The Athenian Plague, a Cautionary Tale of Democracy’s Fragility | The New Yorker

What we can learn from Thucydides’ history of the sickness and unrest that swept Athens twenty-five hundred years ago.

Save this story Save this story “Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now,” Pericles, the great Athenian statesman, declared in his funeral oration, a celebrated speech in the winter of 431–430 B.C.E. He wasn’t wrong. We continue to admire Athens’s architectural splendor, stage its tragedies and comedies, and marvel, especially, at much that its democracy (the world’s first) wrought: participatory government, equal treatment before the law in private disputes, a distaste for class consciousness, juries made up of citizens, and tolerance about others’ personal lives.

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