The Mosquito Read online

  When news of Thermopylae reached the Greek navy, it disengaged from the Persian fleet after two days of fighting. With the Persians marching unchecked on Athens, its citizens and the fleeing army were evacuated by the retreating fleet to the island of Salamis. When Xerxes entered the prized city and found it deserted, he impulsively put Athens to the torch. He immediately regretted his decision as it was out of character with the Persian tradition of tolerance and respect championed by Cyrus and Darius I. Realizing his error, he repeatedly offered to rebuild Athens, but it was too late for acts of contrition. The Athenians had already fled the city and the opportunity for negotiation and reconciliation had gone up in smoke. This was now total war. Outraged by this Athenian insolence, in September 480 BCE, Xerxes ordered his navy to destroy the coalition fleet at Salamis. There the Persian navy entered a brilliantly sprung trap conceived by the Athenian general Themistocles.

  Luring the numerically superior but flimsier Persian vessels into a narrow strait, the bulkier Greek trireme ships quickly blocked both entries. In these tight quarters, the Persian ships became logjammed, unnavigable, and disorganized. The heavier, battering-ram Greek navy swept through, scoring a decisive victory. Undaunted by this defeat, a disgruntled Xerxes continued his campaign to conquer Greece and bring the alliance to its knees. It was the Persians, however, who would be brought to heel and disciplined by a late addition to the Greek coalition—flying columns of mosquitoes.

  Persian ground forces were pressed and sieved to traverse swampy terrain and lay siege to numerous Greek towns girded by bristling marshes. With the Persian force now trespassing on her terrain, the mosquito quickly announced her presence to the hapless, unsuspecting foreign soldiers. Malaria compounded by dysentery soon swallowed the Persian ranks, with losses upwards of 40%. This straggling, scarecrow Persian force was shattered at the Battle of Plataea in August 479 BCE, effectively ending any future Persian intentions toward Greece. Salamis and Plataea marked the turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars. Accompanied by General Anopheles, these decisive victories propelled the balance of power and the center of civilization west to Greece. The initiative and momentum were wrested from Xerxes and his retreating Persians and were now permanently in the custody of the Greeks. With the Persian Empire weakened and its regional influence waning, the ensuing “Golden Age” of Greece would be the substance from which modern Western society was built.

  There was, however, still the lingering question of hegemony within Greece itself. The Persian threat had only temporarily paused the ongoing hostility between Athens and Sparta, which came to a head with the Peloponnesian Wars intermittently raging from 460 to 404 BCE. Aristophanes’s satirical, sexually charged comedy Lysistrata, debuting in 411 BCE at the height of the Peloponnesian War and in the wake of the disastrous mosquito-spawned Athenian defeat in Sicily two years earlier, embodies the futile bloodbath washing across Greece and beyond. The rascal Athenian title character, Lysistrata, sets out on a mission to persuade the women of the warring city-states to withhold sexual relations, pleasures, and privileges from their husbands and lovers to broker a peace and put end to the brutal conflict and catastrophic butchery. The carnage of the Peloponnesian War could not be cured or pacified by a play, however, even one as brilliant and enduringly relevant as Lysistrata.

  Ironically, this period, demonstrated by Aristophanes’s play itself, coincided with a flurry of academic advancement shaped by men whose names are now commonplace and roll off the tongues of schoolchildren across the world. Despite this constant warfare, or perhaps because of it, fifth-century BCE Greeks, primarily Athenians, fashioned their most celebrated innovations in architecture, science, philosophy, theater, and the arts. Socrates, Plato, and Thucydides, for example, all fought for Athens during the Peloponnesian War.

  All was not entirely golden, however, as malarial epidemics sapped and bled the Greek population, undermined military might, eroded economic influence, and eventually ended Greece’s reign as the heart of Western civilization. Greek poet Homer mentions malaria in the Iliad (750 BCE) when he describes the autumn season: “burning breath taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death.” Numerous entries on the who’s who list of golden age Greeks, including Sophocles, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, left exemplary depictions of malaria. “And we have made ourselves living cesspools,” Plato noted, “and driven doctors to invent names for our diseases.” The famed Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BCE), for example, likened the deadly malaria season of summer and early fall to the nightly arrival of Sirius the Dog Star, a period of sickness he branded the “dog days of summer.”

  Hippocrates, or the father of Western medicine, as he is often called, was clear to distinguish malaria from other types of fever. He noted in articulate detail the enlargement of spleens and the fever cycles, time frames, and severity of the different “tertian, quartan and quotidian” malarial infections, going so far as to note which strains were prone to relapse. Hippocrates conceded that malaria was the “worst, most protracted and most painful of all the diseases then occurring,” adding that “the fevers that attack are of the acutest type while the earth is soaked by reason of the spring rains.” He was the world’s first malariologist since no one before him or for centuries afterward so methodically and patently diagnosed, studied, and recorded the symptoms of malaria.

  Hippocrates removed medicine from under a religious umbrella, arguing that illness was not punishment inflicted by the gods, but rather was the product of environmental factors and internal disparities within the human body itself. This was an unprecedented, monumental shift in the balance between the supernatural and natural worlds. Hippocrates maintained that the best medicine was prevention, not cure. Benjamin Franklin later paraphrased this aphorism, insisting that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” albeit that it pertained to the fire hazards of colonial Philadelphia rather than to mosquito-borne (and other) illnesses. Hippocrates also stressed the importance of clinical observation and documentation during which he correctly diagnosed and recorded numerous diseases, including malaria. His Hippocratic oath to “use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing” is still observed by physicians to this day, accompanied by his caveat and vow to uphold the privilege of doctor-patient confidentiality.

  In the miasmic tradition of the Hippocratic school of medicine, observers, writers, and health professionals believed until the late nineteenth century that diseases, including malaria, were caused by decaying debris and poisonous gases emanating from stagnant swamps, marshes, and wetlands, giving rise to the name malaria—literally “bad air” in Italian—discordant with Plato’s musing that “they certainly give very strange names to diseases.” Hippocrates and his predecessors came tantalizingly close to the source, for they did couple standing water to malaria, though not to the mosquitoes that bred in it. For example, Empedocles, a contemporary of Hippocrates and the author of the paradigm of the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire, successfully diverted two rivers near the Sicilian town of Selinus at his own expense to rid the area of “evil smelling” swamps that were “causing death and making pregnant women miscarry.” His likeness was struck on a coin of currency so that residents would be continuously reminded of his miraculous and lifesaving humanitarian efforts. The mosquito, however, remained anonymous.

  While Hippocrates was wrong about disease being caused by an imbalance of the four humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—his vivid accounts of malaria provide us with context as to its rampant proliferation during the Peloponnesian War and its role in deciding the war’s outcome. Mosquito-borne malaria, as biologist Dr. R. S. Bray affirms, “no doubt added to the burdens of the Peloponnesian War.” In fact, it defined them. Zoology professor Dr. J. L. Cloudsley-Thompson goes one step further, recognizing that “Hippocrates knew malaria well: this insidious disease was afterwards to sap and r
ot the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome.” For those two superpowers, the mosquito was as skilled and capable at killing as any earthly soldier. On the battlefields of empire building, she prejudiced the results of clashes and campaigns during both the rise and fall of Greece and Rome.

  While Hippocrates was studiously recording the many faces of malaria and observing the interplay between the natural world, disease, and the human body, the relationship between Sparta and his adopted home, Athens, was souring. Sensing impending hostilities, Sparta initiated the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE by launching a preemptive strike on Athens, hoping for a quick victory before the dominant Athenians could summon their allies. The Athenian strategist Pericles advised a two-pronged plan to defeat the Spartans. The first was to prolong the conflict by avoiding decisive infantry battles, instead fighting smaller rearguard delaying actions to allow for a purposeful retreat to the fortified city of Athens. He was sure that the superior supplies and resources of Athens, and its ability to withstand a siege, would win a war of attrition. Second, Athenian naval supremacy permitted unrivaled command of the seas. Raiding the ports and commercial coastal cities of both Sparta and its allies would force a surrender of resource starvation. Pericles’s genius might have won the day had it not been for the intervention of disease.

  With an Athenian victory in reach, a devastating epidemic, known as the Plague of Athens, struck in 430 BCE, claiming the celebrated general as one of its first victims. This contagion ripped apart the cohesion and foundation of not only the Athenian military but also Athenian society. It struck a blow so powerful that any immediate salvage of the social, religious, and cultural antebellum status quo was untenable. The epidemic originated in Ethiopia and passed through the seaports of Libya and Egypt before being shuttled northbound across the Mediterranean by infected sailors, and entered Greece through the Athenian port of Piraeus. The sanctuary city of Athens was crawling with over 200,000 refugees and their livestock, adding to an already overpopulated city. This overcrowding inside the fortified city walls, when combined with appalling hygiene, a shortage of resources, clean water, and supplies, was an invitation to death by disease.

  Within three years, the mysterious disease had killed upwards of 100,000 people, roughly 35% of the Athenian population. A vulnerable Athens ensnared in social and military anarchy should have made for an easy Spartan victory. The terror of the mystifying plague was so persistent, however, that Sparta abandoned its siege of the city. The Plague of Athens was a rare one-sided epidemic, for the Spartans escaped relatively unscathed. From a military perspective, the Plague of Athens leveled the playing field but brought neither side closer to victory. Eventually, in 421 BCE, as a result of this calamitous and enigmatic contagion magnified by years of attrition and mutual exhaustion, a tenuous peace was brokered.

  More ink and academic sweat have been spilled on literature concerning the nature of the Plague of Athens than blood spilled during the Peloponnesian War. The never-ending clinical discussion of causality is surprising, given that the eyewitness description from acclaimed Athenian historian Thucydides is so exhaustively thorough. His firsthand written account of the Peloponnesian War, including the Plague of Athens of which he was a survivor, is the watershed of impartial scientific-based history and international relations theory. His unbiased research methods, analysis of cause and effect, recognition of strategy and the influence of individual initiative were innovative and groundbreaking. His text is still studied and scrutinized at universities and military colleges around the world. As a young army officer at the Royal Military College of Canada, I carried Thucydides on my mandatory reading list.

  His exquisite symptomatic description of the disease, too lengthy to reproduce here, is so comprehensive as to be problematic. The symptoms mirror all the designer name-brand diseases, but not any particular one completely enough to be able to discount others. Historians and medical experts have bantered and debated the cause for centuries, tabling over thirty different pathogens as the architect of the plague. The initial considerations of bubonic plague, scarlet fever, anthrax, measles, or smallpox have generally been discredited. While typhoid is a candidate, the top contenders to claim this carnage are typhus, malaria, and some form of mosquito-borne viral hemorrhagic fever akin to yellow fever.

  Given the myriad symptoms rendered by Thucydides, it could also have been a lethal concoction of these three diseases empowered by the cramped and unsanitary conditions in the besieged city of Athens. Harvard physician and biologist Dr. Hans Zinsser emphasizes that most historical epidemics are exacerbated by other complementary diseases: “Soldiers have rarely won wars. They more often mop up after the barrage of epidemics. . . . Very rarely is there a pure epidemic of a single malady. It is not unlikely that the description of Thucydides is confused by the fact that a number of diseases were epidemic in Athens at the time of the great plague. The conditions were ripe for it. . . . The plague of Athens, whatever it may have been, had a profound effect upon historical events.”

  A rejuvenated Athens broke the armistice in 415 BCE, launching the greatest and most expensive military campaign in Greek history, enflaming Aristophanes to write his antiwar protest play, Lysistrata. Feeling obligated to assist their allies in Sicily, the Athenians set sail to crush the Spartan pawn of Syracuse. Upon landing, the Athenian force dithered under clumsy leadership, and languished in marshy, mosquito-infested encampments surrounding Syracuse. Historians have mulled the idea that the defenders purposefully channeled and lured the Athenians into the malarial swamps, subjecting them to a brand of biological warfare. Given the accepted miasma theory that standing water and wetlands caused disease, it seems likely that this strategy was employed throughout the ancient world.

  The Athenian army at Syracuse was crippled by malaria. As the two-year siege dragged on, malaria killed or incapacitated over 70% of the total force. The Athenians floundered into catastrophic defeat in 413 BCE. The Sicilian Expedition was an unqualified disaster. The entire Athenian force of 40,000 men died of disease or were killed, captured, or sold into slavery. The Athenian navy was in tatters. The Athenian treasury was bankrupt. The mosquito and soldierly bungling effected one of the greatest military blunders in history with global reverberations.

  The Athenian democratic government was overthrown by an oligarchy, and in 404 BCE Athens surrendered to Spartan occupation under the draconian rule of a puppet government known as the Thirty Tyrants. The dream of Athens and its democracy died with the execution-suicide of the luminary thinker Socrates in 399 BCE. Like Athens, however, Sparta was also in an economic and military shambles. Fifty-six years of intermittent warfare had left Athens and Sparta, and their lesser allies of Corinth, Elis, Delphi, and Thebes, impoverished, tired, and weak. In addition, the war shattered religious, cultural, and societal taboos, vast amounts of the countryside and entire cities had been razed and lay in ruin, and populations had been devastated by war and disease.

  This disintegration and collapse were bolstered by endemic malaria throughout southern Greece. Malaria interminably drained Greek health, vitality, and manpower. Consequently, fields, barnyards, mines, and ports were left fallow, untended, vacuous. Malaria attacked fertility by targeting pregnant women and young children, sending populations into a downward spiral. Endemic malaria was accompanied by stillbirths and miscarriages. Children with underdeveloped immune systems were easy targets for the parasitic predator. Malarial fevers often reaching 106 degrees sizzled and cooked sperm, draining male potency. Plato lamented that “what now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man.” The Peloponnesian War and General Anopheles put a harsh, abrupt end to the golden age of Greece. Every loss, however, is tethered to a gain. In this case, the ultimate victor was the relatively unsullied and isolated kingdom of Macedon.

  While a teenage Alexander immersed himself in the teachings of Aristotle, his father, Philip, began to train and organize a formidable Macedonian army.
Philip’s innovative use of maneuver warfare with both heavy and light cavalry and infantry, accompanied by the alteration of existing weapons, produced a highly mobile, quick-striking Macedonian force. These military improvements, formations, and tactics were later tailored and refashioned by Alexander. While viewing themselves as Greek, the Macedonians were viewed by southern Greeks as lewd barbarians and uncivilized drunkards. Historical and archeological evidence supports the notion that the Macedonian aristocracy had a healthy penchant for alcohol and were a hard-drinking lot. Macedonia’s rise to superpower status in the ancient world is regarded as one of the greatest wonders of antiquity. Given the economic and social plight of its battle-scarred and mosquito-spiked southern neighbors, however, it was no accident.

  With the Greek city-states reeling from the devastation of the Peloponnesian Wars, throughout the 340s BCE, King Philip II persuaded the majority of northern and central Greece into alliance before taking the offensive. With his father away warring, sixteen-year-old Alexander was left as regent and heir apparent. When rebellion against Macedonian rule broke out in Thrace, Alexander raised a small army of local leftovers and dregs, and quickly crushed the revolt in a widely heralded event among his peers and subjects. Alexander’s military prowess and reputation continued to grow as he put down subsequent revolts in southern Thrace and northern Greece. To counter the Macedonian southern offensive, in 338 BCE, Athens and Thebes subsequently rallied a defensive coalition that Philip and Alexander, whose flanking force was the first to break the enemy lines, summarily dispatched at the Battle of Chaeronea. Never again would the city-states of Greece be independent agents in international affairs.