This document discusses the influence of Thucydides' account of the plague of Athens on the genre of plague literature. It argues that Thucydides established tropes about the social effects of plague that were echoed in later works, including detailed descriptions of symptoms. Works on later plagues like the Black Death and Great Plague of London incorporated these elements. The document also discusses how accounts of the 1720 plague of Marseilles took on increased medical authority by being written by physicians, while still including the social commentary established as a hallmark of plague literature by Thucydides.

1. In the first sentence in his seminal work on the Great Plague of Marseilles Carrière
reflects that “There is only Thucydides”.1 Since the day in 1968 when he penned that, Marseilles,
Ville Morte has remained the primary chronological source on the outbreak of 1720 available to
both historians and the public at large. Despite larger changes to the discipline of history, it has
remained mostly unchallenged, and indeed reprinted on two separate occasions. It remains a very
solid work of history, even as some Marxist elements of its argument can now be dissected and
disparaged. And indeed, I do not seek to challenge it as a whole very greatly, but rather call
attention to the model he draws upon, that indeed ALL popular works on epidemics draw upon –
Thucydides. This Greek author, writing in the 5th century BCE on the outbreak of disease in
Athens during the Peloponnesian war, wrote the first and greatest exemplar of a genre now
known as plague literature. The tropes and themes he established shaped not only how the
western popular consciousness views outbreaks of disease, but academia as well. Carrière's work
remains the “best” in the field because his work IS Thucydides, taken to a logical and well
researched extreme. Historians seeking to fill in the gap left by him in the past 60 years would do
well to reexamine the structures that underlie his work – as well as their own.
In the modern era, disease histories typically take on one of two forms – a biomedical
approach, cataloging the specific causes of infection, how it spread, its symptoms, and its
mortality rates, and a social approach, examining the effect of an outbreak on a population and
its societal and cultural institutions. An example of the first can be seen in works such as
Anthony Alberg's extensive research focusing on the epidemiology of lung cancer.2 Typically
1 Charles Carrière, Marcel Courdurié, and Ferréol Rebuffat, Marseille, Ville Morte: La Peste de 1720, (Marseille:
A. Robert, 1968), 9.
2 Alberg, Anthony J., and Jonathan M. Samet. 2003. "Epidemiology of Lung Cancer." Chest 123, 21S. Academic
Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed January 14, 2014).

2. however, the two are blended together; popular modern “treatises” on the effect of disease on
human history, seen in works like Karlen's Man and Microbes and the overarching
environmental argument of Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, go out of their way to
demonstrate the biological origins of different kinds of diseases. Some are universally typical,
products of our hunter-gatherer roots, such as cardiovascular disease or malaria, the results of a
fatty, high meat diet or exposure to the warm, humid elements where mosquitoes thrive. 3 Others
however, usually depicted as the real killers of humanity, are the results of an upswing in
population density – the result of agriculture, cities, and thus, western civilization as we know it.
4 It was these same diseases - smallpox, typhus, and yes, bubonic plague – that ravaged Europe
until the modern era as well as depopulating the New World by as much as 95%.5 These popular
works do agree with the more biomedical of epidemiological studies, but their perspectives
contain bizarre strains of Darwinism. It might not have been our inherent moral superiority or
better evolved brains that allowed us to triumph over the native, but victory was still essentially
“inevitable” thanks to a byproduct of our particular route to evolution. However, the point of this
paper isn't the contingencies or lack thereof of history, but rather Thucydides' place in such
works. While the biological facet of plague writing is often thought of as a wholly modern
phenomena – the result of the development and discovery of modern germ theory in the 19th
century, it is also true that as long as disease has existed, someone have made systematic and
detailed observations upon them. Lists of symptoms make up a full chapter of Thucydides' work;
today, based on his detailed descriptions, it is even possible to identify it as typhoid fever – a
3 Arno Karlen, Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times, (Simon & Schuster,
1996), 113.
4 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,(Chicago: W. W. Norton & Company,
1999), 222.
5 "La catastrophe démographique" , L'Histoire n°322, July–August 2007, p. 17.

3. diagnosis further backed up by the post-mortem examinations of plague victims.67 Biomedical
descriptions of the disease, even in the 5th century BCE when biomedicine did not even properly
exist, added an air of legitimacy to the often inevitable argument about social history. If anything,
19th century developments have only led to increasing reliance upon it as a crutch.
This can be seen in a fairly unbroken chain of authors since the time of Thucydides.
Procopius, a Byzantine author well trained to follow the classical Greek school, described the
symptoms of what turned out to be a quite different disease in a similarly, almost clinical light.8
This disease of course, was the first known pandemic of what would come to be known as the
Bubonic Plague, infamous for the marks it left upon European culture and society even as other
diseases, such as smallpox, remained more virulent for far longer. Procopius' detailed description
matches modern observations on the plague, and recent studies have conclusively proven its link
with its medieval and modern cousins. 9 The disease had a highly public nature, connected with
its ability to infect and kill all segments of a population quickly, in a highly painful and clearly
evident manner. Compare this to diseases such as cancer and AIDS that lie latent for often
months or even years in the victim until death, for which constant “awareness” campaigns must
be raised10. Procopius' account might have been the first, but its highly public face made various
outbreaks of the Bubonic Plague a popular subgenre in the emerging field of plague literature.
6 Thucydides,The Peloponnesian War, 2.49
7 Manolis Papagrigorakis, Christos Yapijakis, Philippos Synodinos,and Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani, "DNA
examination of ancient dentalpulp incriminates typhoid fever as a probable cause of the Plague of Athens,"
Journal of InfectiousDiseases, 10, no. 3 (2006): 206-214,
8 Procopius, and H.B. Dewing, History of the Wars, Books I and II, (Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1954), 451-
473.
9 Wiechmann I, Grupe G. Detection of Yersinia pestis DNA in two early medieval skeletal finds from Aschheim
(Upper Bavaria, 6th century A.D.)" Am J Phys Anthropol 2005 Jan;126(1) 48-55
10 Susan Sontag, AIDS as Metaphor, (AnchorBooks, Doubleday, 1988), 140-142.

4. These were followed by still popular accounts made by Boccaccio and Daniel Defoe, on
the infamous outbreaks of the Black Death of 1347-1352 and The Great Plague of London of
1665. What is interesting about both cases is that they are not considered “historical” works as
Procopius' and Thucydides' were. Boccacio's Decamaron is a seminal work of the early Italian
Renaissance, a collection of stories that influenced Chaucer and later Shakespeare. Defoe's
Journal of the Plague Year is framed as a journal kept during the plague, as Samuel Pepys' was
in reality, but in fact written fifty years afterwards. Nonetheless, both works are often treated as
historical sources by modern sources much like the Plague of Athens in Thucydides' History of
the Peloponessian War. Both describe in great detail the symptoms and virulence of the Bubonic
plague. Defoe even takes it one step further by listing systematically what neighborhoods were
afflicted first and in what order the rest of London came to be infected. Amazing are his tables
upon tables of body counts, listed by parish.11It is here that we encounter another tenet of popular
plague history; its verisimilitude with fiction.
History and fiction are strange cousins: histoire in French, after all, refers to both.
However normally the difference is fairly discernible; one offers an account of events that
actually occurred, and the other investigates an imaginary construct of the author's making.
However the two can overlap quite frequently, especially in the realm of popular history, and
nowhere is this more evident than in plague literature. History, while based on real events, is
subject to the author's lens as much as fiction, and fiction can chose to draw upon historical
happenings. This is why, as closely related as Procopius' and Thucydides' text was, Boccacio's
prologue, introducing the plague-infected frame story in which the tales come to be told, follows
him even more exactly, describing in great detail the same breakdown of social customs and
11 Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year, (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1895), 6.

5. relationships.12 Tropes cross over readily between the two. Defoe's Journal offers an increasing
elaboration upon the structure Thucydides offered. Symptoms and death counts are not only
recorded, but the responses of all levels of society, including the government to the Plague are
are offered and described systematically and completely. The process of quarantine, the only
successful pre-modern action one could take against outbreak, is discussed in great detail, as both
a narrative device recording the isolation of the tragic victims, and as simple historical fact.13 In
fact, while Thucydides IS plague literature in that it created the various tropes and themes that
the vast majority afterwords later underscored, many have called Defoe's Journal one of the first
modern style histories on the subject – despite the fact that it is clearly fictional. 14 In fact,
Carrière's seminal work on the Plague of Marseilles in many ways mirrors it in terms of its
narrative construction and reliance on maps and statistical detail. This sort of observational detail,
whether it be found in biomedical accuracy or demographic analysis, adds an air of legitimacy to
these texts that often straddle between history and novella, and it can all be traced to that initial
terse, but objective description of the Plague of Athens by Thucydides.
However, Thucydides' greatest contribution to the format of plague literature, both
ancient, medieval, and modern, is the almost single minded focus on the theme of social chaos.
Disease is not just portrayed as a physical illness, but a social one. When it strikes, inevitably the
same formulas pop up. Families collapse as fathers, brothers, and servants either flee or become
sick themselves. 15 Funeral rites are ignored. 16 Licentiousness prevails. 17 These are seen in
12 Giovanni Boccacio, and John Payne, Stories of Boccacio (The Decameron), (Philidelphia: G. Barrie, 1881), 3-4.
13 Defoe, 156
14 F. Bastian, "Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered," The Review of English Studies, 16, no. 62 (1965):
151-173,
15 Thucydides,2.51

6. Procopius, Defoe, and most famously Boccaccio. There may be little doubt that indeed these
events occurred, but it betrays how in the tradition of such works, starting with Thucydides, there
is an obsession with how disease is like a macabre carnival, revealing weaknesses in society as it
strains against the excesses of death and decay. This interest is still vivid today, especially in
popular works like World War Z, which takes on the form of a historical collection of accounts
of a totally imaginary zombie apocalypse. Each story examines a particular facet of epidemic
ravaging, and often the focus is on how the inadequacies of modern society become the devices
of its near failure under a near apocalyptic scenario of outbreak. Once again, the biomedical
angle is there, but rarely do works on the plague focus on anything beyond the scope of societal
commentary.
So where does the Plague of Marseilles fit into this scope? It took place in 1720 in the
famed Old Regime France of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot. It turned out to be the last
major outbreak in Western Europe, but no one at the time knew that. Plague literature, a
somewhat popular genre in the past, exploded in the aftermath. Post plague France saw a
massive increase in the sheer number of volumes purporting to describe the plague, its
progression, and its cures.18 Moreover, where such works, usually written by physicians, priests,
and public health officials, had mostly been written in Latin before, more than ever they were
published in the vernacular for the emerging literate populations of the cities. London saw a
similar fascination with this particular outbreak. A popular English poem circulated, condemning
16 Ibid; 2.52
17 Ibid; 2.53
18 Colin Jones,"Plague and its Metaphors in Early Modern France," Representations,53 (1996): 99,

7. France for its many faults and sins and citing the outbreak as a punishment.19 Interestingly
enough, commentaries on the disease were offered based off the notes taken on the outbreak in
London 50 years later. And, two years afterward, Defoe published his Journal of the Plague Year.
In the era of the philosophes, plague was more likely to attract the attention of the popular
audience.
Of the 264 surviving manuscripts written on the plague between 1500 and 1770, sixty of
them alone were known to have been written in the immediate aftermath of the 1720 outbreak.20
Many more might have even existed. Not surprisingly, given the phenomenon observed in other
works of plague literature, doctors and surgeons outnumbered other types of authors four to one.
Often, these authors also produced other forms of credentials, meant to be impressive to the
potential reading audience – citing their membership of the Academie de medecine, or
underscoring their association with the prestigious medical university at Montpellier. 21 What
sets the authors of the Marseilles plague tracts apart from the other authors analyzed is this
increased reliance on such author-experts. As far as is known, Thucydides was no doctor.
However, as discussed previously, all texts within the genre of plague literature contain a certain
degree of medicalizing to give the text a sense of reality and legitimacy. However, those written
in early modern France tended to take it to the next level. The reason for this is most likely
related to market forces; such “accounts” of the plague, read far beyond the scope of the medical
world, were sold to an audience not only curious what had occurred, but wondering how to
prevent or cure the disease if it should happen to themselves. Thus, many of these texts are less
19 Christopher Pitt, The Plague of Marseilles: A Poem, (London: J. Bateman & J. Nicks, 1721).
20 Jones; 103
21 Ibid 105

8. chronologies of outbreaks and more lists of cures. Chicoyneau's Traité de la Peste, for example,
written in the immediate aftermath of the plague and distributed by the command of the King's
regent throughout the realm, only briefly describes the passing of events in Marseilles. The rest
of the text is devoted to categorizing different levels of specific cases of plague, its symptoms, its
progression, and potential preventative measures and cures. I would not go as far as to say that it
is the typical text, but it is something of an exemplar for the genre; it is very thorough, systematic,
and logical, and thus everything a scared Parisian bourgeois could want. Moreover, the author
Francois Chicoyneau was one of the most respected anatomists and physicians of the faculty of
the University of Montpellier, and had moreover had gone to Marseilles personally to treat
victims of the epidemic. Essentially, he was everything the potential lectorat could want, and a
large number of copies of his work survive accordingly.
Another popular work published in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak was the
Relation de la peste of Jean-Baptiste Bertrand. Similar to Chicoyneau, he was a physician who
himself had treated victims in Marseilles and had contracted a near deadly case of the disease in
the process. Unlike Chicoyneau's work, though, Bertrand's oeuvre is a full blown narrative
history, following the progression of the disease from start to finish, and in particular focusing on
the roles of the physicians in it. Interestingly, he unleashes a heavy critique upon Chicoyneau,
criticizing his stance that the outbreak of Marseilles was, in fact, not the plague, and was rather
caused by a combination of bad air and bad eating. “The physicians of Montpelier are the sole
force I must complain about,” he rails in his preface.22 Bertrand was one of the early proponents
of contagion theory, after all, and proposed that a certain “pestilential yeast” was the cause of
22 Jean Baptiste Bertrand Bertrand, Relation historique de la peste de Marseille en 1720, (Cologne: Pierre Marteau,
1721). 6,

9. such infections that indeed could be spread from person to person.23 The contagionist debate was
still raging throughout much of the 18th century, and while it became clear over time, partially as
a result of the Plague of Marseilles, that person-to-person contact was indeed more likely the
mechanism of spread, during the outbreak the debate still ran hot. In any case, Bertrand's work
was just as popular, if not more so, than Chicoyneau's.24 It is possible that this is a sign of the
greater adherence of urban Frenchmen to emerging contagion theory, but it could just as likely
be that the two works offer very different perspectives on the same event; one as a curative, and
the other as a historical account.
And, especially evident in Bertrand's piece, while still latent in Chicoyneau's, is the
overarching influence of Thucydides. Bertrand begins his work by tracing the history of the
plagues that have struck Marseilles, proving thus that this, the twentieth, is by the very nature of
the fact the most severe.25 This is exactly the sort of sensationalist narrative device created to
appeal to a large, gullible audience desiring both information and theatrics, the sort of narrative
melodrama that Thucydides established as the norm. His awareness of the Greek author's tropes
isn't exhibited so much by his use of them as by his subversion of them. Rather than describing
how the institutions of society broke down as the members of it – fathers, brothers, friends and
servants – fled, he focuses on how the preservation of such institutions caused death. The father
stayed with the sick mother, who continued to try to nurse her child, and all three died as a
result.26 The good who observe the rules of society, die young, and with them, apparently so did
23 Ibid 331
24 J. Ehrard, "Opinions médicales en France au XVIIIe siècle: La peste et l'idée de contagion," re, Sciences
Sociales,12, no. 1 (1957): 51,
25 Bertrand 6
26 Ibid 8

10. a large number of physicians Its a matter of the public record that a great number of the doctors,
surgeons, and apothecaries of Marseilles died in the process of attending to the sick. One of these,
indeed, was Bertrand, who fell sick but did not die. It was partially for this reason that the
Montpellier physicians were sent for. But whereas the initial physicians are treated by Bertrand
as heroes, attempting to warn the city before it was too late about the destruction that was to
occur, the Montpellier physicians that followed them proved themselves incompetent, and even
malicious.27 Plague brings out the best and worst, destroying the better while leaving the dregs
behind.
With Chicoyneau, Thucydides' influence is much more latent. After all, this particular
tract almost ignores entirely the matter of the course of the disease in the city It is not a history
book. However, his description of the plague itself is quite illuminating. Throughout his letters,
and indeed in the text he penned in 1721, he often refers to the plague as “ce terrible mal”, a
phrase that roughly translates to “this terrible evil” but stands in harsh contrast to Bertrand's
insistence upon “contagion”.2829. Moreover, this distemper he did not call the Plague but rather
said it was generally referred to as such. One of the things Bertrand complains about in his work
about the physicians of Montpellier was that they willfully spread incorrect information about
the nature of this disease. Approaching the council, they convinced the city government that the
plague was not plague at all “but rather a malignancy of bad air and bad diet” made worse by
people's fear.30
27 Ibid 258
28 François Chicoyneau, Relation de la peste de Marseille,(Marseilles: 1721). 2
29 Letter 1 from M. Chicoyneau to M. Bezac, September 17, 1720, H565, Archives de faculté de medecine de
Montpelier, Université de Montpelier 1
30 Bertrand 89

11. Indeed, this is supported by the official announcement spread throughout town during the
height of the pestilence, recorded by Bertrand in his work31 And he questions why they refused
to see the truth, that “everyone” he records “perceives to be true”, especially after the treatment
of so many and the dissection of the cadavers of the victims.32 Indeed, this is a great question.
After all, it was one of Chicoyneau's assistiants, the surgeon Anton Deidier, who proved that
inserting the bile of the victims into dogs would result in death in a very similar manner.33 It
should seem evident, then, even to a physician of the old school like Chicoyneau that there was
something contagious spreading from person to person. However, this was not the case.
Williamson surmised that, while Deidier himself later retracted his belief in the plague as just a
common malignancy, the experiment first confirmed to him precisely what Chicoyneau – that the
disease was not contagious, and caused by the same bad food that both men and dogs shared,
which the injected bile made them more susceptible to.34
Indeed many doubts were raised about Chicoyneau's theories, and, according to Bertrand,
most of Marseilles disbelieved him. Moreover, he himself might not have believed it, as his letter
and report to the Regent suggests. To Versailles, he called it a “pestilential fever” or “some sort
of plague.”35 In his very own letters, he himself is inclined occasionally to use the word
31 Ibid 96-97
32 Ibid 323-324
33 Antoine Deidier, Experiencessur la bile et les cadavres des pestiferés, (Zurich: 1722).
34 Raymond Williamson, "The Plague of Marseilles and the Experiments of Anton Deidier on its transmission,"
Medical History, 2, no. 4 (1958): 237-252
35 Jean-Baptiste Bertrand, Anne Plumptre A Historical Relation of the Plague at Marseilles in the year I720,
London, 1805 Appendix 2, 97-98

12. “contagion”.36 This would seem to imply that he himself often questioned his decidedly more
conservative appraisal of the situation. No matter his wavering beliefs, however, his suggested
cures remain the same - a good diet, clean water, and a better environment. This trifecta can be
seen in his letters to Montpellier during his plague tenure, in his treatise published shortly after
the fact, and the monstrous volume he published fifty years after the fact, as surgeon of the king.
Readers might recognize his suggested regimen to prevent predisposition to the plague as,
in fact, fairly reasonable and well thought out. After all, while it is proven that the contagionists
of 18th century France had the right idea, contagion theory is not germ theory. All it postulated
was that there was some vehicle of transmission of a disease from person to person, in contrast to
past beliefs that were heavily reliant upon environment and personal predisposition. However,
technology had not yet advanced to the rate that theory had. In 1720, simply knowing the causes
probably would not have helped save lives. Chicoyneau's advice, on the other hand, based on the
more conservative school of thought, essentially prescribed the only useful advice that could be
given in an era before an understanding of microbes and antibiotics: eat well and maintain your
good health as best you can. Of course, pro-contagionists like Bertrand reviled this approach.
Jean Astruc, another physician of Montpellier who actually supported contagionist theory,
condemned Chicoyneau for instilling false confidence in people, resurrecting the daily life, trade,
and all the direct human engagement that those entail before the plague had run its course,
exposing even more to disease.37
How could this be understood within the confines of Thucydides, though? Chicoyneau's
description of plague, both in his letters and his Relation lack the traditional structure and tropes
36 Letter 1, September 17, 1720, H565
37 Ulysse Coste, F. Chicoyneau et la peste de 1720,(Paris: V.A. DelaHaye et Cie, 1880), 12.

13. originating in the Plague of Athens, both being more analytical and “medical” in their outlook,
but how this Greek author shaped his viewpoint of epidemics is still highly visible. Thirty years
after the outbreak, Chicoyneau wrote his magnum opus, the Traité des causes et des accidens de
la peste, which pursued a historic reflection back on the events while defending his course of
action. Like Bertrand, he begins his an account with a record of all the epidemics that had struck
Marseilles. Unlike him, however, he begins, rather singularly, with the Plague of Athens – which
was neither Bubonic Plague nor virulent in Marseilles. By doing so, he is making everything but
a direct statement that his work follows in the footsteps of Thucydides. While we only see hints
in his letters of social disorder mimicking the pestilential, the Traité dramatizes the collapse,
adopting the same language as Boccacio to show how people abandoned one another, including
their children, and the streets lay empty.38
Thirty years after events, he still credits an unhealthy environment and unhealthy living
over contagion, but he also credits fear as a facilitator.39 That is to say, when he states that the
people were “sick with fear” it was not a metaphor, but a fact, as it increased the likelihood of
one catching the disease. So, if plague caused a well ordered realm to fall into chaos and
paranoia, it was therefore the physician's job to fix it, to “treat” it as a sickness. In this regards,
Chicoyneau saw himself not only as a doctor, but as a restorer of order. Emerging research has
further substantiated that his viewpoint was not that uncommon; the king and his advisers often
used public health initiatives such as quarantine to exert authority in an otherwise fairly
independent, newly reincorporated city.40 Chicoyneau, a Montpellierain doctor sent by the King's
38 François Chicoyneau, Traité des causes, des accidens,et de la cure de la Peste, (Paris: Pierre-Jean Mariette,
1745), 12.
39 Ibid 323
40 Junko Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore:

14. royal physician to appease the Regent, could have seen restoring order as equally part of his
mission as restoring the sick. His measures to allay fears, prescribe reasonable sounding
preventative measures, and send people back on the streets to reinvigorate the moribund daily
life of Marseilles all follow as logical solutions to what he sees as a social disease.
When we move from a biological to a more social perspective on disease, we have seen
how even cures and preventative measures can be charged with a social or political motive.
Within this same schema, cause carries an even heavier implied judgement. Even today, with the
advances of biomediecine revealing the real origins of such epidemic diseases, in the popular
conscience, “cause” is “blame” by any other name. The clearest example of this is HIV/AIDS,
often called the Gay disease or linked to a murky bestiality-filled African past. Both judgments
were based on fact; indeed HIV was more prevalent in the homosexual community and did
originate in Africa, but both statements reveal underlying cultural homophobia and xenophobia.
Thucydides did this as well, and popularized it for the next two thousand five hundred years. In
his time, diseases were often either attributed to angry deities or stresses placed on the humors of
the body. The Plague of Athens came in the midst of the Peloponessian war, which many
aristocrats like Thucydides disliked because it was prolonged by the rabble-rousing, democratic
process. The final chapters of this account depict the plague as a sign that the gods were angry
with Athens for this war, and that it was a sign that the Spartans would prosper. After all, the
plague did not afflict their territories.41 It's assigned origins in Ethiopia might imply a certain
xenophobia.42
Johns Hopkins University, ) 123
41 Thucydides 2.53
42 Thucydides 2.48

15. However, the most interesting aspect of his description of the causes is his description of
the vast majority of the sick, “Besides the present affliction, the reception of the country people
and of their substance into the city oppressed both them and much more the people themselves
that so came in. For having no houses but dwelling at that time of the year in stifling booths, the
mortality was now without all form; and dying men lay tumbling one upon another in the streets,
and men half-dead about every conduit through desire of water.”43 It thus seems that many of the
victims were refugees from the countryside, resented by the city for straining resources during a
time of war and siege. Did their squalor, in Thucydides' mind, make them more susceptible to
disease? His objectivity in portraying the events makes it difficult to say, but that he thought to
mention it at all suggests that he either wanted to implicate that, or another direct effect of the
war, into their cause.
However, Chicoyneau does say them. He clearly labels those struck with poverty as the
ones most susceptible to disease, not only because they live in the area releasing the “bad air”,
but because they do not take care of themselves. After all, as Chicoyneau asserts, he and his
fellow doctors eat multiple times a day and they have not gotten sick.44 His apparent naivité
aside, it is difficult to tell how the physician feels about his patients. He calls them “poor
wretches”, an obvious statement of pity, but also a potentially dehumanizing one. What might
also be indicative is his description of anatomy show he performed. Now, reference is made to
their dissection of some of the victims to determine a cause, but he clearly describes a live air
show “to demonstrate how sobriety, good food, and moderation” aided by one's “disposition and
43 Thucydides 2.52
44 Letter 3 from M. Chicoyneau to M. Bezac, October 23, 1720, H565, Archives de faculté de medecine de
Montpelier, Université de Montpelier 1

16. temperament” could prevent the plague.45 As his subjects were victims of the plague, one would
assume that such dissections would demonstrate how they themselves did not follow this
regimen and died for their troubles. Research on anatomy shows in France has been minimal, but
it is known that the only formally approved dissections under royal law, even for the medical
university of Montpellier, were of executed criminals.46 In England, where research has been
more systematically done, it was much the same; dissections were crude, popular shows where
people could come and be educated – but also see gore, after a satisfying execution.47 Yes,
Marseilles was in a state of emergency at the time, and this particular anatomy demonstration is
an interesting early example of public health awareness campaign, but that Chicoyneau used the
body of a plague victim the same way he would, in peace time, a child murderer is indicative of
how he thought of them. They were guilty of something, even if it was of not take caring of
themselves. Compare this to the phenomenon of fat-shaming today, where fat people are
perceived as lazy and unmotivated, and perhaps deserving of their apparently inevitable heart
disease.
But, while some victims are lowered by the circumstances of their death, some plague
victims are lifted up by the process. In Thucydides' account, substantiated by Plutarch, Pericles,
the leader of Athens in its golden age, was struck down, as was his entire family. Posthumously,
the plague was declared the turning point of the Peloponnesian war, partially as a result of his
death, for the only ones left to lead were demagogues such as Cleon. Similarly, of Bertrand's
45 Letter 11 from M. Chicoyneau to M. Bezac, April 14, 1721, H565, Archives de faculté de medecine de
Montpelier, Université de Montpelier 1
46 Marcel Fournier, Les statutset privilèges des universités françaises depuis leur fondation jusqu'en 1789:
Volume 2, (Paris: L. Larose, 1898), 543.
47 Cynthia Klestinec, "A History of Anatomy Theaters in Sixteenth-Century Padua ," Journal of the History of
Medicine and Allied Sciences, 59, no. 3 (2004): 3,

17. victims, the most marked are the physicians of Marseilles who died treating their patients, who
urged the council of the city that the plague was in fact contagious.48 However, the Montpellier
delegation lost none of its members. If Chicoyneau took this as proof that his methodology was
the true on, Bertrand only took this to be the “natural” outcome of plague; after all, the good die
young. However, it is only “natural” because Bertrand is following in the tradition of Thucydides,
as is, indeed, Chicoyneau. In their respective reflections on the history of the Plague of
Marseilles, and of outbreaks of the plague in general, both cite him. “Nothing has changed”
indeed.
Thucydides has profoundly influenced the genre of plague literature from the very first
day he penned his work. Since him, popular writers writing from a more general perspective
have looked at epidemics, specifically outbreaks of the bubonic plague, as a test of a society's
strengths and weaknesses when it is finally pushed beyond the brink. However, these concepts
have bled over into scholarly works as well. Carrière's work, which remains to this day the best
chronological history on the plague, is infinitely indebted to him and to the other two prominent
sources on events, Chicoyneau and Bertrand. While decidedly a modern work trying to weave
objective tale with as many of the sources as possibly remain, it still basically the same narrative:
how the pestilence disrupted this French mercantile society and overturned many lives. To its
credit, rather than focusing on Marseilles he extends his tale to that of the whole of Provence,
realizing that, even as Marseilles was cut off by quarantine and plague walls, the dark cloud that
had affixed itself over it cast a long shadow. But it still remains a story of plagues and people.
Other scholarly works focus almost solely on how people at the time perceived it, and
48 Bertand, 65

18. how it was reflected in everything from their philosophical works to their music, to their public
health policy. Once again, however, the theme of societal collapse is near omnipresent. But is
this the only way that we can possibly conceive of plague? As much of a historic monolith as it, I
cannot wholly criticize this lens on epidemic history, created by Thucydides. After all, historians
are supposed to record how those of the past saw things, and what they saw was the Plague of
Athens, on repeat. My only desire is that this focus not be as monopolizing as it currently is.
Surely a divergence exists somewhere. Otherwise epidemic history runs a huge risk of simply
repeating itself.