The Plague of Athens, which hapned in the second year of the Peloponnesian Warre / First described in Greek by Thucydides; then in Latin by Lucretius. Now attempted in English

An English rendering of classical eyewitness reports, this work recounts a devastating epidemic that struck an ancient city during a wider contemporary war, offering close clinical descriptions of symptoms and the typical course of illness alongside accounts of overwhelmed physicians and ineffective religious remedies. It documents rapid contagion, heavy mortality, and the collapse of customary civic and burial practices, portraying how fear, lawlessness, and social disintegration followed the health crisis. Interwoven with medical detail are reflections on human responses and the limits of contemporary knowledge, presented as a condensed adaptation of earlier Greek and Latin narrative sources.