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177 Whenever I Am Called to Defend the Importance of My Job And Book Reviews 177 Jennifer T. Roberts, (2017) The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece. New York: Oxford University Press. xxviii + 416 pages. ISBN: 9780199996643 (hbk), $34.95. Whenever I am called to defend the importance of my job and the relevance of ancient history (something I have to do all too often these days), I revert back to Thucydides, who wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War to be a ‘pos- session for all time’. According to the ‘human thing’, or kata to anthrōpinon in the Greek, Thucydides thought that the motivations and personalities – along perhaps with the events themselves – of the Peloponnesian War would hap- pen time and time again throughout human history. I think that Thucydides is more or less right, and that aside from offering a powerful and provocative lit- erary meditation on a specific conflict and set of characters, he sheds light on the human condition like few other authors have, making his work eminently applicable today. I am heartened, therefore, to find that Jennifer T. Roberts takes a similar view of Thucydides and the war he recorded. In the preface to her book, Roberts makes a passionate case for the con- tinuing relevance of the Peloponnesian War, starting with her own father’s wartime experiences and surveying the many other works – academic and popular – that have compared Thucydides’ war to the modern world. But, be- fore beginning her readable history of the Peloponnesian War geared mostly to the newcomer to that period of Greek history, Roberts argues at the outset that, invaluable as his work is, Thucydides ought now to be ‘uncoupled’ from the his- tory of the war (p. xiv). This is so because, while Thucydides and his literary successor Xenophon conceived of the Peloponnesian War as a twenty-seven- year conflict (431-404 BCE), other, less well-known ancient authors thought the true end of the war was not until the Battle of Cnidus, a decade later in 394. Roberts goes even further than this, suggesting that the Battle of Leuctra in 371, when Spartan power was broken for good by Thebes and its brilliant general Epaminondas, marked the real end of the conflict. The nearly continuous war- fare among the Greeks between 431-371, despite the many shifts in alliances and coalitions, and the standard ancient and modern periodization that sug- gests several distinct wars, should be seen as one long war, defined by conflict between Athens and Sparta (and their respective allies) but perhaps most of all by Sparta’s diplomatic ineptitude and social dysfunction. As a book for general readers, The Plague of War contains many useful en- hancements to Roberts’s standard narrative of the Peloponnesian War. After a timeline and note on the sources (treating primarily the literary sources alone, rather than expanding to include epigraphy and archaeology to any great extent), Roberts provides a stimulating introductory discussion followed © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/20512996-12340203 178 Book Reviews by two chapters to set the war in historical context. Considerable attention is paid to the question of whether or not the war was inevitable, as Thucydides seems to imply. This debate has been ongoing since at least the nearly simul- taneous publication of Donald Kagan’s The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Cornell, 1969) and G.E.M. de Ste. Croix’s The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (Cornell, 1972). Roberts answers this question in the negative: there were several ways to avoid war right up to the formal start of the conflict. The bulk of the volume consists of a history of the war between Athens and Sparta, com- plete with informative discussions of battles, tactics and strategy, and further afield topics concerning politics, society, and culture. The sections focused on military events contain many useful maps – the inclusion of John Hale’s fig- ures for the naval battles being especially effective. Roberts includes plenty of engaging vignettes about some of this period’s most interesting characters and scandals, including the checkered and entertaining careers of the Athenian bad-boy, Alcibiades, and the energetic and controversial Spartan general Lysander. Though Athens was forced to surrender to Sparta in 404, and though the Greek states continued to fight incessantly even after that, Roberts digresses from her main historical account to provide her readers lessons on the cul- tural and intellectual dynamism of the fourth century, especially as seen in the career of Plato and the remarkable persistence and development of Athenian democracy. The fourth century BCE has for several years now enjoyed a re- newed interest among the scholarly community, a correction of the long-held misperception that that the Greek ‘golden age’ came to an end with the ex- ecution of Socrates in 399. That said, Roberts does explore the ways in which Socrates’ trial reflects the very real societal strain and political upheaval, as evi- denced by the brief reign of the Thirty Tyrants, experienced by the Athenians after they surrendered to Sparta. Roberts’s last full chapter explores the con- tinuing conflicts between the Greeks up to the Battle of Leuctra in 371, which she sees as the truly decisive event in the fraught relationship between Sparta and the rest of the Greek world. The book ends with an epilogue re-stating her position that the Peloponnesian War extended well beyond 404 and was due most of all to miscalculations on both sides and weaknesses inherent to the Spartan system, primarily demographic decline and diplomatic incompe- tence. A section on the cast of characters and a useful glossary will do much to help readers sort through the endless Greek names and terms sprinkled throughout the narrative. So, is Roberts right? Were Thucydides and Xenophon and most of their readers wrong to see the Peloponnesian War as a conflict contained within the twenty-seven years between 431-404? We should first of all commend Roberts Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek AND ROMAN Political Thought 36 (2019) 167-190.
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