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Book Review - The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

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Column: Publications, by Nikolaos Markoulakis at Volume 1 no. 3 | GetCITED | CiteULike |

The Peloponnesian War. Perennial; ISBN: 0007115067.
By Donald Kagan .

 

The Synopsis of Donald Kagan’s book linkage Stalingrad with the Peloponnesian War on the concepts of “an immensely readable, brilliant, brutal and vivid history of the greatest and bloodiest war of ancient Greece.” Indeed the Peloponnesian War was ‘brutal’ and one of the greatest and bloodiest civil wars in ancient Greece, however, until now I fail to find a connection with the battle of Stalingrad.

The Peloponnesian War, a war fought in between the two major city-states of Greece at that time, the oligarchic Sparta and democratic Athens. Kagan tries to present the events, the reasons and results of the war to an extreme weight. He continually gives links of this ancient civil war to modern times ‘bloodsheds’ with sometimes-extreme indications. He claims that it was a horrific and savage conflict between the Greek city-states that altered the way of the Greek living.

Kagan considers that “two uncompromising empires fought a war of survival from diametrically opposing political, social and cultural positions, the seemingly invincible glory of Athens crumbles in tragedy.” However, here we can argue that Sparta was not an empire at that time as on the other hand Athens and its league. He clearly expresses his academic point in the main body of the book by arguing that the “Athenian culture and politics were unmatched in originality and fertility, and is still regarded as one of the peak achievements of Western civilisation,” and in the end all those achievements were eventually “lost to this bloody conflict.” What I do not like is the poorly stated argument of the Athenian cultural power. He claims that the “dramatic poets […] raised tragedy and comedy to a level never surpassed; architects and sculptors were at work on the Acropolis; natural philosophers like Anaxagoras and Democritus were exploring the physical world, and philosophers like Socrates were dissecting the realm of human affairs.” On the previously mentioned statements, I cannot see the reality or the connection with the Peloponnesian War.

Dramatic poetry existed during and after the war even brighter than ever. The Acropolis was a ‘work’, which started before the Delian league, and Socrates became “great” after the end of the war. “All of this was [not] lost to this bloody conflict.” Though Kagan illustrates remarkably the ability to interpret ancient events “as a part of the universality of human experience.” He is evolving both the ancient world and the wars of the 20th century in a storytelling writing material that is not as academic based as we expected. The book in general is an easy reading and is accessible to all kind of readers who wish to learn and understand in a more narrow way the events of the Peloponnesian War.

Reviewed by N. Markoulakis

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