The Ancient Greeks also lived through a plague, and they too blamed their leaders for their suffering

A painting by Nicolas Poussin titled 'The Athenian Plague' shows people dying of the plague. Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a scholar of ancient Greek literature, I have returned again and again to the Greek historian Thucydides to try understand the historical parallels to the American response to the health crisis.

Thucydides – a onetime general and historian of the Peloponnesian War, a generationlong struggle between Athens and Sparta – presents one of the most famous accounts of a plague from antiquity.