Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.51.1 · 2.51.1
No two cases alike
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τὸ μὲν οὖν νόσημα, πολλὰ καὶ ἄλλα παραλιπόντι ἀτοπίας, ὡς ἑκάστῳ ἐτύγχανέ τι διαφερόντως ἑτέρῳ πρὸς ἕτερον γιγνόμενον, τοιοῦτον ἦν ἐπὶ πᾶν τὴν ἰδέαν. καὶ ἄλλο παρελύπει κατ’ ἐκεῖνον τὸν χρόνον οὐδὲν τῶν εἰωθότων· ὃ δὲ καὶ γένοιτο, ἐς τοῦτο ἐτελεύτα.
The disease, then, passing over many other oddities in how it happened to differ from one person to another, was such in its whole character. At that time no other of the usual illnesses troubled anyone, and whatever did happen ended in this.
Word by word
The setting
Leaving aside many odd features, Thucydides gives the general character of the disease and adds that no other common illness troubled anyone then.
A note on this passage
The sentence begins by announcing what it will leave out. Paraleipō is "to leave to one side," and the thing left aside is atopia, literally "out-of-placeness," so the many oddities are the cases that fit no pattern. Thucydides says there were many and that he is not recording them. What he keeps is the idea of the disease, in the old sense of "outward form" or "look," which here means its general character taken as a whole.
The second half is a statement about other illnesses. The usual ones are eiōthota, a perfect participle of ethō that means "things that are in the habit of happening." None of them troubled anyone then, and the last clause is flat: hò de kai genoito, "but whatever did happen," went into this one. The optative of genoito makes it a general statement about any case at all, so every illness that arose was counted as the plague.
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