“Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins”, by J.E. Lendon

576 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465015061 

The last book by J.E. Lendon that I reviewed (on December 29^th, 2015) was Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, a history of the battle tactics of the ancient Greeks and Romans. So who better to delve into the most famous wars of the ancient world, which he does in Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins? As Lendon points out in the introduction, the ancient world is very alien to us all-knowing moderns – “a strange and alien past” as he puts it – and so we must not treat these people as displaced moderns who think and feel as we do. Just as we shouldn't hold foreign peoples to our standards of morality or principles, neither should we hold ancient peoples to our same standards. They were so very different from us, and in some ways cannot fathom them or theirs. Not that we shouldn’t try.

And Lendon makes sure that his ideas and conclusions about these alien peoples are well-supported by a full panoply of footnotes and an extensive bibliography. Just as importantly, he gives us a full chronology the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC (while being careful to delineate when said chronology isn’t very clear), a listing of important people, places and things and, perhaps most importantly, a glossary of all of those untranslatable but all-important Greek words that matter. When all of these many moving parts are set within their proper, ancient, context, the First Peloponnesian War becomes the tale of the all-pervading Greek social concepts of honor, revenge and humiliation, each of which is a crucial social construct that stretches back to the time of the Iliad, the all-important Greek epic poem that lends its (paraphrased) opening lines to Lendon’s book.

This last bit is important, for Lendon begins his history long before the First Peloponnesian War ever starts, as he gives an overview of the relative histories of Athens and Sparta before giving a synopsis of the Greco-Persian Wars of 499-449 BC and their impact on Greece in order to showcase how they ultimately led to the ancient Cold War between perhaps the two most important of the Greek city-states. Using this over-arching cultural framework, Lendon explains just when and how First Peloponnesian War erupted and the tactics used by the belligerents and their ultimate goals. The reason that Lendon uses this approach in his work is to emphasize that which previous histories seemed to emphasize over everything else; namely, the overarching economic and strategic interests of all of the powers involved.

Song of Wrath explains not only the where, what and how of the first decade of the First Peloponnesian War, it explains the why, which is this: that it was just as much a war of honor and status with all of the illogical and irrational dynamics this implies.