The leaked WhatsApp messages about Covid tell us little of relevance to the handling of the disease (but much about personalities) because we all know what policies they resulted in and who was responsible for them. They have simply encouraged many journalists to proclaim (again) how they were completely right all along about lockdowns, and many readers to demand they are never repeated. Athenians might have disagreed.
In 430 bc, one year after going to war against Sparta, Athens was hit by a deadly plague, made all the more devastating by the fact that the whole population had been crammed within its defensive walls for fear of attack by the formidable Spartan army. It killed about a quarter of the population, perhaps as many as 100,000 people. The historian of that war, Thucydides, who caught the plague himself but survived, left an entirely deity-free medical account of it, of which any modern doctor would be proud:
‘The first internal symptoms were that the throat and tongue became bloody and the breath unnatural and malodorous.
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