For centuries scholars have debated the cause of the Great Plague of Athens, which devastated the war-torn city in 430 B.C. An intriguing hypothesis--that plague victims were felled by the Ebola virus--has gained favor in the last few years (Science, 14 June 1996, p. 1591). But at a forum last month at the University of Maryland, College Park, an old contender surged to the fore: typhus.
Every year, academics and physicians gather at the university to diagnose a historical figure. This year, the subject was Pericles, anonymously described to conferees as a 65-year-old man who died after 11 days of an illness marked by bouts of high fever, chest pain, vomiting, diarrhea, fetid breath, and a bumpy red rash. Forum host David Durack, an infectious disease specialist at Becton Dickinson Biosciences in Baltimore, contended that the symptoms best fit typhus, spread by the feces of infected body lice. Typhus, however, would not explain the diarrhea, so Durack proposed an additional illness--perhaps Lassa fever--to loosen the bowels. Durack and his co-host, classicist Robert Littman of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, rejected the Ebola theory, arguing that the hemorrhaging the virus causes "would not have escaped" the notice of plague chronicler Thucydides.
The chief promoter of the Ebola hypothesis, San Diego-based Navy physician Patrick Olson, is sticking to his guns. All of Pericles's symptoms fit Ebola, in which visible bleeding is not all that common, he says. Olson is leading a drive to settle the ancient dispute by retrieving genetic material from plague-era corpses discovered in an Athens cemetery (Science, 22 November 1996, p. 1307). But that enterprise is currently on hold, stalled by Greek officialdom.
