Scientists Solve Puzzle of Death of Pericles

Scientists solve puzzle of death of Pericles
Sarah Boseley, health editor
Tuesday January 24, 2006
The Guardian

The cause of the plague of Athens in 430BC, which devastated the city and killed up to one-third of the population, including its leader, Pericles, was typhoid fever, scientists believe. Doctors and historians have long speculated about the nature of the disease, which precipitated the end of the golden age of Athens, from the account given by Thucydides. Ebola fever, anthrax, tuberculosis and lassa fever have been suggested as candidates.

"The profound disagreement on the cause of the plague has been due to the lack of definite microbiological or palaeopathological evidence," write Manolis Papagrigorakis of the dental school at the University of Athens, and colleagues. But the discovery of a mass grave dating from the time of the epidemic appears to have solved the mystery.

The Greek scientists, writing in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, describe how they removed teeth from the human remains and analysed the DNA they contained to find traces of the infection which killed so many Athenians trapped in a city surrounded on land by Spartans and relying on its navy's control of the sea through the port of Piraeus.

The mass burial site was located in the Kerameikos ancient cemetery in Athens and was excavated in the mid-1990s. In it were at least 150 bodies interned in more than five layers, many with their heads towards the circumference of the pit, but those on top "virtually heaped one upon the other," they write. The "hasty and impious manner of burial" as well as the age of the few burial offerings linked the site with the plague of Athens during the first years of the Peloponnesian war.

The scientists took three teeth at random from the remains in the pit and extracted DNA from the dental pulp. They compared it with sequences from plague, typhus, anthrax, tuberculosis, cowpox and cat-scratch disease, and found a match with typhoid fever. Many of the symptoms Thucydides described are consistent with typhoid fever, including fever, rash and diarrhoea. Others, such as the rapid onset of the illness, are not.