The Fevered Past

The Plague of Athens

In the summer of 430 BCE, something horrific tore through Athens. The city was at war with Sparta, packed beyond capacity with refugees from the countryside, and entirely unprepared for what came through its gates next. Within four years, perhaps a quarter of the population was dead, including the man who had led Athens into the war. We have an eyewitness account of the disease from Thucydides, who caught it himself, and survived to write it down.  We have, in the last twenty years, fragments of DNA recovered from a mass grave of its victims. However, we still cannot agree on who, exactly, was the killer. This episode walks through the candidates: typhus, typhoid, measles, and a few stranger guesses — and asks what the evidence will and will not let us conclude. One of them has been the leading suspect for almost a century. One of them has direct molecular evidence behind it. They are not the same suspect, and that is where the trouble begins.