The Peloponnesian War, Kagan
3.0 Stars
11-20-2024

happiness requires freedom, freedom requires courage, courage requires setting fire to a cop car

This book covers the Peloponnesian War, i.e. ~4 decades of internecine war between the city states of ancient Greece. These wars were utterly ruinous for Greece's power and culture and civilization, and it's basically the last time you hear about them influencing world history, but the wars *did* at least generate a lot of interesting vignettes and international relations case studies, and so they were not a complete waste. One of the reasons this time period is still interesting 2500 years later is that A) the city states of Greece had a sort of PreCambrian Explosion of different models of governance, with each city having its own bespoke combination of kings, consuls, senates, direct democracy, republic, elected generals, oligarchs, navarchs, etc. etc. So you had all sorts of wild political setups, as people started the various political experiments that would, over the millennia, gradually refine themselves into our own perfected form of governance. These states were then pitted against each other by B), the fact that none of them really had a good way of subduing any of the other states. Occasionally one of the cities would defeat another city-state, but they had no effective way of making these victories stick, either by incorporating the defeated into their own polity, or by doing an Israel and murdering/driving off the previous inhabitants. The city states did occasionally place down their own settler-colonies in claimed lands, but these colonies mostly did not grow to significance in a reasonable time, and if they did become significant they would "bud" off from their mother-city and become their own independent entity, and so there was no real and solid empire building going on. So instead you have this more or less constant froth between the states, as they did their best Machiavellian plotting against each other, and the wheel of fate brought first one city and then another high, and then low, and then high again. Again, not great for the Greeks, but interesting if you want to see every possible configuration of ancient state craft and diplomatic relations.

Whew. Ok, one quick caveat, there wasn't really any "good guys" during these wars. Other people on the internet have written plenty about this, but the quick summary: The Athenians are the easiest to identify with, since they practiced direct democracy among their citizens, but even they were more akin to a group of verbose cartel members, who did invent the discipline of History in the West, but also ran a mini-empire on the basis of "you give us your money and we will not kill you and torture your family". Their main opponents, the Spartans, were kind of like the Old South, except way, way, way, way, way, way worse. The other city states were similar; e.g. the Argives and everyone else were slave states, the Corinthians were messy and always starting drama, the Argives and Sicilian colonies and the etc. etc. One of the more interesting bits of this time period is how well these conflicts model later world conflicts, but on a micro-scale. E.g. - cold war in miniature, reminds me of CStross story about Cthulju copy and pasting various cold war states onto an infinite plane in order to observe human societies and their interlay in the same way we would examine a petri dish or an ant mound - distributed intelligence, rather than having all the decision making concentrated at the center of a polity - many incidents of humor - relation to us civil war and distribution of loyalties