Athens and Sparta and the War of Rank in Ancient Greece: An Interview with J.E. Lendon
- Athens and Sparta and the War of Rank in Ancient Greece: An Interview with J.E. Lendon
IN SONG OF WRATH: THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR BEGINS (Basic Books, 2010) Jon E. Lendon combines military and cultural history to tell the story of the origins and first decade of the Peloponnesian War (431–421 B.C.). He portrays the war as a duel over honor marked by a series of acts of destruction and revenge. He also challenges those who would read Thucydides as the progenitor of “a realist theory of international relations narrowly grounded in power.” Lendon is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (Yale University Press, 2005). Senior editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Lendon in September 2011.
Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of Song of Wrath?
It’s another damn book about the Peloponnesian War! And it’s not even about the whole Peloponnesian War, just about its origins and the first ten years of fighting—what the ancients called the Archidamian War (431–421 B.C.). And even so it’s 566 pages long.
What prompted you to write the book?
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In illustrated relief of Thucydidies from The History of Thucydides, trans. S. T. Bloomfield (London, 1829).
Love of the events and their original teller, Thucydides? Ancient history is not like most other branches of history. You work with published sources. You don’t go to archives, but you rely for the most part on works of Greek and Roman historians that were preserved through the Middle Ages at least as much for their high aesthetic value as for the stories they told. Becoming a classicist is the process of falling in love with one or more of those authors. Your teachers parade the authors before you, you spend hours and days and months reading them (not least because Latin and Greek are hard) and some you end up hating (like Terence in my case, that miserable old bore!), and others end up putting a fish hook in your soul from which you can never thrash your way free. And your teachers, of course, nudge you. I was a student of Donald Kagan, a man who quite innocently left his students in no doubt that of all the Great Books, Thucydides had written the greatest.
So I’ve wanted to write about the Peloponnesian War since I was an undergraduate. But the reasons why I wrote this book now are less poetic. I’ve long been interested in the culture of ancient foreign relations, and particularly the role played by revenge. I’d always imagined that I’d write about revenge in Roman foreign affairs, but my friend Susan Mattern got there first with her Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate (University of California Press, 1999), which says pretty well everything I wanted to say about Rome. Luckily, I was trained to be ambidextrous in Roman and Greek history, so it wasn’t much trouble to move to the Greek side.
What good luck! What a favor Susan did me! Because like many middle-aged historians I had discovered that purely analytical history rather bores me. It enforces dogmatic, mechanical thinking and dull writing. But if you consider the historians’ craft to some degree a branch of belles-lettres, you need a story to tell. From a purely practical standpoint, the Peloponnesian War is one of the few epochs in ancient history well enough reported that you can write a continuous narrative about it without constantly droning on about why we think we know what we think we know. But more important, what a story! What triumph! What pathos! What characters! The grim, unbending Pericles; the wise, dutiful Spartan king Archidamus; the dreadful demagogue Cleon; the Athenian general Demosthenes, the Odysseus of his age; the charismatic Brasidas, general of Sparta, who marched north into the snows of Thrace with a scratch army of mercenaries and freed helots and saved Sparta from defeat in the war! I know...
