The Greek historian Thucydides survived and later documented a plague which devastated Athens in the early 420's BCE. As he witnessed his son's death, Cantacuzenus carefully documented bubonic plague in much the same way his classical prototype had described the symptoms of the Athenian epidemic nearly two millennia earlier. Clearly the weight of history rested heavy on Cantacuzenus' shoulders, as indeed it did all Byzantines by then. Their civilization was flickering out—the dying embers of the ancient world—and the Black Death did little but hasten its extinction.

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