Thucydides’ statement on the plague is quite astonishing; what he implies is that the disease was the greatest disaster to befall the Greeks during the war—worse than Sicily, the chaos at Corcyra, the carnage of the Ionian War, and a variety of other catastrophes from Decelea to Melos. Perhaps the reason why we find that generalization hard to believe is that the plague broke out in the second year of a conflict that, nevertheless, went on for another quarter century.
