No one knows what caused the Plague of Athens in the 5th century B.C. One popular theory is Ebola—but to discover the source of an outbreak millennia after the fact, scientists need victims’ remains and a bit of luck.
In the summer of 430 B.C., a mass outbreak of disease hit the city of Athens, ravaging the city’s population over the next five years. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the historian Thucydides, who witnessed the epidemic, described victims’ “violent heats in the head,” “redness and inflammation in the eyes,” and tongues and throats “becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath.” Patients would experience hot flashes so extreme, he wrote, that they “could not bear to have on [them] clothing or linen even of the very lightest description.” In the later stages of infection, the disease would end with “violent ulceration” and diarrhea that left most too weak to survive.
More than 2,000 years later, the Plague of Athens remains a scientific mystery. Thucydides’ account—the only surviving description of the epidemic—has been the basis for dozens of modern-day theories about its cause, including bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid fever, influenza, and measles. And in June, an article in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease suggested another answer: Ebola.
The article, written by the infectious-disease specialist Powel Kazanjian, is the latest in a string of papers arguing that Athens was once the site of an Ebola outbreak. The surgeon Gayle Scarrow first raised the suggestion in The Ancient History Bulletin in 1988. Eight years later, the epidemiologist Patrick Olson published a letter in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comparing the symptoms of the Athens plague to those of Ebola, which had broken out in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) and Sudan in 1976. “The profile of the ancient disease,” he concluded, “is remarkably similar.”
But not everyone was on board with Olson’s theory. In a 1996 interview with the The New York Times, the epidemiologist David Morens argued that Thucydides wasn’t the most reliable source: Unlike his contemporary, Hippocrates, he wasn’t a physician, and many of the terms he used to describe the disease’s symptoms were ambiguous. For example, the ancient Greek phlyktainai could refer to either blisters or callouses. Noting Thucydides’ claim that the epidemic had originated “in the parts of Ethiopia above Egypt” (today’s sub-Saharan Africa), Morens also questioned how people with Ebola, a highly contagious and deadly disease, could make it all the way to Greece without dying along the way.
The duration of the Athens epidemic also presented another problem: At five years, it was much longer than any known Ebola outbreaks, the majority of which lasted less than a year. And finally, Morens asked, if Ebola had made it out of Africa millennia ago, why were there no other accounts of the disease re-appearing anywhere on Earth until 1976?
Unfortunately for both Olson and Morens, however, neither had a more concrete way to back up their arguments. Their efforts to identify the Plague of Athens, like all the other efforts before them, could only rely on the written record left by Thucydides, which made confirmation more or less impossible.
This, in a nutshell, is the challenge of ancient pathology: With DNA testing, it’s often possible to identify the cause of an epidemic that took place centuries or even millennia ago. Finding remains of those victims to test, though, is another story.
Sometimes, scientists get lucky. In 2001, for example, a mass grave was uncovered at a construction site in Vilnus, Lithuania. Based on uniform fragments found in the grave, the bodies were identified as belonging to soldiers in Napoleon’s army—somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 of them, hurriedly buried during the retreat from Moscow. When a team of anthropologists examined dental pulp taken from the bodies, they found that around one-third of them had died of typhus, a finding confirmed by tests of dead lice found at the site (the disease is transmitted through lice). Researchers had long suspected that typhus had contributed to Napoleon’s eventual defeat, but because knowledge of the disease was scant during his lifetime, historical accounts alone had never been enough to confirm it.
For the Plague of Athens, it seemed like a similar turning point had arrived in 1994, when during excavations for a planned Athens metro station at Kerameikos, an ancient graveyard used from the early Bronze age through Roman times. The excavators uncovered thousands of previously undiscovered tombs—including a set of seemingly hurried, unceremonious mass burials dating to 430 B.C., the year of the Plague of Athens.
Control of the site was turned over from the construction company to the Greek Ministry of Culture, which handles the discoveries of ancient ruins. In 2000, archaeologists turned over three teeth found at the site to a University of Athens team led by Manolis Papagrigorakis, an orthodontist and professor of dentistry, for DNA testing. Examining the dental pulp found in the teeth, Papagrigorakis’ team ran tests for seven diseases that had previously been suggested by other scholars: plague, typhus, anthrax, tuberculosis, cowpox, cat-scratch disease, and typhoid fever. The only match they identified on all three teeth was with the pathogen for typhoid fever. The researchers published the findings from their analysis in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases in 2006.
Far from solving the mystery, though, Papagrigorakis’s team only muddled it further. In a letter to the editor in the same journal, zoologists from Oxford University and the University of Copenhagen argued that Papagrigorakis’s methodology was flawed because he failed to do a phylogenetic analysis (a way of examining evolutionary relationships) on the teeth. Using the DNA data published in Papagrigorakis’s study, they conducted their own phylogenetic analysis, concluding that the DNA of the tooth bacteria was related to, but not the same as, that of the pathogen for typhoid fever. “The Athens [DNA] sequence and typhoid would have shared a common ancestor in the order of millions of years ago,” they wrote.
The authors also suggested another possibility: that the DNA found in the teeth wasn’t from the Plague of Athens pathogen at all. “While we cannot exclude the possibility that the Athens sequence is a previously unidentified infectious agent,” they concluded, “it is quite reasonable to assume that the sequence is actually that of a modern, free-living soil bacterium, a possibility that could have been explored by extracting DNA from surrounding soil samples as additional negative controls.”
Papagrigorakis currently has a new study underway, using more modern techniques and a greater number of tooth samples, that he hopes will help to settle the debate. In the decade since he published his Athens study, advancements in DNA-sequencing technology have enabled scientists to answer a number of lingering questions about ancient epidemics, making new discoveries from very old tooth samples. In 2011, for example, scientists used teeth taken from bodies in one of London’s so-called “plague pits” to sequence the genome of the bacterium y. pestis, the source of the Black Death epidemic that had swept Europe in the 14th century. By comparing the old genome to modern-day strains, the researchers were able to reconstruct the bacterium’s evolutionary path over the centuries, finding support for the idea that the 14th-century pathogen was likely the root of the evolutionary tree leading to more recent outbreaks.
And in a 2014 study published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, scientists were able to prove for the first time that the Plague of Justinian—which killed about 50 million people in Europe and the Byzantine Empire between 600 and 800 A.D.—was actually a strain of y. pestis, making it the first known outbreak. The team made its discovery by sequencing DNA from teeth taken from human remains that had been found in a German graveyard and dated to the time of the epidemic.
Even when ancient specimens are available, though, they may not be enough to identify a disease. Bacteria, like typhoid and plague, can be identified through DNA sampling, but this isn’t always the case with viruses. Many of them, including the viruses for Ebola, influenza, and measles, require an RNA sample for positive identification—and thus far, the oldest preserved RNA viral genome belongs to a 700-year-old specimen of caribou feces, much more recent than the Athens samples from in the 5th century B.C. The structure of RNA makes it much more unstable—and therefore more prone to degradation—than DNA, meaning that if the Plague of Athens was viral rather than bacterial, its source may remain a mystery.
“If Ebola virus was there, we will never know,” said Vinent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University professor and the host of the podcast This Week in Virology. “For that, we’ll need a time machine to bring us back to get samples.”
Partially due to these limitations, Kazanjian’s recent study doesn’t delve into dental-pulp analysis data. His argument is based on the similarity between the symptoms of the Plague of Athens and those of Ebola, an argument that he believes is strengthened by observations from the latest Ebola outbreak. The paper ends with a chart of the symptoms described by Thucydides, listed side-by-side against the symptoms of eight modern diseases that had previously been floated as possible explanations; of all of them, the symptoms for Ebola have the most overlap.
Even so, Kazanjian cautioned against referring to Ebola as a “probable” or even a “likely” cause. “The most accurate statement is that the cause remains unknown, and there are several possibilities,” he said, including that the Plague of Athens may have been a now-extinct disease with Ebola-like symptoms.
He also acknowledges the difficulty of making rigorous comparisons between Thucydides’s descriptions and modern-day medical knowledge: “I try not to get into the trap of saying what the most likely thing is,” he said.
But for Kazanjian—also a historian—solving the puzzle of the Plague of Athens is less compelling than exploring all the possibilities. The inquiry is “clearly fun to do,” he said, “no matter what your background is.”
Epidemics spread mistrust, as communities seek to blame their plight on outsiders or those at the margins of society. Yet the historical record reveals that outbreaks are more likely to bring people together than force them apart.
After more than half a century without a major epidemic in the West, the shock of the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the early 1980s triggered sudden interest in the socio-psychological reactions to disease. A wide range of commentators across scholarly disciplines and the popular press searched for historical parallels to AIDS and readily found them. Their message tended towards the simplistic, the anachronistic and the one-dimensional, resisting almost any attempt to detect change over time or find significant differences between epidemic diseases. In his study Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath (1989), the prominent Italian historian of early modern Europe, Carlo Ginzburg, concluded that: ‘The prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged.’ Cultural historians Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman claim that ‘blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable’. The historian of medicine Roy Porter agreed with Susan Sontag that when ‘there is no cure to hand’ and the ‘aetiology ... is obscure ... deadly diseases spawn sinister connotations’. More recently, from Haiti, which endured a devastating earthquake followed by an outbreak of cholera in 2010, Paul Farmer in Haiti After the Earthquake (2011) proclaimed: ‘Blame was, after all, a calling card of all transnational epidemics.’
Across time, space and disease, epidemics, particularly those deemed new, lacking tested cures or effective prevention, ‘became fodder’ for all ‘sorts of irrational hatreds and prejudice’. This irrationality was supposedly directed towards the victims of epidemics or ‘others’: the poor, the outcast, the Jew, the foreigner. Assertions that epidemics’ social toxins – their negative effect on social relations – were more explosive when diseases were mysterious meant that diseases before the laboratory revolution of the 1870s, before the Scientific Revolution and certainly before Fracastoro’s mid 16th-century notion of germs should have been the most violent, with the greatest blame heaped on the victims of disease or minorities. Yet an examination of the historical record of epidemics fails to support these assertions. The most frequently cited example from antiquity of a mysterious disease sparking blame and violence is the fifth-century BC Plague of Athens. Yet any notion of such violence derives from just one tentative line in Thucydides, when inhabitants of Piraeus ‘even said that the Peloponnesians had put poison in their cisterns’. No more is heard of it when the plague reached the densely populated upper city of Athens, levelling the population by a third, where Thucydides begins his description of the plague’s socio-psychological effects. Blame does not, however, disappear entirely from Thucydides’ account. When the epidemic flared again a year later in 430, the Athenians did not blame outsiders or victims but their own leader Pericles and his stubborn continuance of the devastating war with the Spartans.
Plague in an Ancient City, by Michael Sweerts, c.1652
Those searching for blame and violence connected to epidemics spend little time on antiquity, leaving the impression that outbreaks were then rare. Yet, despite the survival of less than a quarter of Livy’s History of Rome (35 of 142 books), the author mentions 57 epidemics, of which modern historians have recalled only two or three. In recounting these, Livy portrays another side to the social and psychological consequences of epidemics that do not sit well with the current post-AIDS view. Instead of dividing societies, with one class or group blaming another, these epidemics often ended bitter rivalries between warring neighbours or between the plebs and senatorial classes and brought societies together, at least temporarily. Compassion, not hate, was a side effect of epidemics. In 399 BC, for example, a bitter winter followed by a summer heatwave produced a severe epidemic in Rome, fatal to humans and beasts alike and for which no cures could be found. The senate voted to consult the Sibylline Books, as was usual in times of crisis, and this led to the creation of a new sort of banquet, the lectisternium, which was open to the masses:
Throughout the City the front gates of the houses were thrown open and all sorts of things [were] placed for general use in the open courts; all comers, whether acquaintances or strangers, were invited to share the hospitality. Men who had been enemies held friendly and sociable conversations with each other and abstained from all litigation, the manacles even were removed from prisoners during this period, and afterwards it seemed an act of impiety that men to whom the gods had brought such relief should be put in chains again.
On at least three occasions the lectisternium was repeated during the fourth century BC, when particularly fatal and mysterious epidemics struck Rome. To end these scourges, the government bequeathed largesse on the population, with extended work-free holidays. Other plagues succeeded in ending class conflict between plebeians and the senatorial classes, as in 433-2 BC, when masses and elites ‘crowded before shrines, and everywhere prostrate matrons swept the floors of temples with their hair’. Fearing famine would follow pestilence, governments emptied their coffers to pay for foreign shipments of grain.
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As with antiquity, so with the Middle Ages, a single episode, the Black Death, has fixed impressions of the social toxins aroused by a pandemic. Unlike Thucydides’ one-liner about possible biological warfare, however, accusations against Jews, beggars at Narbonne and Catalans in Sicily at the time of the Black Death fill hundreds of chronicles. Archival evidence points to over 1,000 Jewish communities annihilated between 1348 and 1350: men, women and children were burnt on islands or in synagogues, accused of poisoning wells to end Christendom. The enormity of the Black Death’s social toxins appears to be unique, not only to the Middle Ages, but to European, even world history. Yet historians have failed to mention just how short-lived these extreme reactions were. While waves of persecution against Jews continued through the late Middle Ages and early modern period, pre-modern plagues no longer triggered massacres of Jews or any other ‘others’.
Beginning around 1530, however, a second wave of plague accusations arose in Toulouse, Geneva, Lyon, Nîmes, Rouen, Paris, Turin, Milan, Palermo and smaller towns and villages. Yet the trials, tortures and executions of supposed plague-spreaders that followed cannot compare in scale, numbers, murders, or destruction with those seen during the Black Death, or with the 19th- and early 20th-century riots sparked by cholera in Europe, plague in India or smallpox in North America. Moreover, these early modern plague persecutions do not follow the reputed patterns of governments, elites or the rabble hysterically victimising suspected populations of foreigners, Jews or the poor. From the surviving trial transcripts produced at Milan in 1630 and immortalised in Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi, those initiating the charges were poor women and the accused were insiders rather than outsiders: usually native Milanese men, including property-owning artisans, wealthy bankers and aristocrats.
Some historians have seen syphilis rather than plague as early modern Europe’s great disease of phobia and blame. Not only was it new to Europe, it was sexually transmitted, making it the perfect antecedent of AIDS. But where is the evidence that it encouraged blame or social violence? For the most part, scholars can point only to the names used to label the disease: Neapolitans called it malfrancese, the French, the mal de Naples and so on. Despite such names, no one has found a single source describing an early modern syphilis riot or a mass attack on those known, or supposed, to have spread the disease: mainly, foreign armies and prostitutes. Instead, texts such as De morbo gallico by Gabriel Falloppio, chair of medicine at Padua, expressed sympathy for Naples’ ‘most beautiful girls’, ‘propelled’ by poverty into ‘secret prostitution’. Nor did Falloppio or other 16th-century commentators blame the French, despite the standard name – morbus Gallicus – appearing in medical texts until the 17th century. In one of the most widely circulated medical tracts of the 16th century, De guaiaici medicina et morbo gallico (1519), Ulrich von Hutten explained why he used the term and immediately apologised: I do not ‘bear any grudge against a most renowned nation which is, perhaps, the most civilised and hospitable now in existence’. Two decades later, the Florentine statesman and historian Francesco Guicciardini called the disease malfrancese, but insisted that it was necessary to ‘remove the shame of the name “franzese”’, arguing that the disease had been brought from Spain and not France to Naples. He then added that the disease was ‘not exactly of that nation’ either; instead, it came from the West Indies, but he did not blame any Indian or his Italian hero Christopher Columbus ‘for making the wonderful discovery of the New World’. The physician Falloppio went further, seeing the disease springing not entirely from outside invaders but from malpractice within: unwittingly, Neapolitan bakers were partially to blame because they contaminated their bread with gypsum, thus weakening Naples’ population and contributing to the spread of the disease. The mid-16th-century Venetian physician Bernardino Tomitano also looked inward, placing the blame for the spread of syphilis in the 1530s on his own Venetian merchants, who carried it into Eastern Europe.
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The patterns of hatred and mythologies of blame caused by epidemics changed in the 19th century with cholera. Unlike with previous diseases, including the Black Death, the hate and violence cholera provoked spread across linguistic and political borders, touching almost every country in Europe. Across strikingly different cultures, economies and regimes, the content and character of the conspiracies, the divisions by social class and the targets of rioters’ wrath were uncannily similar. Without any obvious communication among rioters from New York City to Asiatic Russia, cholera’s conspiracies repeated stories of elites masterminding a Malthusian cull of the poor, with health boards, doctors, pharmacists, nurses and government officials as the agents. Myths of poisoned wells and other sources reach back to antiquity and can be seen during the Middle Ages and early modern period, as with the slaughter of Jews and lepers in 1319-21. But unlike these massacres, 19th- and 20th-century cholera riots rarely targeted Jews or other marginal groups (and never lepers). Popular rage turned not towards the ‘other’, but against the dominant classes, especially medical professionals, local policemen and governors.
When cholera spread beyond the Ganges in 1817 into the Near East and up the Volga to reach Astrakhan in 1823, it was a new disease. Yet no reports of conspiracies or riots have yet to surface from this period. Rather, social violence followed cholera during its second tour up the Volga, when disease and hate spread in tandem throughout Europe. During cholera’s next five waves, from 1830 into the 20th century, the same myths of health workers and the state inventing the disease to kill off the poor recurred in parts of Russia and Italy long after the disease’s means of transmission were known and understood. During the 1890s, cholera riots appear to have spread more widely than ever before in Eastern Europe and Russia – into Persia, Syria and Egypt – with the estimated numbers of rioters reaching new peaks. At Astrakhan in 1892, rumours spread that the sick were being carted to hospitals to be buried alive, igniting a crowd of 10,000 to besiege the cholera hospital. Instead of attacking the disease’s victims, the protesters saw themselves as ‘liberators’, freeing the afflicted from the clutches of supposed hospital death camps. The crowd next marched to the governor’s house and burnt it to the ground. A month later, Asiatic Sarts living in and around Tashkent claimed that cholera was the work of Russian doctors poisoning them. Five thousand, ‘driven to madness over the reported cruelties to cholera patients’, invaded the Russian quarter of the city. Armed with revolvers and daggers, they plundered shops and stoned ‘all citizens in their way’. They destroyed the residence of the deputy governor and chased him through the streets, trampling, stoning, beating him to death, ‘mutilating his features beyond recognition’. Eventually, Cossacks quelled the revolt after killing 70 and wounding hundreds. Between these two events numerous smaller but deadly cholera riots swept down the Volga.
Cholera riots became especially widespread in Italy. In the first and most studied wave in 1835-6, social violence was confined almost entirely to Sicily. That was far from the case during Italy’s last major cholera epidemic, of 1910-11, even though mortality rates were a fraction of previous outbreaks and despite the fact that the disease’s water-bound transmission had been known for half a century. At Massafra in Puglia, for instance, the old cholera myths of hospitals as death chambers for the poor persisted. Crowds of around 3,000 stormed the cholera hospital and ‘liberated’ the patients, whom they paraded triumphantly through the streets. Prominent government officials and doctors were killed, nurses were thrown out of windows, equipment was smashed and the hospital set ablaze.
A costume designed to protect doctors from plague, French, 1720
The incident that gained most publicity occurred at Verbicaro, a town of 6,000 north of Cosenza in Calabria. At the end of August 1911, 1,200 ‘rebels’ attacked the town hall while the mayor was convening a meeting. The first to be seized was a clerk, who several months earlier had been involved in drafting the town’s census. A woman struck his head with a stick, another shot him and a third hacked his head off with a pruning knife. The attack was not random. Harking back to a basic plot of cholera conspiracies, the peasants believed the census was the town’s first step in selecting those ‘for the sacrifice’ to ease Italy’s overpopulation. Armed with spades, knives, sticks and agricultural implements, women, boys and men knocked down telegraph poles, cut the wires, wrecked the town hall, burnt its archives, the court house, the telegraph office and the mayor’s house and released prisoners from gaol. The mayor, a town clerk and a judge fled. A group of 11, including three women, caught the clerk and ‘hacked him to pieces’. On reaching the train station, the judge ‘died of fright’. Fearing reprisals, half of Verbicaro’s population fled to the mountains, leaving cholera corpses strewn through streets. The mayor escaped, but two days later was ordered to return and was immediately murdered, repeating the fate of his grandfather, mayor of Verbicaro in 1857, when a previous cholera uprising swept through town.
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Southern Italian towns were not the only ones to have been afflicted by cholera’s social toxins. Large-scale cholera riots, for instance, had erupted in Tuscany’s industrial port of Livorno in 1857 and 1893. In 1911, similar riots spread through seaside resorts outside Rome at Ansio, Nettuno and Terracina. The authorities in Segni, southwest of Rome, which experienced just five cholera cases, requisitioned a hospital and lazzaretto to quarantine suspected cases. Immediately ‘the idea spread among ignorant people’ that the authorities, municipal and national, had planned a ‘massacre of the innocents’ to poison the town. ‘A mob’ of 3,000 marched on the town hall demanding the release of cholera patients, stoned carabinieri and battered down the town hall’s door, ‘intending to sack and destroy the place, and murder the mayor and health workers’, who they accused of inventing the disease. The papers reported women as being ‘particularly ferocious’. One seized a carabiniere, threw him to the ground and stomped on him. Another grabbed the municipal flag and shouted: ‘To the hospital.’ The ‘mob’, heeding her command, surged through town, crying ‘Death to the doctors and nurses’. They succeeded in removing the cholera patients from the hospital, carrying them ‘in a procession to their homes’.
We can reach some conclusion from these examples. First, even though a nexus of hate driven by epidemics may have been on the rise in the 16th and early 17th centuries, with the trials of supposed plague spreaders, they were short-lived and mild in comparison to what followed with the much more widespread social unrest from cholera in 19th- and early-20th-century Europe. Second, with cholera the unrest was more than principally an urban phenomenon confined to ten or so cities. In the British Isles for the 13-month period, December 1831 to January 1833, for instance, I have found 72 cholera riots, many with crowds in the thousands, that attacked physicians and destroyed cholera hospitals. In Ireland and Scotland in particular, these occurred not only in the principal cities but in small towns and villages such as Ardee, Kilkenny, Killineer, Ballina in Ireland and Paisley, Wick, Pathhead (Kirkcaldy), Leith and Ivergordon in Scotland. Third, scientific discoveries of cholera’s bacterial agent and mechanisms of transmission did not end or even dampen cholera’s social violence or the mythologies that fuelled it in and around the large and sophisticated cities of western Europe. In Russia and Italy these riots continued into the 20th century, becoming as widespread and frequent as they had been in the 1830s. Finally, comparison of epidemics shows that the social configurations of hate were not one-dimensional or static across time and place as the recent literature inspired by the AIDS experience would have us believe. Responses to cholera differed markedly from the slaughter of Jews during the Black Death or the 16th- and 17th-century plague trials, which reveal a wide variety of perpetrators and victims. Instead of blaming and scapegoating the poor, Jews, foreigners and other marginal populations, cholera’s mythologies of hate funnelled blame and violence in the opposite direction: marginal groups such as Asiatic Sarts in Russian cities, impoverished Irish women and boys in New York, Liverpool and Glasgow, peasants, fig-growers and unemployed fishermen in Puglia and women and children in other Italian towns targeted physicians, pharmacists, nurses, mayors and other government officials as the ones purposely spreading the disease. Nor have such conspiracy theories connected with epidemics disappeared, as attested by attacks in 2014 on the Red Cross in West Africa, accused of inventing the Ebola virus, or more recently with charges that a biotech company had purposely released the superbugs causing the Zika virus in Brazil to reduce global population.
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Curiously, the one disease of the late 19th- and early 20th-century to correspond most closely with the current view of big epidemics triggering blame against ‘the other’ did produce the most widespread and frequent social violence in US history: smallpox. Yet historians have hardly recognised its social toxins, especially after the few anti-inoculation riots of the colonial period. As with cholera, smallpox produced mass revolts in which the poor and immigrants railed against health boards and municipal governments, as seen in three large riots and a series of smaller ones in Milwaukee from September 28th to December 31st, 1894, or one comprised of Mexican immigrants at Laredo, Texas in March 1899. But from the epidemic of 1881 to the second decade of the 20th century, smallpox sparked numerous grizzly acts of inhumanity against the victims of this disease. Those perpetrating the violence were white, propertied farmers and business men – ‘the better sort of citizens’ – and their targets were Amerindians and recent immigrants – Chinese, Bohemians, ‘tramps’ – but, above all, blacks. Time allows only two interconnected examples. There are many more:
April 3 [1896]. William Haley, colored, is in the Memphis hospital … He was badly beaten about the head and arms and wounded with bullets in three places. Smallpox originated in Haley’s house several months ago and for this he was whitecapped by a mob of twenty persons, clubbed with guns and shot, before the eyes of his wife and children.
The epidemic spread from Memphis to Bessemer, Alabama. A pesthouse was erected for the patients, nine tenths of whom were ‘negroes’. A mob, ‘composed of white farmers living in the neighborhood’ came at night ‘and riddled [the patients] with bullets’. Asked to justify their crime, they replied that ‘this is the best and quickest means of ridding the town of smallpox’.
Smallpox quarantine station in Hawaii, by Paul Emmert, 1853
Other epidemics of the late 19th and early 20th century had more complex alignments between perpetrators and their targets, such as the plague riots in India, which produced general strikes and crowds even larger than those of cholera riots in Russia. Indian protests, however, often had a clear political agenda. British doctors and soldiers strip-searching young Indian girls for signs of plague sparked the Bombay riot of the Julai weavers in March 1898. Soon after, 15,000 dockers, labourers and cartmen supported the protest with a general strike. Journalists and intellectuals joined in, decrying the government’s needless and abusive quarantines, body searches and destruction of homes and religious shrines. Rather than tearing Indian societies apart, the plague united groups across class and castes and Hindus with Muslims against the backward and oppressive health measures of the British.
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Not all epidemics of the modern period produced blame, hate or collective violence. Yellow Fever in the United States and the Great Influenza of 1918-20 throughout the world remained mysterious in their modes of transmission and their causal agents far longer than cholera, killed millions more and could possess frightening, disgusting signs and symptoms. Yet neither sparked large-scale collective violence or widespread blame of others, whether the impoverished or the elites. Instead, as with epidemics in antiquity, they brought societies together across race, ethnicity and class, even within contexts of rising social, political and racial tensions, as with the Yellow Fever outbreak in New Orleans in 1853, which arose on the eve of the Civil War, when regional and racial antagonisms were sharpening. The city’s blacks, believed to have had greater immunity to the disease, crossed class and racial lines to nurse stricken whites and, in turn, the white middle classes praised them for their bravery. In El Paso, Texas in October 1918, at the height of the Great Influenza, anti-Mexican sentiment had been brewing thanks to Zapata’s incursions on US soil and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet debutante ladies, for the first time in their lives, crossed into the city’s poorest Mexican neighbourhoods where influenza cases were at their highest and risked their lives, sweeping floors, setting up soup kitchens and treating the dangerously ill.
The extraordinary variety of reactions to the hazards and shocks of epidemic disease defy the widespread, one-dimensional views that have become dominant since the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Curiously, activists’ and scholars’ understanding of the psychological, social and political effects of HIV/AIDS itself began to shift in the 1990s from one that stressed hate, violence and blame to one in praise of the way in which the disease inspired volunteerism, community organisation, self-sacrifice and compassion. Instead of retelling stories of discrimination in jobs, education and housing or the homophobic pronouncements of right-wing politicians and television evangelists, the literature began to emphasise the political gains won by lesbians and gays, sex workers and, in Africa, women, and how AIDS reshaped more progressive doctor-patient relations and redefined the family. This shift, however, has yet to inspire scholars to revisit the long history of epidemics. This second, more nuanced and positive (though hardly rosy) view of AIDS forms a new template to rewind the movie reel (de rérouler à reculons), as the great French medievalist Marc Bloch once put it, for understanding the distant past from the perspective of the present.
Samuel Cohn is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow
A 16th-century drawing by Hand Baldung Grien depicts a German mercenary speaking with Death. As pandemics swept Europe, stories of hungry and vengeful undead grew in German-speaking lands and may be reflected in burial practices.
In 2014, Swiss anthropologist Amelie Alterauge was just a few days into her new job at Bern University’s Institute of Forensic Medicine in Switzerland when she was called to investigate an odd burial in a centuries-old cemetery that was being excavated ahead of a construction project. Of some 340 burials in the cemetery, one stood out: a middle-aged man, interred face-down in a neglected corner of the churchyard. “I had never seen such a burial in real life before,” says Alterauge.
Excavators found an iron knife and purse full of coins in the crook of his arm, positioned as though they had once been concealed under his clothes. The coins helped archaeologists date the body to between 1630 and 1650, around the time a series of plagues swept through that region of Switzerland. “It was like the family or the undertaker didn’t want to search the body,” Alterauge says. “Maybe he was already badly decomposed when he was buried—or maybe he had an infectious disease and nobody wanted to get too close.”
The discovery set Alterauge off on a search for more examples of face-down, or prone, burials in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Though extremely rare, such burials have been documented elsewhere—particularly in Slavic areas of Eastern Europe. They are often compared to other practices, such as mutilation or weighing bodies down with stones, that were believed to thwart vampires and the undead by preventing them from escaping their graves. But Alterauge says no one had looked systematically at the phenomenon of prone burials in medieval German-speaking areas that now constitute modern Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.
Now, in a new study published in the journal PLOS One, Alterauge’s research team reveals their analysis of nearly 100 prone burials over the course of 900 years that have been documented by archaeologists in German-speaking Europe. The data suggest a major shift in burial practices that the researchers link to deaths from plagues and a belief among survivors that victims might come back to haunt the living.
A medieval burial in a Berlin churchyard reveals a man buried face down. Prone burials increased in the later Middle Ages and may be a reaction to deaths resulting from the plague.
During the early and high Middle Ages in Europe (ca 950 to 1300), the few bodies that were buried face-down in regional graveyards were often placed at the centre of church cemeteries, or even inside the holy structures. Some of them were buried with jewelry, fine clothes and writing implements, suggesting that high-ranking nobles and priests may have chosen to be buried that way as a display of humility before God. One historical example is Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father, who reportedly asked to be buried face-down in front of a cathedral in 768 as penance for his father’s sins.
Archaeologists begin to see an increase in face-down burials in Europe by the early 1300s, however, including some on the outskirts of consecrated Christian burial grounds. This shift coincided with devastating plagues that swept across Europe beginning in 1347, killing millions across the continent.
“Something changes,” says Alterauge, who is also a doctoral student at the University of Heidelberg.
As diseases killed people faster than communities could cope, the sight and sound of decomposing bodies became a familiar, unsettling presence. Corpses would bloat and shift, and gas-filled intestines of the dead made disturbing, unexpected noises. Flesh decayed and desiccated in inexplicable ways, making hair and nails seem to grow as the flesh around them shrivelled.
Decaying “bodies move, they make smacking sounds. It might seem as if they’re eating themselves and their burial shrouds,” Alterauge says.
A 14th-century drawing depicts the burial of plague victims. German tales tell of nachzehrer (loosely translated as corpse devourers), and wiedergänger (“those who walk again”), which may have been inspired by mass deaths resulting from the plague.
As medieval Europeans tried to explain what they were seeing and hearing, they might have seized on ideas about the undead already circulating in Slavic communities of Eastern Europe: “We don’t have [the concept of] vampires in Germany,” Alterauge says, “but there’s this idea of corpses which move around” that is imported into western Europe from Slavic areas to the east not long after the first plague outbreaks take place in the mid-1300s.
Before the 1300s, medieval stories in German-speaking Europe described helpful ghosts returning to warn or help their loved ones. But in an age of epidemics they took on a different shape: revenants, or the walking dead.
“This shift to evil spirits takes place around 1300 or 1400,” says Matthias Toplak, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved with the study.
Turning to medieval folklore for clues, Alterauge and her co-authors found tales of nachzehrer, loosely translated as corpse devourers: restless, hungry corpses that consumed themselves and their burial shrouds, and drained the life force from their surviving relatives in the process.
“Historical sources say nachzehrer resulted from unusual or unexpected death,” Alterauge says. “There was a theory someone became a nachzehrer if he was the first of the community to die during an epidemic.”
In pandemic-era Europe, the legend had a compelling logic: As the victim’s close relatives began developing symptoms and collapsing within days of the funeral, it must have seemed as if they were being cursed from the grave.
“The background of all these supernatural beliefs must be the sudden deaths of several individuals from one society,” says Toplak. “It makes sense that people blamed supernatural spirits and took measures to prevent the dead from returning.”
Equally feared at the time were wiedergänger, or “those who walk again”—corpses capable of emerging from the grave to stalk their communities. “When you did something wrong, couldn’t finish your business in life because of an unexpected death, or have to atone or avenge something you might become a wiedergänger,” Alterauge explains.
The new study reveals an increase in the number of bodies placed face-down on the edges of Christian cemeteries between the 14th and 17th centuries. The researchers argue that, in this part of Europe at least, burying people face-down was the preferred way to prevent malevolent corpses from returning to do harm.
Other archaeologists say there could be other explanations. In a world ravaged by deadly pandemics, burying the community’s first victim face-down might have been symbolic, a desperate attempt to ward off further calamity.
“If someone got really sick, it must have seemed like a punishment from God,” says Petar Parvanov, an archaeologist at Central European University in Budapest who was not involved in the study. “Prone burials were a way to point out something to the people at the funeral—somehow the society allowed too much sin, so they want to show penance.”
The next step, says archaeologist Sandra Lösch, co-author of the paper and head of the department of physical anthropology at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Bern University, would be to look at the face-down burials to find if there are clearer links with disease outbreaks. By analysing the ancient DNA of individuals in prone burials, for example, it might be possible to sequence specific plague microbes, while isotopic analysis of victims’ bones and teeth “might show traces of a diet or geographic origin different from the rest of the population,” offering another explanation for their out-of-the-ordinary burials.
Because local excavation records are often unpublished, Alterauge hopes more evidence will emerge in the years to come as archaeologists re-examine old evidence or look at unusual medieval burials with a fresh perspective. “I definitely think there are more examples out there,” she says.
This extraordinary helmet was buried with its Anglo-Saxon owner, an elite warrior or possibly even a king, at Sutton Hoo in the early 600s A.D.
Archaeologists can be a careful bunch. They hedge their bets, question the data at every turn, and tend to spurn any hint of sensationalism. But bring up the ancient burial mounds of Sutton Hoo in southeast England, and even the most circumspect scholar will spout superlatives. Magnificent! Monumental! Unparalleled!
In 1939, archaeologists discovered a 1,400-year-old Anglo-Saxon burial at the site that included an entire ship, as well as a dizzyingly rich cache of grave goods. The spectacular find changed historians’ understanding of early medieval Britain, says Sue Brunning, the curator who cares for the now legendary artifacts at the British Museum. “It transformed everything in a stroke.” (Read more about who was buried at Sutton Hoo.)
The film The Dig retells the story of the Sutton Hoo excavation from the perspectives of landowner Edith Pretty (played by Carey Mulligan) and archaeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes).
Eighty-two years later, the Sutton Hoo ship burial is back in the public eye thanks to The Dig, a new Netflix movie starring Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, and Lily James. But in the early seventh century A.D., when the last spade of dirt was tossed over the Anglo-Saxon warrior and his treasures, the practice of burying the dead with piles of bling was falling out of fashion. Within a century of Sutton Hoo, most English burials contained little more than decaying bodies. What caused the shift?
“Humans had been burying people in ships for centuries and millennia,” says Brunning. The same went for grave goods. In early medieval Europe, people were rarely buried without at least some of the things they held dear, from beads to coins, horse harnesses, and more.
A photo from the original Sutton Hoo excavation shows the remains of the wooden ship that was buried in the earth of southeast England some 1,400 years ago.
The Sutton Hoo cache was unearthed by Basil Brown, an untrained excavator hired by landowner Edith Pretty, who was curious about what lay beneath the barrows on her Suffolk property near the River Deben. Over a series of excavations, Brown slowly unearthed 263 precious objects buried in the 80-foot-long Anglo-Saxon ship. The opulent finds, made of materials ranging from iron to gold, bone, garnet, and feathers, included a human-faced helmet, delicately tooled shoulder clasps, household goods, and weapons—many with links to far-flung places like Syria and Sri Lanka.
When the Sutton Hoo artifacts were discovered, they instantly changed historians’ image of the era once called the Dark Ages. The grave goods were exquisitely crafted out of materials from around the world and suggested that the early medieval society portrayed in epic poems like Beowulf might be more reality than myth. “That sort of thing was previously thought to be largely fantasy,” Brunning says.
But the practice of furnishing graves had already started to die out by the time Sutton Hoo’s unnamed Anglo-Saxon elite breathed his last. Between the sixth and eighth centuries A.D., graves in England became simpler and sparser.
In an attempt to understand how and why the practice died out, archaeologist Emma Brownlee, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Girton College who specialises in early medieval burial practices, dug into archaeological records that document more than 33,000 early medieval graves. Her analysis, recently published in the journal Antiquity, covered 237 cemeteries in northwestern Europe, the majority of them in England.
Using descriptions and drawings of tens of thousands of graves excavated over the past 60 years, Brownlee painstakingly calculated the average number of objects per grave, down to the last bead. She also gathered other important information, such as how long the cemeteries were in use, and what the most reliable dating techniques suggested about their age.
Then the number crunching began. Her map shows England abandoning grave goods as early as the mid-sixth century. By the time the Anglo-Saxon warrior was interred around 625, furnished burials were well on their way to abandonment.
“After the seventh century, nobody is being buried with things in their graves,” says Brownlee.
Since her data skews toward England, Brownlee cautions that English people didn’t necessarily lead the way. Nonetheless, her data shows that England finished its turn toward simpler burials by the 720s, while the rest of northwestern Europe took another half-century to follow suit.
The evolving burial practices coincided with a time of profound change in England. Once under Roman rule, England became independent around 410 and faced wave after wave of conquerors, including the Germanic Angles and Saxons.
Between 400 and 600, these pagan powers coalesced into kingdoms that converted to Christianity in the seventh century. The most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms survived the Viking invasion that began in the ninth century. They went on to unite as the Kingdom of England in 927 and form the basis of the modern British monarchy.
The warrior interred with the ship is thought to have been an Anglo-Saxon king, perhaps Rædwald of East Anglia, who ruled a kingdom that included Suffolk between about 599 and 624. Dates on coins buried at the site coincide with his reign, and the quality and value of the grave goods suggest a person of extreme influence.
So, too, does the existence of the grave itself. “The very act of dragging a ship up from the river downhill, digging a hole big enough to contain the ship, and building the burial chamber is almost like a piece of theatre,” says Brunning. “We can imagine it involved huge groups of people. The funeral itself would have been an enormous occasion, and the [barrow] was so enormous, it could probably be seen from the river below when people sailed by.”
The individual interred at Sutton Hoo was buried with his sword. Recent research by British Museum curator Sue Brunning suggests that the weapon's Anglo-Saxon owner was left handed.
Archaeologists think Sutton Hoo was also a burying ground for the royal’s relatives, who were laid to rest in about 17 other mounds near the presumed king. Another, smaller ship was also found at the site.
Political power might be the key to the change in burial practices, says archaeologist Heinrich Härke, an early medieval burial specialist and a professor at HSE University in Moscow who was not involved in the research. As leaders across England began to consolidate power and form kingdoms during the sixth century, Härke says, it may have become less important for people to display their power and bury such ornate goods.
Another early medieval archaeologist, Andrew Reynolds of University College London, has a theory of his own: The rise of kings impoverished everyone who wasn’t among the upper crust.
“English royal families’ increasing grip on resources and land dealt the first death blow to the freedoms previously enjoyed by small scale communities,” he says. “Wealth became polarised.”
Then there’s the rise of Christianity. As the new religion took hold across Europe, burial mounds went out of style and royal resting places migrated to churchyards or tombs inside churches and cathedrals. The number of grave goods declined, too. From the eighth century on, royals and non-elites alike were usually buried with nothing more than shrouds, personal items of jewellery, or Christian ornaments like crosses.
Reynolds sees the Sutton Hoo burial as part of that transition, especially since it seems to have been the burial place of just one Anglo-Saxon family, rather than part of a larger cemetery.
A view across the frost-covered burial mounds at Sutton Hoo on a dawn morning. Part of the burial field discovered near the famed ship has been left untouched for future generations of archaeologists to explore with new questions and new technologies.
“All of the high-status burials from this period are situated away from the burial grounds used by people of lesser status,” he says. “What we are looking at here is an attempt by people who controlled access to high-status goods, and who almost certainly called the shots locally, to distinguish themselves from others, not just by the acquisition of ostentatious items, but also spatially, to set themselves apart.”
Brownlee, on the other hand, thinks increased trade and connection across western Europe, not monarchical power grabs, explain the trend toward bare burials. “The change in most burial practices happened through communication with people of a similar social status,” she theorises, citing sociological and linguistic models that show cultural change spreads most quickly when it comes from peers.
Perhaps the Sutton Hoo burial was rooted in royal fear, says Brunning. “There are lots of theories about whether this is a reaction to the arrival of Christianity—one last hoorah to the pre-Christian way of doing things,” she says. “It might be a sign of insecurity rather than strength, a symbolic gesture that covers over some rather insecure feelings.”
Short of any smoking-gun evidence, it remains tough for scholars to tease out exactly how burial practices of the past fit into broader societal change. But an unexcavated portion of the Sutton Hoo site offers a glimmer of hope for answering that question, at least for medieval England.
After Brown’s initial dig, two other excavation projects continued exploring the site until the early 1990s. But part of the burial field near the famed ship was “left for future generations with new questions and new techniques,” a National Trust spokesperson told the East Anglian Daily Times in 2019.
For now, researchers must make do with what’s already been dug up by Brown and his successors—or, like Brownlee, try to tease new insights out of old data. In the meantime, Brunning and her curatorial colleagues will painstakingly preserve the artifacts found in the barrow—objects that speak to an era of kingship and pageantry that historians dismissed as mythical before Brown’s discovery.
Regardless of the reason behind the Sutton Hoo burial and its increasingly sparse counterparts, it’s always worth thinking about how and why people of the past buried their dead, and what they did (or didn’t) include.
“Graves are one of the few parts of the archaeological record that were deliberately put into the ground,” says Brownlee. “Almost everything else is accidental.” Each item, she says, “was put there with a specific purpose. Rediscovering that purpose is part of the challenge.”
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