Athens During the Plague: The Narrative Qualities of Thucydides's Historical Account Anonymous College

While Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War primarily serves as a straightforward historical text—bereft of the grand digressions and parables of Herodotus’s Histories—there are moments that strike one as especially poetic in tone. One such scene is the description of the plague that struck Athens. Thucydides begins by vaguely tracing the plague’s origins but then proceeds to describe its physical, psychological, and sociological effects in far more vivid detail, honing a piercing gaze into the crux of human feeling. While this passage does not feel out of place with the rest of the historical narrative, it is far more humanistic and artistic in its composition than surrounding extracts, perhaps because of Thucydides’s personal exposure to the plague. Whereas in other parts of the books he merely recounts what he has discerned secondhand, in this portion he was in the thick of what he describes. It deals with such issues as the struggle between man’s inherently selfish nature and the structures that govern it. When these structures fall away, Thucydides note, man’s careless and self-serving temperament shines through, and society as a whole suffers for it. Since this section is so personal to Thucydides, it has a...