Plague of Athens

The Plague of Athens was an epidemic that struck Athens in 430 BCE, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, and returned in the winter of 427–426 BCE. The population, crowded inside the city walls by Pericles' strategy of avoiding battle on land, suffered terribly, and modern estimates put the dead at a quarter to a third of the people of the city; Pericles himself died of the disease in 429 BCE. Thucydides, who caught it and survived, left a detailed description of its symptoms, but its cause is still debated, with typhoid fever, typhus and smallpox among the candidates.