Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Thucydides says that the plague spread from Ethiopia to Athens, [9] and that the plague first emerged in the port of Piraeus, from ships with plague-infected passengers, whence it spread to Athens via the Long Walls, where refugees would camp out. He says that crowding and poor hygiene in the Long Walls led to a significant spread of the plague.
A disputed anecdote from his early life says that when Thucydides was 10–12 years old, he and his father were supposed to have gone to the agora of Athens where the young Thucydides heard a lecture by the historian Herodotus. According to some accounts, the young Thucydides wept with joy after hearing the lecture, deciding that writing ...
The epidemic there killed the 13-year-old son of the Byzantine emperor, John VI Kantakouzenos, who wrote a description of the disease modelled on Thucydides' account of the 5th-century BCE Plague of Athens, but noting the spread of the Black Death by ship between maritime cities. [27]
The epidemic there killed the 13-year-old son of the Byzantine emperor, John VI Kantakouzenos, who wrote a description of the disease modelled on Thucydides's account of the 5th century BCE Plague of Athens, noting the spread of the Black Death by ship between maritime cities. [98]
Several funeral orations from classical Athens are extant, which seem to corroborate Thucydides's assertion that this was a regular feature of Athenian funerary custom in wartime. [a] The Funeral Oration was recorded by Thucydides in book two of his famous History of the Peloponnesian War.
Thucydides is mentioned in The Wasps by Aristophanes, [8] as an example of a defendant who is silenced by the overwhelming power of his accuser's (Pericles') arguments. While in Athens, Thucydides is also said to have accused Pericles' personal friend, Anaxagoras , of atheism and sympathy for the Persians .
The plague killed an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people, around 25% of the population, and is believed to have entered Athens through Piraeus, the city's port and sole source of food and supplies. Thucydides, an Athenian survivor, wrote that much of the eastern Mediterranean also saw an outbreak of the disease, albeit with less impact.
Contemporary sources indicate the plague originated in Aethiopia, but treating Aethiopia as the source of contagious diseases goes at least as far back as Thucydides' account of the Plague of Athens. That the plague reached Alexandria at least one year before it reached Rome, however, is a mark in favour of an East African origin. [17]