Damocles could enlist in the army and join one of the incessant minor wars of Dionysius, but he’d probably get nicked in battle and die of infection or tetanus. There’s a damn good chance he’d croak of dysentery without ever leaving the camp-tents. Homer’s war-brags don’t talk about sickness much, but it’s there all right. There’s even a killer plague of the period called "the sweats" which Thucydides talks about in his histories; it once killed off half of Athens. Nobody knows what kind of disease "the sweats" was or where it came from. We’d just better hope it never comes back.