J. E. Lendon had a very curious upbringing””a Canadian, he was born in Lebanon and grew up in Japan””the memory of which he has tried to obliterate with a quite conventional academic career: he got his B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale, began teaching at MIT, and is now a Professor of History at The University of Virginia. He is the author of Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World, Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, and Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins, featured in his Rorotoko interview. All of which is to show, in different ways, how futile his attempts have been to escape his exotic childhood.
Most of the nutshells in this book end up broken: there is much fighting. Song of Wrath tells the story of the origins and course of the Archidamian War between Athens and Sparta (431 BC-421 BC), the first of the several wars that made up ancient Greece’s great Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC).The subject of the book is strategy and statesmanship, and my purpose is to show that these are grounded in culture—that different societies pursue different objectives in their foreign relations, and pursue them, including in war, in idiosyncratic ways.The lesson of the book is that culture gets people killed. And some of the aspects of culture that got people killed in ancient Greece are very similar to those that that drive modern states and individuals to violence, especially in Asia and the Middle East.No less important, Song of Wrath aspires to tell its story well. I intended the book to be literary history as it was known before history became the property of college professors. Song of Wrath was a pleasure to write, and I hope it will be a pleasure to read.
J. E. Lendon Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins Basic Books566 pages, 9 1/4 x 6 1/8 inches ISBN 978 0465015061
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