Summer 430 B.C. A plague hit Ancient Athens, ravaging the city’s population according to Thucydides’ Historyof the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides described the victims’ “violent heats in the head”, “redness and inflammation in the eyes, and tongues and troats “becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath.” He wrote that the flashes were so extreme that patients “could not bear to have on clothing or linen even of the very lightest description. Later on, the victims would suffer frm “violent ulceration” and diarrhea that left most weak, and finally, death would come.

The plague is still a scientific mystery until 2,000 years later an article in the journal Clinical Infectious Disease suggested that the cause of the epidemic may have been Ebola.

Infectious-disease specialist Powel Kazanjian suggests that Athens was the site of an Ebola outbreak.

Thucydides was not a physician and he used vague terms to describe the disease’s symptoms. The ancient Greek term phlyktainai could refer to blisters or callouses.