Abstract
Moral tales and the countless dead Some of the earliest texts about deaths in plagues and war from ancient Greece emphasize the difference between the individuals who lead their citizens into disasters and the masses of people who suffer and die because of them. Probably the most famous account of a plague from ancient Greece comes from Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War,” a generation-long war between the city-states of Athens and Sparta from 432 to 404 B.C. Thucydides describes how a plague overtook Athens in 430 B.C. Thucydides’ first-person account describes fevers and boils and frustrated doctors, but little sense of the individuals who suffered from it. [...]he focuses on the breakdown of social order, how people abandoned their neighbors and loved ones, and how, shockingly, traditional burial rites were abandoned.