Lords Of The Sea: The Epic Story Of The Athenian Navy & The Birth Of Democracy (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
This book is an excellent overview of the military and political history of Ancient Athens during the classical age, it's rise and eventual fall due to forces that we see in politics even today. It's "readable history". Very well researched, yet concise and presented in easy to follow chronological narrative. Yet very engagingly written with very evocative passages that help transport the reader to places Salamis or Piraeus. But more than that, too often the likes of Themistocles and Xanthippus are taught apart from the likes of Pericles and Socrates and Euripides. This book seeks to marry the two sides of Greek culture as we see them by pointing out the impact of the Athenian Navy. Not only in the political forces they exerted, but the social impact of wedding Athens to the seas had on the culture as a whole. Often it is forgotten that many of these famous names in Greek culture had served as soldiers and sailors. While this book definitely focuses on the Athenian navy of the Classical age, it successfully shows how it both integrated with and contributed to the greater Athenian society as a while. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in ancient Greek history. Hale's Lords of the Sea is the history of the Athenian navy. Pretty straightforward, so this will be a fairly short review. The book is extremely readable, and it wasn't necessary to drag my feet through tons of horribly academic language. It moves at a fairly good pace, and only uses 318 pages to cover hundreds of years of history, so there isn't a lot of pointless detail.However.Hale is very obviously in love with the Athenian navy and credits it with every single advancement Athens made. He credits the NAVY with the BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY even when Athens was a democracy BEFORE the navy! He also glorifies it to the point that he ends up glorifying war. A good chunk of the book takes place during the Pelopponesian War, and he makes it seem like a paddle around the pond for Athens, when in fact the the Athenians and Spartans spent most of the war torturing each other and dying in terrible ways. These are entirely glossed over or ignored in favor of relating the detailed plots of some of the plays that were written--and not all of those were about the sea or the navy. If you're going to include plays, Hale, you should probably have thought to include Lysistrata, the one about how the Pelopponesian War was so horrible and caused so many deaths that the women of Greece refused to have sex with their husbands until the men ended the war, because the women didn't want to lose anymore family members. (This was, by the way, fiction; no such sex strike ever took place, to my knowledge.) That seems a bit more important than a farmer flying to Olympus on a dung beetle.There also seems to be some extrapolation; Hale often puts words or thoughts into Greek mouths, or records actions that I very much doubt were recorded.Overall, a readable book, but Hale's love of the navy has obviously blinded him to other important aspects of Greek life, and this should be read with a heart dose of salt.
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