A model of clarity and exposition A MUST READ IF AN HISTORY BUFF!

books:

	• The Peloponnesian War Donald Kagan Penguin (Non-Classics), 2004 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 44 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A model of clarity and exposition A MUST READ IF AN HISTORY BUFF!

I bough GATES OF FIRE. (A long, long time ago...)
I read and enjoyed.
THEN I went on and bought TIDES OF WAR... and was flabbergasted... what a flop!... I was thoroughly disgusted with Alcibiades and the rest... really I just thought they were mad... but curiosity made me dig on and SO I discovered this book!

This is an History book which reads as the BEST historical fiction (with very little fiction to say the least) but it is also WELL WRITTEN and a model of clarity on a very complex subject...

The author is an academic on the period... but also loves to tell the tale in the most possibly affordable level... I WAS DELIGHTED WITH IT...
and still is in a place of honor on my shelves...

WELL DONE!

ADB

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A great book on a complex war...

The Peloponnesian War is one of the first true world wars, as the Greek city-states covered the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea from Spain to the Middle East. They had colonies in Italy and dealings with Carthage. They even had relations with the Persian Empire. So when Athens and Sparta went to war they took everybody with them.
The war is a complex one, yet Donald Kagan is able to explain it, without losing any of the military details or human passion. Nor does he seem to talk down to the reader. He knows his stuff, he loves it and he wants you to love it too. From sea battles in the Aegean Sea to the campaigns in Sicily, he explains tactics, major political decisions, problems of logistics, and the choices both sides had. Flaws and merits of the leaders are examined and the importance of the events that happened is also spread out for all to see. History is presented as a history of human beings, with their fears, dreams, and hates.
This is a must for anybody interested in military history, ancient history or Greek history.

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A wonderful history, plus lessons for our own time

Donald Kagan has taken 2500-year-old accounts written by Thucydides and others and produced a book that succeeds on two levels. First, it provides an excellent if slightly dry history of the war that led to the collapse of the Athenian empire. We learned a lot about Athens in school, and in Western world we view it as the birthplace of democracy. Kagan explains why Athens and Sparta went to war and stayed at war long past the point of exhaustion. He also explains how the various Greek cities grasped for power when the two Greek superpowers locked horns. He even manages to explain the budget issues facing Athens -- as in how many talents of silver it took to keep a war galley at sea for a year.

We also learn a great deal about how Sparta and other Greek cities worked, and how they managed to stumble into a 10-year conflict that emptied Athens' treasury. The history is written in a very matter-of-fact style that some make think is a too dry, but adding emotion to a 2500-year-old story would seem artificial to me.

The book succeeds in a second valuable way. It explains diplomacy as few historians do, largely by example. Kagan provides explanations for each of the major decisions made by the cities of Greece during (and before) the war. Countries don't always behave logically, and the logic that does exist in often hidden from an outsider's view. In the process of explaining what Athens and Sparta did, Kagan illustrates the mechanism by which decisions were arrived at. In the process and without mentioning it himself, he tells us a great deal about how foreign policy is arrived at today.

Democracy is supposed to work better than any other form of government, and it probably does. So it's not particularly reassuring to see that an ancient proto-democracy blundered so many times because of the influence of individual leaders with their own agendas. But it sure is educational.

So... read it for the history of ancient Greece, and come away with a better understanding of our own times.

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Chaos Made Comprehensible

My interest in the Athens/Sparta civil war (431-404 BC) came from an historical novel (Tides of War-Steven Pressfield) and a military history (A War Like No Other-Victor Davis Hanson). A fascinating yet highly confusing conflict that seesawed back and forth over three decades. I needed a chronological account to bring it all together and picked Kagan based on Hanson's recommendation.

What a well written book, with many superb maps. A true scholar (four volumes for the academics) who wrote this single volume for the layman. He takes things in order, puts everything in context and describes the strategies and tactics concisely and lucidly. Exactly what I was looking for.

Read this book, then Pressfield and Hanson, and you'll have a grounding in this still highly relevant 2,400 year old brutal struggle between a direct democracy and a martial oligarchy.

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The Athenians Win The Paper War Again

Donald Kagan is an acknowledged master-historian of the Peloponnesian War, the great struggle between Athens on one side and Lacedaemon (led by Sparta) and Boeotia (led by Thebes) on the other. The war lasted 29 years (counting only the direct involvement of Athens) and in many ways has the same status for classical Greece that WW2 has for modern history - the world (meaning the Eastern Mediterranean, for the earlier conflict) was never the same afterwards. Kagan has written the currently definitive four-volume scholarly history; this is the lightweight version for general readers - the main text is a mere 490 pages. I bought it hoping to get a fresh slant on a subject I first touched about 45 years ago. That was perhaps optimistic; this is a field that has been ploughed over by historians for over 2,400 years, starting even before the dust had settled on the battlefields. In short, I was disappointed; there is little here that one could not have got from Grote a hundred and fifty years ago (he was a little before my time, but we had him in the school library). To be fair, the material is comprehensive (at that length it ought to be) and lucidly presented; anyone simply wanting a narrative in one volume and modern English could hardly do better.

What it does not do is challenge in any way the long-standing presupposition that, overall, the Athenians were the White Hats and the Lacedaemonians and Boeotians were the Baddies. This bias goes all the way back to the time of the War itself, and stems fundamentally from the fact that Athens had all the best writers - indeed, nearly all the writers, full stop. Above all, Athens had Thucydides, an only moderately successful general but a historian of genius and a participant in the events, on whom all subsequent generations (Kagan included) have drawn greedily. It is in some ways a satisfactory irony that, even once, history was written by the defeated, but that is not necessarily preferable to having it written by the victors, as the ongoing controversy over Japanese history of WW2 demonstrates. What is surprising, though, is that even at this late date western historians should buy wholesale into the Athenian version. We graduates of the 20th century should have learned a little scepticism by now, for the claim of Athens to be the fount of freedom really does look a little thin on dispassionate examination. There's the matter of democracy, for example. To be sure, Athens was one of the most democratic states in Greece, which means probably in the world - but the claim rests on an enfranchised percentage that was about the same as apartheid South Africa's, and with about as much benevolence towards the under-classes. That probably looked excitingly radical to many 18th- and even 19th-century westerners (the ones who really fell in love with the Athens thing), but I believe we can set the bar a little higher these days. That was Athens at home; Athens abroad looks a lot worse. The USA has been much vilified since 1945, often with justice, but it never tried to convert NATO into a tribute-paying empire, nor did it nuke, say, Finland for refusing to sign up. The Athenians did the exact parallel of both these things when they turned the Delian League into a hegemony (using their former allies' taxes to aggrandise and beautify their own city) and massacred and enslaved the Melians when they declined to contribute. Alongside that, the Athenians' catastrophic adventurism in Sicily and their judicial murder of their own (victorious) generals after Arginusae are almost peccadillos.

Kagan does not pull any punches when describing Athenian actions, but he still resolutely refuses to draw any new conclusions (in this book, at least) about the nature of the Athenian state or the Athenians' view of, and actions towards, their fellow Greeks. I guess it's too late (by a couple of millennia) to hope for the discovery of writings from Sparta or Thebes that would tell the story from the other side, far less from any of the smaller states that were trampled as the elephants fought. I believe, though, that the time is over-ripe to critically review the notion that the Athenians were the Greeks par excellence, and that their downfall merits a furtive (or any) tear. They had it coming.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

For three decades in the fifth century b.c. the ancient world was torn apart by a conflict that was as dramatic, divisive, and destructive as the world wars of the twentieth century: the Peloponnesian War. Donald Kagan, one of the world?s most respected classical, political, and military historians, here presents a new account of this vicious war of Greek against Greek, Athenian against Spartan. The Peloponnesian War is a magisterial work of history written for general readers, offering a fresh examination of a pivotal moment in Western civilization. With a lively, readable narrative that conveys a richly detailed portrait of a vanished world while honoring its timeless relevance, The Peloponnesian War is a chronicle of the rise and fall of a great empire and of a dark time whose lessons still resonate today.

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