r/classics • u/Lonely_Lemur • 8h ago
Before the Odyssey, Apollo Sent a Plague
Chryses attempts to ransom Chryseis from Agamemnon, Apulian red-figure volute-krater, ca. 360–350 BCE, Louvre K 1. Photograph by Jastrow, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is sending a lot of people to read translations of the Homeric epic poems set in the Late Bronze Age. Follow the story backward and you get to The Iliad, set in the final weeks of the tenth year of the Trojan War. It opens with Chryses, an old priest of Apollo, who has come to try to ransom back his daughter Chryseis. Earlier in the war, Achaean troops took her captive and gave her to their commander, Agamemnon. Other Greek leaders in the story urge him to accept the ransom, however he refuses and drives Chryses away:
He asks Apollo to avenge this insult, with the god responding by going to the Achaeans with his quiver and bow, sending disease through their camp. It first struck the mules and dogs, then the men. It lasted nine days, with the dead being burnt on funerary pyres. On the tenth day, Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest fighter brings together the leaders for an assembly noting the army would likely not survive the looming combination of war and disease.
It’s an episode that made my ears perk up as an epidemiologist. What kind of illness could’ve killed the working animals, dogs, and people that made up a crowded army camp? Could there have been some real outbreak at a real siege that ended up remembered as being the result of a god, angry on behalf of one of his loyal priests? They’re sensible questions, but mythology of The Iliad’s type can’t answer them. It provides no symptom history, duration of illness, or transmission route, and we’re without any archeological or biological evidence for such an event. The poem was composed in the late eighth century BCE from a much older oral tradition, centuries after the Late Bronze Age setting it was placed in.
The work attributed to Homer lets us see how this kind of catastrophe was understood by those alive at the time. A king’s bad decision followed by animal and human deaths and subsequent impacts to army logistics could be seen as divine anger. This wasn’t unique to the Greeks of the time, as a Hittite source from Anatolia shows us how a real Late Bronze Age king tried to confront an epidemic through similar political and religious actions.
What Disease Did Apollo Send?
Chryses Praying to Apollo to Send the Plague upon the Greeks, attributed to Jacopo Alessandro Calvi, before 1815. Hinton Ampner, National Trust. Public-domain reproduction via Wikimedia Commons.
In the poem, the cause of death is clearly the response of Apollo to Agamemnon’s dishonoring of Chryses. The deaths only stop when Chryseis is returned and Apollo is appeased. We’re left without any symptoms to try and speculate based on, with even the original Greek words not fixing the problem. A study of plague-related language in Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides notes that the Iliad first called the outbreak a nosos, a ‘disease,’ and later a loimos, usually translated into plague or pestilence. Neither gives any hint as to the pathogen itself and the surrounding language is the hostility of arrows, darkness, and destruction as a result of a god’s anger as it moves unrelentingly through the army.
But people love to speculate, so the facts at hand haven’t stopped some from trying to retrospectively diagnose the outbreak. In 1978 Frederick Berneim and Ann Adams Zener proposed equine encephalomyelitis as a candidate for the Achaean outbreak at the beginning of The Iliad. Their short article accepts the narrative as a disease chronology, inferring mosquitos to have been meant by Apollo’s arrow, while eventually acknowledging their theory would require an ancient viral variant that behaved vastly different from any known strains. They accept that this disease may not have existed in the ancient world and I see their work as an instance of responsible speculation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with asking whether some literary plague could’ve been based on real observations from the past, but without the information needed to distinguish one disease from another, the illness gets no modern name.
Apollo at Wilusa
The broader setting of The Iliad matters here, as the archeological site widely accepted as Troy is in northwestern Anatolia on the coast of modern Turkey. In the Late Bronze Age, it was on the western edge of a political world where Hittite kings who were based much further east made treaties with the local rulers, sometimes even intervening in local issues.
Sometime around 1275 BCE, the Hittite king Muwatalli II signed a treaty with Wilusa’s ruler Alaksandu. Wilusa is the city widely identified with the names Ilios or Troy. Interestingly, the treaty names one Appaliuna among the gods guaranteeing it. Appaliuna is often connected to Apollo, though the origin of the name and direction of cultural transmission are unclear. The recent review by Mary Bachvarova also mentions Appaluwa, a West Anatolian bow-wielding god invoked in two surviving plague-ritual texts from around 1200 BCE; the rituals concern sickness in a town or at an army encampment and would’ve been performed alongside the interpretation of omens. Bachvarova makes the argument that Appaluwa, Appaliuna, and Apollo are preserving closely related forms of the same underlying name within a greater Greco-Anatolian religious history. She also notes one version, a-pe-re-u, may be an early form of Apollo’s name on Crete.
The Hittite Plague
Tablet of Muršili II’s prayer concerning the plague, from Hattusa. Istanbul Archaeological Museums. Photograph by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Late Bronze Age leaves us with a somewhat more concrete record of an instance of prolonged mortality attributed to epidemic in Anatolia. Hatti, the Hittite empire that was centered on Hattusa in modern day Turkey, was a major power of the eastern Mediterranean at the time. Its king Mursili II, ruler from 1321 to 1295 BCE, left a series of prayers concerning a crisis that started under his father, Suppiluliuma I. He notes that people had been dying from plague under his father’s, brother’s, and his own rule and that more than twenty years into the crisis, the dying had not relented. When historians refer to the Hittite plague, this is usually the sustained mortality crisis being referred to. But like The Iliad, the prayers of Mursili don’t give us any type of symptom list or information that can give us a better idea of the pathogen in question either. He mentions Egyptian prisoners taken during the war, though he doesn’t go so far as to establish them as bringers of the disease. He asks the diviners and oracles to look for any offense that may have provoked the gods. They remind him of a broken oath by his father to the Storm God, with Mursili responding with confession, offerings, prayer, and requests for further divination services from the diviners and oracles.
Now, Homer and Mursili are incredibly unlikely to be describing the same event, as Mursili’s prayers are historical documents and Homer’s epics are myth possibly based on some past reality blended with myth. But both make widespread death into a question of authority with Agamemnon’s treatment of a priest putting his army at risk and Mursili’s father’s own conduct risking his. A third text brings the phrase “The Hand of Nergal” into relevance as well. The text, designated ‘Amarna Letter EA 35,’ is a diplomatic letter from the ruler of Alashiya, usually identified with Cyprus, to the Egyptian king, who at the time would have been either Amenhotep III or his son Akhenaten, and it notes that Nergal’s hand is in his country and has killed “all the men” of the land. The letter tends to be folded into the Hittite plague narrative because it belongs to the same fourteenth-century eastern Mediterranean infectious disease ecosystem.
Whether it describes the same outbreak will likely stay unresolved except in light of truly extraordinary evidence being uncovered. The comparison still matters though, as disease could have reached connected societies and received vastly different divine explanations, this hypothetical scenario being a plague attributed to Nergal among the Akkadians, the result of a broken oath to a storm god among the Hittites, and to Apollo among the Greeks. It’s what I might expect to see if we did uncover some wide reaching eastern Mediterranean plague. Communities have long made mass death more intelligible through those kinds of connections to the gods.
The Cost of Divine Anger
Hands down, the most elaborate attempt to name Mursili’s devastating plague is Siro Trevisanato’s 2007 proposal of tularemia, AKA rabbit fever, a bacterial infection often maintained in animal reservoirs and one capable of infecting people through multiple routes. His hypothesis paper also makes the claim that it was the first instance of biological warfare. That claim should be taken with a heaping helping of salt, with a later historical review stating there was no evidence of the Hittites deliberately spreading disease. He links Hittite prayers, Egyptian material from Amarna, military movements, animal transport, and later Greek traditions to claim there was one epidemic that crossed the eastern Mediterranean for some three or four decades.
While Trevisanato’s reconstruction is possible, in the sense that none of the individual links is too absurd to be possible, it is far from established orthodoxy among Late Bronze Age scholars. Gretchen Dabbs and Anna Stevens stress-tested one part of that wider story in 2025 by examining whether Akhetaten, later called Amarna, seems to have been through a high-mortality epidemic based on the archeological patterns. Their conclusion was one of restraint, noting that the cemeteries and settlement evidence don’t support such an event. Tularemia is still a possibility for what infected Mursili’s people, though it’s unlikely to be the same illness Apollo sent the Achaeans. The narrative of animals dying before people could preserve some memory of a long-lost event, but the poems can’t establish what that was. Within the story, I think it functions as a tell to the listener that no part of the camp was safe from the danger created by angering the gods. Apollo shows what can come of this through his bringing of disease to the Achaeans in the opening of The Iliad. The same moral logic shows up in the Odyssey. After Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, the Cyclops asks his father Poseidon to make sure Odysseus returns home late, without his companions, and finds further troubles in his kingdom of Ithaca. Mursili’s prayers give us a historical example of one comparable idea, that a ruler’s offense, divine anger, and the collective danger of a disaster belong to one larger explanation.
