Could the first recorded outbreak of the Ebola virus not have taken place in Africa forty years ago, but in ancient Greece over 2,400 years ago? An article in the Washington Post suggests that there is an archaic DNA in the virus (Was Ebola the culprit in the ancient Plague of Athens?). Most scholars believe that the first Ebola outbreak occurred in 1976 in Congo.

However, previous research suggests that Ebola dates back millennia and might have infected the ancestors of rodents at least 20 million years ago.

In a new study, Professor of history and infectious diseases at Michigan University Powel Harold Kazanjian, attempts to link the Ebola virus to the plague of Athens in classical Greece, an epidemic that began in 430 BC in the course of the Peloponnesian War. He argues that the symptoms, mortality rate and sub-Saharan Africa origin that describe the Plague of Athens are consistent with the virus of Ebola.

In fact, so brutal was the impact of the disease that it decimated Athens' then population of 300,000, and, to some, signalled classical Greece's end.

The disease is also called Thucydides’s syndrome because the historian was the first to record the symptoms after surviving the disease. The vivid descriptions of the disease’s debilitating symptoms by Thucydides allow historians and doctors to make comparisons with Ebola, without of course any certainties. Moreover, it is possible that the virus moved from Africa to Europe, was frequent even in antiquity.

Kazanjian draws attention to the lessons for the modern world from the ancient panic-stricken response to the plague:
Thucydides noted that fear compounded the damage caused by the disease itself, and exacerbated its spread as people crowded together in panic, giving perspective to today’s observations about how fear and panic about Ebola hamper efforts to control the spread of the disease, according to Kazanjian.