Plague of Athens

The Plague of Athens struck the city during the early Peloponnesian War, beginning in 430 BC while much of the rural population had crowded behind the Long Walls. The disease killed a large proportion of the population, including Pericles, and intensified fear, social strain and political instability.

The epidemic mattered because it weakened Athens at the beginning of a long war and showed how strategy, urban density and disease could interact. Thucydides’ description remains one of antiquity’s most important accounts of an epidemic and of the behaviour of a community under extreme mortality.

The History of the Peloponnesian War is therefore the clearest direct source for the plague, while Steven Pressfield’s Tides of War uses the wider wartime Athens in which its consequences continued to matter. The Last of the Wine is set mainly later and should not be presented as a direct plague novel.