Abstract
This article offers a detailed comparison of two of the most famous narratives of epidemic disease in European literature, Thucydides’ account of the great plague of Athens (430 and 427 B.C.) in hisHistory of the Peloponnesian War and Daniel Defoe's description of the great plague of London (1664–65) A. D.) in his historical novel,A Journal of the Plague Year. It is argued first that the similarities between them, even though they are matters of content rather than close verbal resemblances, are sufficient, especially when put together with what we know of Defoe's life and education, to justify the assumption that the English writer knew Thucydides'History and was influenced by it. Attention is then focused on a striking difference between the two plague narratves, namely, the quantity of numerical information and how it is deployed. This analysis leads to some observations on the differences between the two writers in source material, literary genre, and narrative method.
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References
Simon Hornblower,A Commentary on Thucydides, Vol. 1 (Oxford 1991), 316, states, “The identification of the disease in Th[ucydides] is an insoluble problem,” citing A.J. Holladay and J.F.C. Poole, “Thucydides and the plague of Athens,”Classical Quarterly 29 (1979), 282–300.
Thucydides states (2.47.4) that the plague appeared in Athens “not many days” after the Peloponnesian army invaded Attika for its annual campaign of devastation. This invasion is the first event he reports in the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430–429 B. C.). Thucydides' chronological framework for his narrative of the war begins each year in the spring, when the campaigning season opened for Greek states. At 3.87.1–3 (quoted in translation in note 27 below) he reports the second outbreak of the plague, in the winter that ended the fifth year of the war (i.e., winter 427–426 B. C.), noting also that this second outbreak lasted “not less than a year,” while the first epidemic lasted two years.
On the many uncertainties regarding the composition and dissemination of Thucydides' work, see Simon Hornblower,Thucydides (Baltimore 1987), 136–154.
Contemporary medical sources, such as Dr. Nathaniel Hodges,Loimologia (Latin edition, London 1672; English translation by J. Quincy, London 1720), already identified the London plague as bubonic. The chronology of this epidemic is firmly established through documentary sources such as the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn and the Bills of Mortality, published weekly in each London parish. It lasted altogether about a year, from November 1664 to November 1665: see (e.g.) Sir George Clark,The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714, 2nd edition (Oxford 1965) 65–66.
A good account of the nature of Defoe'sA Journal of the Plague Year and of the circumstances of its composition is given by Paula Backscheider,Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington, KY 1986) 135–144. See also Donald Kay, “Defoe's sense of history inA Journal of the Plague Year,” Xavier University Studies 9.3 (1970) 1–8. Anthony Burgess's introduction to the Penguin edition ofA journal of the Plague Year (Harmondsworth 1966) provides a useful summary outline of Defoe's life and literary activities.
References to the ancient authors are as follows: Lucr.de rerum natura 6.1138–1251, DS 13.69–71, Verg.Georg. 3.478–566, Livyab urbe condita passim (see R.M. Ogilvie,A Commentary on Livy Books 1–5 [Oxford 1965] pp. 394–395), OvidMetamorphoses 7.523–613, ProcopiusWars 2.22–23. Raymond Crawfurd,Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford 1914) surveys the record of epidemic disease in European art and literature from Thucydides to the eighteenth centuryA.D. Among the ancient authors he discusses are: Thucydides, Lucretius, Diodorus Siculus, Galen, Oribasius, Procopius, Evagrius. Later authors include: Matteo Villani, Giovanni Boccaccio, Gui de Chauliac, Alessandro Manzoni, Nathaniel Hodges, Defoe, and Samuel Pepys. The strength of the literary tradition of plague description can be seen also in such works as Girolamo Fracastoro's famous Renaissance Latin poemSyphilis sive de morbo gallico, which, in the words of a recent modern editor and translator of the poem, uses “classical words” to “refer to unclassical facts” (see Geoffrey Eatough's edition, Liverpool 1984, p. 2).
On the special distinction of Thucydides' plague narrative, see Crawfurd (above, note 6: 23):Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford 1914) “To the historian, the physician, and the man of letters, the account given by Thucydides of the plague of Athens, in the course of the Peloponnesian War, must stand for all time as one of the most remarkable documents in the whole annals of pestilence”; and again (38): “To Thucydides then is due the credit not only of the first detailed description of an actual visitation of pestilence, but of a description that breathes in every line the true spirit of history... So vivid and so forcible is his picture of the plague, that it is difficult to believe that some ten years had elapsed before he set pen to paper, and some thirty or more before the whole attained its present form... Thucydides was the first to draw a picture of the demoralization of society in the presence of pestilence—a theme that became a commonplace with later historians of plague.”
On the reputation of Defoe's novel Crawfurd (above, note 6: 190)Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford 1914) states: “Of all the literature of pestilence none has been more widely read than Defoe'sJournal of the Plague Year: all later records take their colour from Defoe.” Thomas E. Keys, “The plague in literature” (Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 32 [1944] 35–56, at 51–52), pronounces a similar verdict: “Although the literature of the Great Plague of London of 1665 and the Marseilles epidemic of 1720, the pandemics that brought the cycle of the Black Death to a close, is voluminous, the popularization of these epidemics was the work of Daniel Defoe, and of all the published descriptions those of Defoe are still best remembered.”
Thucydides lived c. 455–395B.C.: see Hornblower (above, note 3: 1–4)Thucydides (Baltimore 1987). Defoe's dates of birth and death are more certain:A.D. 1660–1731 (Paula Backscheider,Daniel Defoe: His Life [Baltimore 1989]).
Hornblower (above, note 3: 1–4, and 153–190)Thucydides (Baltimore 1987), well summarizes what is known or can be reasonably reconstructed of Thucydides' family background and attitudes. A summary description of Defoe's family background, education, and attitudes can be found in Burgess (above, note 5). Anthony Burgess's introduction to the Penguin edition ofA Journal of the Plague Year (Harmondsworth 1966) provides a useful summary outline of Defoe's life and literary activities; Backscheider (above, note 9,Daniel Defoe: His Life [Baltimore 1989]) treats the subject more fully.
See the article by Holladay and Poole (above, note 1) “Thucydides and the plague of Athens,”Classical Quarterly 29 (1979), 282–300.
I am well aware that this application of modern terminology to writers from two eras remote from our own is anachronistic. At the time when Thucydides wrote his account of the Peloponnesian War the literary generes now called “history” and “historical fiction” had not been named nor had the boundary between them been clearly defined. It is symptomatic of this early stage in the development of historiography that the pioneer Greek historian, Herodotus, used the Greek termhistorie in a range of senses, none of which exactly corresponds to our definition of history, while Thucydides chose a totally different term,xungraphe (a “composition in writing”), to describe his work (see Hornblower [above, note 3: 7 and 12])Thucydies (Baltimore 1987). Xenophon'sCyropaedia, written several decades later than Thucydides' work, is usually taken as the earliest surviving example of what we would call “historical fiction” (see A. Momigliano,The Development of Greek Biography [Cambridge, MA 1971]: 54–55). Similarly, it is obvious that Defoe, though he might have used the same words, would not necessarily have understood the same thing by them as we do. But I still think both would have recognized a significant difference between the writing, in his own voice, of a third-person narrative of events that the author believed had happened to individuals who had really existed and the writing, using the voice of a fictitious individual, of a first-person narrative of events not all of which the author believed had really happened.
See Thuc. 2.48.4 for his experience of the Athenian plague, and the sources cited in note 9 for Defoe's experience of the London plague. In particular, Backscheider, chapter 5 (120–151), discusses Defoe's three historical novels.
See Hornblower (above, note 3: 3–4)Thucydides (Baltimore 1987), for the details concerning Thucydides' exile, which is reconstructed from Thuc. 4.104–107 and 5.26. On Defoe's business failures and legal struggles in the middle years of his life, see, e.g., Backscheider (above, note 9): 41–158)Daniel Defoe: his Life [Baltimore 1989]).
Hornblower (above, note 3: 3, 29, 79, and 82)Thucydides (Baltimore 1987), discusses possible cases in which Thucydides may have benefitted from sources of information that might have been inaccessible to him had he lived throughout the Peloponnesian War in Athens. On Defoe's exploitation of some of the experiences he gained as a result of his experience on the wrong side of the law, see Gregory Durston,Moll Flanders: An Analysis of an Eighteenth Century Criminal Biography (Chichester 1997), esp. 1–10.
Selections from Thucydides' plague description (Thuc. 2.47–54, 2.58, and 3.87) are taken from the translation by R. Crawley (J.H. Finley, Jr. [ed.],The Complete Writings of Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War [New York 1951]). Selections from Daniel Defoe'sjournal of the Plague Year are taken from the Penguin edition (edited by A. Burgess and C. Bristow, Harmondsworth 1986). They are numbered in the order of the pairs in which I have grouped them, texts from Thucydides in the series T1, T2, etc., those from Defoe in the series D1, D2, etc. Since an important difference between the two narratives (discussed below, pp. 205–212) concerns the degree of quantification each contains, in all the text excerpts all numbers (whether written in words or in symbols) have been highlighted in bold, while qualifying expressions attached to the numbers (e.g., “about”, “approximately”, “more than”, “less than”) are italicized.
Defoe's narrator states this purpose also on several other occasions: pp. 91–93, 134, 209–210.
Thucydides' description of the disease's physical symptoms continues on to the end of 49.8. In Defoe passages describing the symptoms of individuals are found, e.g., on pp. 74–75 and 175–176; other passages of summary description are on pp. 93–94, 99–100, 206–207, and 213.
See also Defoe, Defoe's narrator states this purpose also on several other occasions: p. 81.
The passage continues with more details of the manifestations of popular superstition.
On Defoe's non-conformist education and its implications for language study, see Burgess (above, note 5 Anthony Burgess's introduction to the Penguin edition ofA Journal of the Plague Year (Harmondsworth 1966) provides a useful summary outline of Defoe's life and literary activities: 8–9). Backscheider (above, note 9:Daniel Defoe: His Life [Baltimore 1989], 14–21). gives a detailed account of Defoe's education. John Robort Moore,Daniel Defoe, Citizen of the Modern World (Chicago 1958) 40, states, “[Defoe] had a working knowledge of Latin, possibly a very slight knowledge of Greek.”
Michael Silverthorne of McGill University has informed me in a private communication that Hobbes' translation of Thucydides (first published in 1629; first edition reprinted 1634 and 1648; second edition 1676; third edition 1723) “was not superseded until William Smith published his version in 1753.” It would thus have been the standard English translation available at the time when Defoe was writingA Journal of the Plague Year. Hobbes' version of Thucydides' description of the plague was republished in 1709 by Thomas Sprat (Thomas Sprat,The plague of Athens, which hapened in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, First described in Greek by Thucydides; then in Latin by Lucretius; Since attempted in English by ... Thomas Lord Bishop of Rochester, London 1709).
On the catalogue from the sale of Defoe's library, see Helmut Heidenreich (ed.),The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell: Olive Payne's Sales Catalogue (1731) (Berlin 1970). Item 202 in the catalogue reads as follows: “L'histoire de Thucydide et la guerre du Péloponnèse,... traduction de N. Perrot, [Paris] 1662.”
Heidenreich (note 23: VIII)The Libraries of Daniel Defoe and Phillips Farewell: Olive Payne's Sales Catalogue (1731) (Berlin 1970). endorses the judgment that Defoe was “an omnivorous reader,” remarking “[S]o wide a range of learning has probably been attained by few under the disadvantages he had himself pointed out... Nor was his learning of a superficial kind”; and again (XVIII), “It [sc., the wide range and variety of historical works contained in the sale catalogue] is symptomatic of the preoccupations of a writer who had made a few serious efforts at history himself [and] who reiterated that history and truth were his business.” Similarly, Backscheider (above, note 9: 72)Daniel Defoe: His Life [Baltimore 1989]). comments, “From his youth, Defoe was more interested in history than any other subject. His 1682Historical Collections shows him already widely read..., and in 1700 he tells his readers that he had read ‘all the histories of Europe, that are Extant in our Language, and some in other Languages’. “On the sources and methods applied to the composition ofA Journal of the Plague Year, see (e.g.) F. Bastian, “Defoe'sJournal of the Plague Year reconsidered”,Review of English Studies NS 16 (1965) 151–173; Michael Boardman,Defoe and the Uses of Narrative (New Brunswick, N.J. 1983) 66–99; and the article by Kay cited above, note 5.
Passages of theological comment by Defoe's narrator are found throughout the novel: e.g., pp. 37 (quoted above, D3, p. 199), 41 (interspersed among passages quoted in D10, above, p. 203), 50, 83–84, 86–87, 204–205. All the standard biographies discuss Defoe's own theological outlook and its manifestation inA Journal of the Plague Year: see Backscheider (above, note 5:135–144).
T11a. The same summer Hagnon, son of Nicias, and Cleopompus, son of Clinias, the colleagues of Pericles, took the armament of which he had lately made use, and went off upon an expedition against the Chalcidians in the direction of Thrace and Potidaea, which was still under siege. As soon as they arrived, they brought up their engines against Potidaea and tried every means of taking it, but did not succeed either in capturing the city or in doing anything else worthy of their preparations. For the plague attacked them here also, and committed such havoc as to cripple them completely, even the previously healthy soldiers of the former expedition catching the infection from Hagnon's troops; while Phormio andthe sixteen hundred men whom he commanded only escaped by being no longer in the neighbourhood of the Chalcidians. The end of it was that Hagnon returned with his ships to Athens, having lostone thousand and fifty out of four thousand heavy infantry in about forty days; though the soldiers stationed there before remained in the country and carried on the siege of Potidaea. [Thucydides 2.58.1–4]]
T11b. Summer was now over. The winter following, the plaguea second time attacked the Athenians; for although it had never entirely left them, still there had been a notable abatement in its ravages.The second visit lastedno less than a year, the first having lastedtwo; and nothing distressed the Athenians and reduced their power more than this.No less than four thousand four hundred heavy infantry in the ranks died of it andthree hundred cavalry, besides a number of the multitude that was never ascertained. [Thucydides 3.87.1–3]
See the articles by F. Bastian (above, note 24) “ and Kay (above, note 5). Anthony Burgess's introduction to the Penguin edition ofA Journal of the Plague Year (Harmondsworth 1966) provides a useful summary outline of Defoe's life and literary activities.
This is Crawley's rendering of the passage. A more exact translation of Thucydides' Greek (\(\mathop \alpha \limits^, \nu {\text{}}\xi {\text{}}\mathop \upsilon \limits^ \rho {\text{}}\tau o\varsigma \mathop \alpha \limits^, \rho \iota \theta \mu o\varsigma \)) would be “an unascertainable number.” Hornblower (above, note 1: “Thucydides and the plague of Athens,”Classical Quarterly 29 (1979), 494–495) translates, “it could never be discovered how many of the common people [died],” and comments, “Th[ucydides'] precise information reaches down only as far as the first three of the four Solonian classes.”
See Hornblower's comments on this passage of Thucydides (above, note 1: “Thucydides and the plague of Athen,,”Classical Quarterly 29 (1979), 255–257).
The English “slave” is regularly used to translate two different Greek terms, \(\mathop \alpha \limits^, \nu \delta \rho \mathop \alpha \limits^ \pi o\delta o\nu \) and\(\delta o\overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\upsilon } \lambda o\varsigma \), which originally had distinct meanings (the former denoting “one made a slave” [e.g., by capture in war], the latter “one born into some state of bondage”), although they came to be used interchangeably (see LSJ, 9th ed., s.vv.). The only passage in Thucydides mentioning a specific number of\(\mathop \alpha \limits^, \nu \delta \rho \mathop \alpha \limits^ \pi o\delta \alpha \) is 7.27.5, where “more than two myriads of slaves” are said to have deserted to the enemy as a result of the Peloponnesian occupation of Dekeleia. V.D. Hanson, “Thucydides and the desertion of Attic slaves during the Decelean War” (Classical Antiquity 11 [1992] 210–228) accepts the argument made by C. Rubincam, “Qualification of numerals in Thucydides” (American Journal of Ancient History 4 [1979] 77–95, at 85) that this statement of Thucydides was motivated largely by the historian's rhetorical purpose. Hanson argues, however, that the actual number “derives... from Thucydides' own rough perceptions of the theoretical number of rural slaves present in the Attic countryside” (227). There is likewise one passage (1.55.1) where a specific number of \(\delta o\overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\upsilon } \lambda o\iota \) is mentioned. In this case the location is Kerkyra, not Athens. Thucydides gives a precise number of women only at 2.78.3 (and, by implication, at 3.68.2), in his account of the siege of Plataia, where the minimal garrison left to hold the city is said to have included 120 women “bread-bakers” (σιτοποιοί), who were enslaved when the city capitulated. It is significant that these women are in effect part of a military operation. Thucydides mentions light-armed troops (ψιλλί) in 37 passages. In ten of these cases a number is specified either for the light-armed alone or for a group including light-armed as one of its components. In none of these passages are the precisely numbered light-armed troops Athenian. The fact that Athenian light-armed are numbered only in indefinite terms (\(\mathop o\limits^` \mathop \alpha \limits^{,} \lambda \lambda o\varsigma \mathop o\limits^{`} \mu \iota \lambda o\varsigma \psi \iota \lambda \overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\omega } \nu o\mathop \upsilon \limits^, \kappa \mathop o\limits^, \lambda \mathop \iota \limits^ \gamma o\varsigma \), 2.31.2;\(\pi o\lambda \lambda \alpha \pi \lambda \mathop \alpha \limits^ \sigma \iota o\iota \tau \overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\omega } \nu \mathop {\text{}}\limits^{\text{,}} \nu \alpha \nu \tau \mathop \iota \limits^ \omega \nu \), 4.94.1;\(\tau \overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\omega } \nu \psi \iota \lambda \overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\omega } \nu \tau \iota \nu \alpha \varsigma \), 6.52.2;\(\tau o\mathop \upsilon \limits^` \varsigma \psi \iota \lambda o\mathop \upsilon \limits^` \varsigma \tau o\mathop \upsilon \limits^` \varsigma \sigma \phi \overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\omega } \nu \kappa \alpha \mathop \iota \limits^` \tau \mathop o\limits^` \nu \mathop o\limits^{,} \chi \lambda o\nu \), 6.64.1;\(\tau \overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\omega } \nu \psi \iota \lambda \overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\frown}$}}{\omega } \nu \tau \iota \nu \alpha \varsigma \), 6.100.1) seems to me significant in the light of Thucydides' explicit statement, in his description of the battle of Delion (4.94.1), that Athens had not at that time (424B.C.) and did not develop any regularly trained light-armed troops.
The most authoritative discussion of the issue of the hoplikekatalogos is that of Mogens Hansen,Demography and Democracy: The Number of Athenian Citizens in the Fourth Century B.C. (Herning 1986) and “The number of Athenian hoplites in 431B.C.,”Symbolae Osloenses 56 (1981) 19–32. Hornblower (above, note 1: “Thucydides and the plague of Athens,”Classical Quarterly 29 (1979), 255–257) appears not completely completely convinced by Hansen's argument that there was no single formal hoplite register.
This is in no sense to deny that Thucydides makes significant use of literary devices shared with tragedians. The effective contrast between the horrors of the plague and the glorious idealism of the immediately preceding Funeral Oration has been often noted: see, e.g., A.W. Gomme,A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, Vol. 2 (Oxford 1956) 161; S. Hornblower (above, note 1: “Thucydides and the plague of Athens,”Classical Quarterly 29 (1979), 299); and especially C.W. MacLeod, “Thucydides and tragedy”=Collected Essays (Oxford 1983) 140–158, at 140–141, 145–146, and 157. But Thucydides does not “focalize” his narrative through a single participant's experience in the way that Defoe does in his novels such asRobinson Cursoe andA Journal of the Plague Year, which have a first-person narrator.
On Thucydides' reticence about his methods and sources, see Hornblower (above, note 3)Thucydides (Baltimore 1987), 34–44 and 75–109.
On Herodotos' frequent interventions into his narrative, see J. Marincola, “Herodotean narrative and the narrator's presence,” in: J. Peradotto and D. Boedeker (eds.),Herodotus and the Invention of History (=Arethusa 20. 1 and 2 [1987]), 121–138, esp. 121: “Unlike Thucydides, who for the most part confined his explanations of his method to a single chapter at the end of his preface and then suppresses his inquiringpersona, Herodotus' methodological statements are found scattered throughout his work, and, more significantly, he constantly employs a series of first-person remarks to indicate the stages of his inquiry.”
In the “Author's note” that precedes the beginning of his novel (Schindler's List [Harmondsworth 1983]), Keneally makes the following statement: To use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course that has frequently been followed in modern writing. It is the one I chose to follow here—both because the novelist's craft is the only one I can lay claim to, and because the novel's techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar. I have attempted, however, to avoid all fiction, since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar's stature. It has sometimes been necessary to make reasonable constructs of conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record. But most exchanges and conversations, and all events, are based on the detailed recollections of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews), of Schindler himself, and of other witnesses to Oskar's acts of outrageous rescue. The latter part of this paragraph clearly implies that in claiming that he had “avoided all fiction,” Schindler did not mean that he had avoided all use of novelistic devices or of imaginative reconstruction of conversation, but that all the events and conversations described in the novel rest to some degree on the recollections of witnesses. Paradoxically, Keneally's refusal to exploit to the full the licence of a novelist has provoked criticism in some quarters. Thus Breyan Cheyette, “The uncertain certainty of Schindler's List” (in Yosefa Loshitzky [ed.],Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List [Bloomington 1997] 226–238, at 228–229), writes, “[B]oth Spielberg and Keneally generate a representational uncertainty with regard to the ‘certainty’ of its supposed documentary form ... Keneally claims the truth of history to give his fiction more authority. The omniscient and self-confident narrative voice in Keneally's novel is only rarely troubled about facilely recreating the most intimate details of the past.”
The following historical works exemplify the treatment of the London plague of 1665 by a selection of writers from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries: Bishop Gilbert Burnet,History of His Own Time (London 1875; originally published 1679–1713 under the title,The History of the Reformation of the Church of England) 151–152; Richard Lodge,The History of England from the Restoration to the Death of William III (1660–1702) (New York 1969; originally published 1918) 74; Sir George Clark,The Later Stuarts 1660–1714 (2nd edition, Oxford 1961; originally published 1934) 65–66; David Ogg,England in the Reign of Charles II (2nd edition, Oxford 1956; originally published 1934) 291–295; Patrick Morrah,Restoration England (London 1979) 202–208. None of these five accounts deals with the plague in anything like the detail of Defoe's historical novel, although there are interesting differences between them in the amount and kins of detail they include. Burnet mentions the plague almost in passing, in a paragraph introduced by the statement, “England was at this time in a dismal state.” Lodge deals with the epidemic in a single paragraph, contrasting “the panic inspired by the great plague” with “the general exultation at the victory of June 3, 1665 over the Dutch fleet.” After remarking that “Mere figures give little idea of the horror excited by the frightful character of the disease itself, by the suddenness of the contagion, and by the recklessness which a sense of unavoidable peril engendered among the populace,” he proceeds to mention only two numbers: the peak of “over 7,00” dying per week reached in the autumn of 1665, and the total casualty figure of “‘about a hundred thousand souls’,” embedded in a quotation from Burnet (Burnet 1.390 cited in Lodge 74, note 4). An earlier note (3) gives the total of “deaths in London from the plague” in 1665 as 68, 596. The notes refer the reader to several more deailed sources for fuller information.
The history of scholarship regarding the historical accuracy of Defoe's novel is well summarized by F. Bastian (above, note 24) “ 151–156.
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Rubincam, C. Thucydides and Defoe: Two Plague narratives. Int class trad 11, 194–212 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02720032
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02720032