펠로폰네소스 전쟁 초 아테네 역병과 그 충격

Abstract

The plague of Athens broke out in 430 B.C. and raged ferociously during that year and the next, it subsided and then broke out again in 427 B.C., wiping out about one third of the population of the city. In the early summer of the second year of the war the Peloponnesians invaded Attica and laid waste to the country, whose inhabitants took refuge within the Long Walls and the city consequently became severely overcrowded. The plague concerns the matter of personal cleanliness and hygiene of the inhabitants. There was no effective treatment, either by physicians' care, or by prayer or prophesy. The Athenians gave up hope. People began to live for the moment, disregarding all laws, sacred and profane. The impact of the Athenian plague was a significant depletion of the city’s human resources. As well as the impact of the plague was its effects on the quality of political leadership at Athens. The plague reinforced existing anomie. The plague reveals manifestations of social dislocation and the collapse of the moral order. This is a series of violent contrasts between the control, stability, order, and harmony of Athens as suggested in Pericles' Funeral Oration and its almost total inversion during the plague. The plague fostered an environment that unraveled the spiritual tapestry of Greece’s greatest city. The plague may have compromised the delicate and essential balance between private interests and the public good, before the plague. Physicians suggested a number of possibilities - smallpox, typhus, bubonic plague, measles, ergotism. But none of these fits the symptoms precisely. In spite of Thucydides' detailed report, no one could match the symptoms to a modern diagnosis. The Athenian plague was manifestly epidemic. I have been point out that Thucydides focus on lawlessness, sacrilege, and the demoralization of Athenian society during the plague. The Plague, in determining the course of human events, may be one of the least considered historical variables. The plague was a disease which still exists today. But the plague altered the flow of all subsequent Greece history.