You are listening to the War on rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the CEO of War on the rocks.

Pandemics are older than war itself and the two are often intertwined.

As the world grapples with a new pandemic, many have looked to past plagues for lessons or out of simple

curiosity.

In this episode we look way back to the Peloponnesian War. In the early years of that three-decade

conflict, Athens suffered a vicious plague. How did it impact the war? How did it impact the

Finian society? Nevil Morley answers these questions in more. This was truly one of the most fascinating

conversations I've had in a long time. And boy could I use it, shut in in my apartment

social distancing. Neville is a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter in the UK.

He's written many books and articles on many different aspects of ancient history and its modern influence,

including Roman imperialism, ancient trade, and the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.

His most recent book is Classics, Why It Matters.

And he's currently writing a book called What Thucydides New that explored what the ancient

historian can tell us about modern politics. He blogs at the Sphinx blog.com.

You can find on that site a couple of posts on a user's guide to Thucydides in case you want

some advice on how to get started with reading him. What was the Peloponnesian War and how do we know what we know about it?

The Peloponnesian War is a big conflict, or at least it's the big conflict if you're Greek at the end of the 5th century

BC. It's between, on the one hand, the Athenians and their empire. It's an empire that claims to be an alliance against the Persians,

but by this point essentially it's an empire. And on the other hand you've got Sparta and their allies, mostly based

down in the Peloponnese, so down in sort of the big lump to the southwest of Greece, whereas Athens is very much a naval

power spread over most of the Aegean.

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