Abstract

Two well-known descriptions of epidemic disease were set down by people who lived through what they described: Thucydides on the plague at Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, and Giovanni Boccaccio on the pestilence in Florence in 1348. For Athens, a reading of the account as epidemiological evidence that stops short of a firm identification stands against a claim, from ancient dental pulp, that typhoid fever was the probable cause, and against a reply that the claim is unproven. For the Black Death, an argument that contemporaries recorded a disease whose spread, season and signs differ from modern bubonic plague stands against a draft genome that established Yersinia pestis as its cause. This article asks what each author wrote down so that a later reader could recognise the disease, and what that writing can and cannot carry in those disputes. It reads the two texts at length, in English and in the Greek and Italian, and sets beside each the modern summary that Skeptron, a history studio of the RISCON family, wrote of the case for its platform. It finds that Thucydides wrote for recognition by a person who meets the disease again, not for naming it, and marked what was seen apart from what was said; that Boccaccio wrote to be believed, and marked a witness's sight apart from belief and estimate; and that translation moves details that the identification debates weigh. The article does not decide what either disease was.