Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.51.4 · 2.51.4
Despair and dying like sheep
Read the full text in our reader
δεινότατον δὲ παντὸς ἦν τοῦ κακοῦ ἥ τε ἀθυμία ὁπότε τις αἴσθοιτο κάμνων ( πρὸς γὰρ τὸ ἀνέλπιστον εὐθὺς τραπόμενοι τῇ γνώμῃ πολλῷ μᾶλλον προΐεντο σφᾶς αὐτοὺς καὶ οὐκ ἀντεῖχον), καὶ ὅτι ἕτερος ἀφ’ ἑτέρου θεραπείας ἀναπιμπλάμενοι ὥσπερ τὰ πρόβατα ἔθνῃσκον· καὶ τὸν πλεῖστον φθόρον τοῦτο ἐνεποίει.
The most terrible thing in the whole suffering was the despair whenever anyone realized he was sick. For turning at once in mind to hopelessness, they gave themselves up much more and did not hold out. And because they caught the illness from one another through nursing, they died like sheep, and this caused the greatest death toll.
Word by word
The setting
The worst thing was the despair of anyone who saw he was ill, and the infection that passed between nurses and patients, so that people died like sheep.
A note on this passage
The despair is named athymia, from thymos, "spirit" or "heart," with the negative prefix, a loss of heart. The condition is kamnōn, from kamnō, which means to be worn down by toil and so to be ill, and the optative aisthoito turns the sentence into a general one: every time any person realized it. The parenthesis then explains what happened inside the person. They turned pros to anelpiston, "toward the hopeless," with their gnōmē, their judgement, and proienai themselves, literally "sent themselves forward" and let go.
The second cause is stated with the verb anapimplamenoi, "being filled up," which describes catching the sickness from the people they were nursing, heteros aph' heterou therapeias, "one from another in the matter of care." The comparison is short: hōsper ta probata, "like the sheep," which is the word for a farm flock, and the verb ethnēiskon is imperfect, a continuing run of deaths. The final sentence says that this nursing, more than anything, produced the biggest phthoros, "ruin" or "destruction."
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.51.4 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.51.4 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/thucydides/2.51.4/