The Peloponnesian War-War
Okay, I thought it might be cool to characterize my relationship with Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War as a war, ergo, the War-War.
I'm sure there must've been days there when the place-names and the people-names were such a blur, that I considered the reading somewhat as a war.
Never-the-less, I've been missing my war ever since I closed its final pages... That the war ended seems something of a Greek Tragedy. And yet, well, history echoes.
The amazing thing is how modern the greek world was. Of course distances were miniaturized but that's sort of the point. But in reality, they were a world engaged in new technology, the trieme, and trying to use it to expand their philosophy. Sometimes the parallels with 2008 are actually jaw-dropping. And considering the reverses of time, makes me a little less pessimistic about our own times, however pessimistic our own times might be. (Slightly smiley face...).
I'm sure there must've been days there when the place-names and the people-names were such a blur, that I considered the reading somewhat as a war.
Never-the-less, I've been missing my war ever since I closed its final pages... That the war ended seems something of a Greek Tragedy. And yet, well, history echoes.
The amazing thing is how modern the greek world was. Of course distances were miniaturized but that's sort of the point. But in reality, they were a world engaged in new technology, the trieme, and trying to use it to expand their philosophy. Sometimes the parallels with 2008 are actually jaw-dropping. And considering the reverses of time, makes me a little less pessimistic about our own times, however pessimistic our own times might be. (Slightly smiley face...).
posted by quantom qurkington at 8:20 PM
2 Comments:
I've not read Donald Kagan's book(s), but from other things I've read about ancient Greece the places seemed very strange, very un-modern. I think it's the individual historian's prerogative to emphasize the strangeness or familiarity of the time he or she is writing about.
On the other hand, I very much liked Thucydides's history of the Peloponnesian war, and I remember thinking how very modern it sounded.
FYI, Kagan relied heavily on Thucydides so perhaps that's where the 'modern' feeling came from. And perhaps modern isn't the correct word. It's just that I could see a lot of our present day way of thinking in the Athenians. And of course the idea of a democracy that thinks of itself as being superior to virtually every other nation and one that invests in (and loses) foreign wars for profit sounded very familiar. Obviously, slavery, spartan government, and neighbors killing neighbors didn't sound very modern, but the fact that a good part of the war was over political ideology - democracy vs oligarchy - rather struck me as more modern than imperial wars that followed. In reality we all can probably consider ourselves progeny of the Athenian democracy. And actually this argument of oligarch vs democracy. Reality is that we all (americans, though more so the world) live in a democratic oligarchy.
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