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I contracted the plague in Athens in 430 BC and survived. I watched thirty thousand people die in a city already under siege, and I wrote down what I saw: the symptoms, the social breakdown, the abandonment of law and custom when people believed they would not live to face consequences.

I survived in order to write. This is the only explanation I could find for my survival, and I treated it as an obligation. The plague chapter is not a digression in the History of the Peloponnesian War. It is the argument: that plague and war are the same thing, that civilisation is not a permanent achievement but a perpetual performance, and that it can stop at any time.