The latest episode of our coronavirus podcast features Tom Holland on the plague that changed the course of ancient history. Holland is a historian, novelist, and the best-selling author most recently of Dominion, a history of the revolution Christianity wrought in world history. He is also the translator of a widely acclaimed version of Herodotus’s Histories. We spoke with him about another chronicler of the ancient world, Thucydides — who detailed how a plague almost destroyed Athens in his History of the Peloponnesian War — and what we moderns can learn from Thucydides on this question.