Thucydides and the Plague of Athens

Abstract

Two problems involving Thucydides and medicine have attracted intense treatment by classical scholars and medical men working separately or in combination. They are, first, the nature of the Athenian Plague which Thucydides describes and, second, the possibility of his having been influenced by the doctrines and outlook of Hippocrates and his followers. It is the purpose of the present paper to reconsider both these problems, to indicate some false assumptions made in the methodology of previous attempts to identify the Plague, and to suggest a somewhat radical revaluation of Thucydides' approach to medical matters compared with that of Hippocrates (if, indeed, the surviving evidence about Hippocrates' method has any validity).