What the Great Plague of Athens Can Teach Us Now

This is not the right time for a pandemic. Not that there is a right time for a pandemic, but some times are definitely the wrong one. And no time is worse than when a nation is already in crisis, when trust in its leaders and itself is already low. A time when international relations are strained and internal strife widespread. Basically, if the social and moral fiber of a society are already being tested, the widespread fear of death at the hands of an invisible killer makes everything exponentially worse. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately; it is very hard to tell at this point), history offers us a number of examples of when a plague arrived at the wrong time.

And none of these examples is better than the Great Plague of Athens. This deadly epidemic swept through the city in 430 B.C., the second year of the Peloponnesian War, claiming perhaps 100,000 lives and revealing in stark contrast the fissures