases such as the plague was not yet created and that epidemics as “punishment of a god “Were seen.

History and impact

The Attic plague hit Athens in the years 430-426 BC. At the time of the Peloponnesian War , the 431 BC. Began, led to crises in the Attic democracy and with the surrender of Athens in 404 BC. BC ended.

The exact records of the Greek historian Thucydides , who fell ill himself, report on the events and the epidemic during the siege of Athens by the Spartans . Thucydides, the Attic citizen and at least 24 years old when the epidemic broke out, describes its course in detail in the second of his eight books on the Peloponnesian War (Chapters 47 to 54). He describes signs of illness he had personally experienced and observed and noticed that no one who had survived the illness got it a second time; this can be seen as the first written evidence of immunological memory .

About a quarter of the population of Athens fell victim to the Attic plague, including in 429 BC. BC also Pericles . The effects of the epidemic are held responsible not only for the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, but also for the decline of classical Greek culture as a whole.

Symptoms

According to the report of Thucydides, the disease suddenly appeared in people who had previously been in excellent health, and it progressed from top to bottom, with a strong (internal) feeling of heat in the head with inflamed and reddened eyes at the beginning came and throat and tongue felt raw. This was followed by sneezing , hoarseness and coughing, as well as symptoms of flu. The breath came foul-smelling and irregular, the disease spread to the entire body, and when it had reached the stomach , it literally turned it over, so that with terrible nausea, bile in all its different forms was vomited up. Eventually, the disease spread to the pubic parts and limbs down to the tips of the fingers and toes. Many only got away because they lost them, while others were blind or lost their memory.

The body did not feel excessively hot, was only slightly red and covered with blisters and ulcers . Internally, however, the sick felt a fierce fire burning within them, so that some jumped into wells driven by insatiable thirst, insomnia and restlessness. In the more frequent case, one died after six or eight days without being completely exhausted; more rarely, after a temporary recovery, it had spread to the abdomen with severe ulceration and the occurrence of diarrhea , so that these patients died of the exhaustion that resulted .

A “hollow hiccup ” was described as characteristic in most of the sick people, which triggered violent cramps and which occurred in some after the symptoms had subsided and in others much later.

Thucydides reports that some died because nobody looked after them, while others died despite all conceivable care. Animals were also affected by the disease.

Hypotheses

The attempt to link the symptoms described by Thucydides with a disease known today has led to more than 200 publications on the subject with at least 29 “suspected diagnoses”.

The following pathogens , among others, have been given as the cause :

Another possibility that must be considered is that it was a disease that no longer occurs today. Identification is also made more difficult by the fact that diseases known today may in the meantime have undergone changes in terms of their geographical distribution, symptoms, transmission and also their virulence . A meeting or superposition of two epidemics was also discussed as a possible explanation. The previously expressed hypothesis that ergotism , poisoning with ergot , could at least have been involved in the epidemic (along with another disease) was rejected as extremely unlikely at the end of the 19th century.

In 2005 the excavation of a mass grave with 150 bodies in the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos in Athens was reported. The dating of the grave to the 5th century BC Chr. And the arrangement of the buried speak for the assumption that these may be victims of the plague. The tooth pulp of three recovered teeth, which appeared to be a suitable material due to its stability over the centuries, its (formerly) good vascular supply and its primary sterility, was examined for DNA fragments of various microbes using the polymerase chain reaction . While the search for six potential other pathogens was unsuccessful, genetic material similar to a strain of Salmonella enterica serovar typhi was found . However, the authors' conclusion that typhoid fever is the likely cause of the Attic disease was not shared by critical commentators. In particular, it was criticized that the fact that Salmonella DNA was found in the examined samples in no way determines the cause of death. The possibility that this finding could be contamination by soil bacteria is also discussed. In addition, the symptoms described by Thucydides can only partially be reconciled with these test results.

See also

literature

  • F. v. Bormann: Attic plague 430-426 BC Between In: Journal of Hygiene and Infectious Diseases. Issue 136. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg 1952, ISSN  0340-1782 , pp. 67–84 ( article preview ).
  • Wilhelm Ebstein : The plague of Thucydides (The Attic epidemic.) A historical-medical study. Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, Stuttgart 1899 ( digitized in the Internet Archive ).
  • Horst Habs : The so-called plague of Thucydides. Attempt an epidemiological analysis. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 1982, ISBN 3-540-11941-8 .
  • Karl-Heinz Leven : Thucydides and the "plague" in Athens. In: Medical History Journal. Volume 26, Issue 1/2. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1991, ISSN  0025-8431 , pp. 128-160.
  • Winfried Schmitz : Divine punishment or medical events - interpretations and diagnoses of the 'plague' in Athens (430–426 BC). In: Mischa Meier (Ed.): Pest. The story of a human trauma. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-608-94359-5 , pp. 44-65.

Web links

Commons : Attic Plague  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thucydides 2,47-55 (English) ( Memento from May 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Project Pest: History ( Memento of February 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Thomas E. Morgan: Plague or Poetry? Thucydides on the Epidemic at Athens. In: Transactions of the American Philological Association. Vol. 124, 1994, pp. 197-209; Manolis J. Papagrigorakis, Christos Yapijakis, Philippos N. Synodinos, Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani: DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the Plague of Athens. In: International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Volume 10, 2006, pp. 206-214 PMID 16412683 ; Horst Habs : The so-called plague of Thucydides. Attempt an epidemiological analysis. Presented at the meeting on November 14, 1981 (= meeting reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Mathematical and Natural Science Class. No. 6, 1982). Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 1982.
  4. ↑ PE Olson, CS Hames et al: The Thucydides Syndrome: Ebola Déjà Vu? (or Ebola Reemergent?) In: Emerging Infectious Diseases . Volume 2, Number 2, 1996 doi: 10.3201 / eid0202.960220
  5. ↑ Manolis J. Papagrigorakis, Christos Yapijakis, Philippos N. Synodinos, Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani: DNA examination of ancient dental pulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the Plague of Athens. In: International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Volume 10, 2006, pp. 206-214 PMID 16412683
  6. ↑ Beth Shapiro, Andrew Rambaut, M. Thomas P. Gilbert: No proof that typhoid caused the Plague of Athens. In: International Journal of Infectious Diseases. Volume 10, 2006, pp. 334-335 PMID 16730469 .