In the late 1990s, construction workers building a new subway stop just outside the old city gates in preparation for the millennium Olympic Games made a grim discovery that appeared to confirm Thucydides’ description. They chanced upon a mass grave that dated to the exact years of the plague, and when archeologists investigated further they noted that upper layers of corpses had been thrown in far more haphazardly than those at the bottom, pointing to “a sense of mounting panic in the city.”[6]
