Peloponnesian War, The

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

Author Biography: Donald Kagan is Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University and the recipient of a National Humanities Medal for 2002. He is the author of many books and articles on a wide range of subjects.

SYNOPSIS

Giving all due respect to Thucydides, Kagan (classics and history, Yale U.) decided that a new account was needed of the three-decade war between the Athenian Empire and the Spartan Alliance at the end of the fifth century BC that changed the Greek world and its civilization forever. He includes maps both of regions and of specific battles. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

In his preface Kagan speaks of his intention to produce ''a readable narrative.'' One feature that makes it eminently readable is its division into short chapters, which facilitates reference and selection. It is also handsomely furnished with something essential to a history of this war: maps, over a score of them, all clearly printed and complete and situated just where you need them. It is the final element in the construction of what he aims at: ''a readable narrative in a single volume to be read by the general reader.'' — Bernard Knox

The Los Angeles Times

No one writing the history of the Peloponnesian War today can afford to ignore the various historical enigmas sketched here, above all those with an economic basis. Yet at the same time it remains an inescapable truth that, like it or not, our efforts will always be, to a great extent, predetermined by Thucydides' version of events. This was certainly true of the four masterly monographs, combining sharp analysis with dramatic narrative, that Kagan devoted to the war between 1969 and 1987, and from which his present account has been skillfully streamlined into one volume. He shows rather less uncritical approval for Thucydides than he once did, and a generation of scholarship has at many points modified his views; but what he gives us is still, in essence, a Thucydidean narrative, which provides the best account now available of the course of hostilities. — Peter Green

The Washington Post

Drawing on incomparable knowledge as a classicist, international relations theorist and military historian, Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale and author of a previous, four-volume study of the Peloponnesian War, now has devoted a single volume to guiding us through that epic of miscalculation, hubris and strategic overreach, supplying supplemental observations and correctives to Thucydides' classic History of the Peloponnesian War. — Douglas Porch

Publishers Weekly

Beginning in 1978, Kagan's publication of the four-volume History of the Peloponnesian War established him as the leading authority on that seminal period in Greek history. Despite its accessible writing style, however, the work's formidable length tended to restrict its audience to the academic community. This single volume, based on the original's scholarship but incorporating significant new dimensions, is intended for the educated general reader. Kagan, a chaired professor of classics and history at Yale, describes his intention to offer both intellectual pleasure and a source of the wisdom so many have sought by studying this war. On both aims he succeeds admirably. The war between the Athenian Empire and the Spartan Alliance, fought in the last half of the 5th century B.C., was tragedy. Fifty years earlier, the united Greek states had defeated the Persian Empire and inaugurated an era of growth and achievement seldom matched and never surpassed. The Peloponnesian War, however, inaugurated a period of brutality and destruction unprecedented in the Greek world. Like the Great War in 1914-1918, participants recognized even while the fighting went on that things were changing utterly. The contemporary history written by Thucydides is the best source for this complex story, but not the only one, and much of the value of this work lies in Kagan's brilliant contextualization of his ancient predecessor's work. The volume's ultimate worth, however, lies in the perceptive, magisterial judgment Kagan brings to his account of the war that ended the glory that was ancient Greece. Kagan gives us neither heroes and villains nor victors and victims. What infuses his pages is above all a sense of agency: men making and implementing decisions that seemed right at the time however they ended. Such lessons will not be lost on contemporary readers, who can discuss them with the author on his six-city tour. (On sale May 12) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs