Review: "Thucydides - The Reinvention of History"

(Wall Street Journal) - Without Thucydides the war (or wars) fought
between the Greek states of Athens and Sparta late in the fifth
century B.C. would have been no more significant than many another
long war (or wars) whose start dates, end dates, causes and characters
might (or might not) have been discussed by future historians. Only
because of Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" (Wikipedia:
http://xrl.us/PeloponnesianWar ) — with his radical claims of
exercising a new rationality and, most grandiloquently, of writing a
"thing for all time" — did a typically messy military contest based on
money, influence, bloody-mindedness and happenstance become
interpreted and reinterpreted as though it were a religious
revelation. Communists and anticommunists, leftists and neocons,
anti-imperialists and empire builders have all fought to recruit the
great Athenian as their ally.

Donald Kagan, a veteran Yale professor of classics and ancient
history, has himself taken part in these arguments for almost a
half-century. His own four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is
a classic of modern scholarship. Now, with "Thucydides: The
Reinvention of History," (Amazon.com: http://xrl.us/Thucydides ) Mr.
Kagan has produced what reads like the last word on the man, a nuanced
and subtle account of a subject that has so often been treated in a
spirit of high partisanship..

Continued: http://xrl.us/Thucydides2
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Tiglath (29.10.2009 18:03)