Of humanity's many pursuits, none can claim to have changed our world more than war. Since civilization began, it has forged nations, imposed cultural norms, popularized languages and redistributed wealth. It has created some empires while it ended others; it has elevated some gods while it smashed the idols of others. It has been the armory for technological advancement and the arsenal for democratic rights. For good and ill, for better and worse, war and its fickle fortunes have shaped all that we know and all that we hold dear. Few incidents in history provide as vivid an example of this principle than the great Peloponnesian war. Mr. Kagan's account demonstrates.
Launched in 431 BCE by an insignificant skirmish between minor players in ancient Greece and ended in 404 BCE with the destruction of the Athenian navy and the subsequent fall of the empire that floated it, the Peloponnesian War was a conflict that pitted the Delian League, lead by democratic Athens, against the Peloponnesian League, captained by oligarchical Sparta in a war for all of Greece. Though hostilities between these rival forces were halted on several occasions, their 27-year grudge match still managed to claim the lives of thousands of combatants, the freedoms of dozens of city states, the honorable civilizing customs of the Homerian age and the internal economies of all of the Greek powers. It began in Spartan fear and Athenian hope; it ended in the fall of Greece and the rise of Rome. Greece, with its philosophers and its innovators, its statesmen and their ideas, would never again occupy the center stage of human existence.
From Pericles to Lysander, from the tangled webs of Athenian politics to the exacting discipline of Spartan life, The Peloponnesian War is Mr. Kagan's simplified account of perhaps the most consequential conflict of the ancient world. Before Octavian and Brutus, before Caesar and Pompey, before Rome, there was Greece, a loose confederation of remarkable thinkers and warriors, statesmen and laborers who, at the height of their powers, drove the mighty Persian empire into the sea. They gave us science and mat, philosophy and culture. But this wisdom, this strength, was not enough to keep them from being tipped, by rivalry and envy, into barbarism, chaos and the end of all they held dear. Step by doomed step, Mr. Kagan reveals the events that cast Greece into shadow, paving the way for the rise of a new and familiar world.
Though plagued at times by the 2,500 years of change that stand between us and the apocalyptic events it chronicles, The Peloponnesian War is a challenging and rewarding read. Mr. Kagan, the Stirling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University, successfully translates ancient disputes and customs into a language comprehensible in the 21st century. Consequently, many of the actors in this most ancient drama spring to life from the pages of his dry text, fighting for dominance and victory in a warrior's world. But as much as the work lends skills and motives to individuals otherwise lost to the vicissitudes of time, its most enduring contribution comes from the extent to which it chronicles a war that seems shockingly similar to far more recent conflicts, particularly, World War I which was also launched by a relatively insignificant conflict and which was continued despite the participants being fully aware that it might well destroy the fabric of their societies. Such were the needs of honor that this reality seems to have been made secondary to the thirst for victory.
For all its value,The Peloponnesian War is troubled by a notable flaw. While, yes, Mr. Kagan is forced to reconstruct this most ancient war from only a handful of incomplete sources, he does very little to supplement the readers knowledge of the actors here with his own scholarly expertise. For instance, though he spends some time draping Pericles in honors and greatness, he does very little to explain why the Athenian statesman was held in such high regard. Thus, while we come to understand how these men and the powers they helmed came to rack and ruin, we understand them only shallowly, their motivations discarded in favor of seemingly endless rounds of negotiations, machinations and war. Moreover, Mr. Kagan does little to relate these events to our times, an addition that would have been decidedly welcome in a tome this long.
Fascinating work, but burdened by its relentless focus on the facts of the war in lieu of valuable context. (3/5 Stars)
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