The earliest account of disease in Greek literature appears in the opening episode of Homer’s Iliad which was composed sometime in the 8th century BCE. The god Apollo sent a plague among the Greek army before Troy in punishment for Agamemnon’s insulting the priest Chryses when he came to ransom his captured daughter. According to Homer, at the onset of the plague, Apollo only shot his arrows at mules and dogs in the camp and then later at the Greek soldiers themselves (Iliad I.9ff). What Homer describes is a highly communicable disease with acute fever, sudden in onset and rapidly fatal, such as easily might attack an army; although no symptoms are mentioned explicitly, nor are any recoveries. After the Greeks appeased Apollo with sacrfices and by the return of the girl, they set about cleansing the camp by throwing “defilements” into the sea. This suggests that part of the disease was a severe dysentery exacerbated by battlefield conditions.

In mythology, the arrows of Apollo and his twin sister Artemis are often a symbol for the sudden onset of disease. The myth of Niobe illustrates this point. Niobe was a mortal woman who boasted that she was superior to Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, because she had borne seven sons and seven daughters as opposed to Leto’s two children. As punishment for this insult to their mother, Apollo shot all seven sons with arrows and Artemis shot all seven daughters. Not only was Niobe robbed of the source of her pride, but she was forced to watch all fourteen die in rapid succession as she tried to shield them from the deadly allegorical darts with her own body.

Arrows not only cause disease, but heal it as well. In this capacity, Apollo was called by the name Paean, once a distinct god, whom he absorbed into himself. Apollo was also father of the healing god Asclepius, whose cult was widespread in the Greek world.

In Homer’s Iliad, Apollo is addressed with his epithet Apollo Smintheus, or “Apollo the Mouse God”. The Greeks associated Apollo with mice and so prayed to him under that name because they recognized that rodents were vectors of disease, although they did not realize that it was actually the microorganisms on the fleas on the rodents and not the rodents themselves that were harmful. They recognized the correlation between plague and rodent infestation and so prayed to Apollo Smintheus to abate plagues.

A famous passage in Thucydides’ History describes the plague that gripped Periklean Athens during the Peloponnesian War (II.47.3-54.5). The vivid picture of the plague and the toll it took on its victims and Athens in general inspired other authors in antiquity who treated similar topics, such as Sophocles’ Oedipos Tyrannos and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (Book V).

Greek myth is often merely an allegory for an historical event. One of the canonical Twelve Labors of Hercules involved ridding the swampy district of Lernea of a multi-headed serpent known as the Lernean Hydra. Every time Hercules cut off one of the serpent’s heads, two more grew in its place. Archaeologists believe this myth actually commemorates an historical plague which devastated the population of ancient Lernea. The rapid spread of whatever sickness gripped the region corresponds to the duplicating heads of the serpent.