LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES

A review of G.M. A. Grube's translation of Plato’s The Trial and Death of Socrates with John M. Copper revising (circa 390 BC, my copy 2000)

(Rating 4 of 5)

The Trial and Death of Socrates is a collection of works by Plato on Socrates that gives a narrative of Socrates's trial and execution.  Socrates had been going around Athens committing the horrible crimes of saying things that other people don’t like.  Unfortunately for Socrates, those “other people” were the ones who held power in Athens. That really is the long and short of it.  

            Socrates was living in a time where people believed in multiple gods that intervened in peoples’ lives.  Not believing in the gods had consequences, such as floods and plagues.  Socrates going around telling people to think for themselves meant people might question the existence of gods or worship new gods that were not of Athens.  Therefore Socrates was a threat to their safety and had to go. 

Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

           Socrates, who chose not to escape his impending doom because of his own philosophy of obedience toward law (although also being past seventy might have made him a little more accepting of the end), became a martyr for free thought and expression.  Of course all of his work and sacrifice could have been lost considering Socrates never wrote anything down.  Fortunately his old pupil, Plato, would be sure to give witness with his writings to Socrates and his ideas.  In this respect we can say that Plato was just as, if not more, important. 

            On the technical side I found having the footnotes at the bottom of the page instead of the end of the book to be more effective in dealing with the text.  I didn’t have to keep going back to check the footnotes.  

PLATO’S REPUBLIC

A review of Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic of Plato (360 B.C. original, 1967 translation, 1991 my copy)

(Rating 3 of 5)

I have to be honest, I rated this higher than I wanted because of what a historic book it is and its impact of Western Civilization.  Yet I still rated low enough to cause myself some embarrassment.  I try to remind myself that I am rating a translation as much as the original work, but I must confess I find philosophy to be such a bore that the whole thing was a chore for me to get through.  I now understand while most college courses only have you read parts of it. Yes, there is that nice part about the cave and Socrates's thoughts on types of governments, however I found most of it to be just a rambling conversation that I often found hard to follow. 

            Allan Bloom has a good but long essay at the end that goes on for over a hundred pages.  My only suggestion would have been to break the essay up into ten parts and feature them at the front of each of ten books that make up The Republic.  That would have made it easier to follow. Not only would it allow the reader a better way to pace themselves but it also would enable them to focus on the important parts of each book.  

            When I was done I found myself thinking of the old Mark Twain quote, “A classic is a book that everyone wishes to have read but no one wants to read.”

A MAN WHO THOUGHT HE WAS A GOD AND A WORLD THAT THOUGHT HE WAS RIGHT

A review of Alexander the Great: Son of the Gods (2001) by Alan Fildes and Joann Fletcher

(Rating 5 of 5)

Alan Fildes and Joann Fletcher wrote this book, Alexander the Great: Son of the Gods, to tell the tale of the world's greatest conqueror. Their book is unique by the amount of space the dedicate to Alexander's time in Egypt, which they consider to be very important to his development and to his ideas on his own divinity. This book's structure and format have a very strong textbook feel to it. The chapters are subdivided into little sections and there are feature boxes that are within but excluded from the main text. The book contains a lot of incredible visuals, such as maps, images of ancient statues, medieval works of art, and present day photos of places where Alexander had been.

This work starts out as a traditional tale of Alexander, discussing the conditions of Macedonia, Greece as a whole, and the Persian Empire that long threatened Greece long before Alexander's arrival. The authors tell the story of how Alexander's dynasty got started and how his parents King Phillip and Queen Olympias came to be married. Alexander grows up between two parents who despise one another while being tutored by one of the greatest minds ever, Aristotle's.





(Alexander's parents)

Alexander becomes the King of Macedon when his father is assassinated. As King, goes to war against the Persian Empire. After defeating Darius III in battle at the battle of Issus and achieving victory at Tyre he heads south. The two authors focus a great deal on what happened to him when he was in the land of the Nile.


(The Alexander Mosaic)

“With the whole of Asia Minor now his, Alexander was free to pursue the Persians east into their own heartlands. However, knowing that would take Darius at least a year to muster a new army after his defeat at Issus, Alexander chose instead to go south to Egypt. Although often regarded by later historians as little more than an eccentric diversion, Alexander's six-month Egyptian sojourn was essential to his future plans—he required a strong coastal base for both strategic and commercial purposes. However, the founding of the city of Alexandria was not the only legacy of the young king's time in Egypt. His stay there was marked a major psychological turning point in his life, for it was in Egypt that he became convinced of his own invincibility and divinity.”(p.52)

Leaving Egypt the Pharaoh, he goes on to challenge King Darius for the rest of his empire. Defeating the King of Persia at the Battle of Gaugamela , Alexander spends the rest of his life mopping up the pieces of his newly won kingdom, stretching his empire all the way to India.


(The battle of Gaugamela)


After his death the authors give the best detailed account of break up his empire amongst his generals that I had ever read. The book also tells the tale of Alexander's tomb that for centuries was located in Alexandria. Now no one knows where it is! If it is ever found that discovery would make the discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb pale by comparison. According to the authors it was how Alexander conquered and ruled that was his greatest legacy for he single handily ushered in the Hellenistic Age.


(Alexander's Macedonian Empire)

I recommend this book to anyone who would like to know more about Alexander the Great the unstoppable conqueror who saw himself as a god.

{Video is from the History Channel's Battles BC series.}

INVINCIBLE WARRIOR

A review of Tania Gergel’s Alexander the Great: the Brief Life and Towering Exploits of History’s Greatest Conqueror as Told by his Original Biographers (2004)

(Rating 4 of 5)

With an introduction by Michael Wood, who in the 1990s produced the BBC series In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, this book was assembled by Tania Gergel who took the work of three famous Alexander the Great biographers—Lucius Flavius Arrianus (Arrian), Plutarch, and Quintus Curtius Rufus—and edited them into a single narrative. All the authors are citizens of the Roman Empire writing centuries after Alexander had died, but they are closer to his time then we are to theirs.

Gergel does an excellent job of taking the best of the three works and making them into one single narrative. The story goes from Alexander’s princely boyhood to the death of the King who was ruler of the all the world that was known to him.


(Phillip, Alexander's father)

For years the Persian Empire had been the greatest threat to the freedom of Greece, the invasions of Darius I and Xerxes the Great had ended the polis or city-state of Greece and led various leagues and counter leagues transforming the culture of Greece from a free collections of city-states into the foundation for an empire. Alexander's father, Phillip, had brought Greece under the thumb of Macedon. Alexander takes the long-standing Greek conflicts, and brings a new war to Persia itself, invading and conquering the greatest power in the ancient world.


(Alexander the Great riding Bucephalus)

The Alexander portrayed in this text is a young man of brilliance and inexhaustible ambition. He is viewed as good person who kind and charitable but becomes corrupted with power and does cruel things even to his closest friends. Although the would later regret some of his actions his remorse comes only after the evil deed is done. Yet his flaws are from the same source as his strengths so it is hard to tell if he could be any other way.


(Alexander the Great)



(Alexander's road to conquest)

“Meanwhile some of the older of his companions, and Parmenion in particular, looked out over the plain between the river Niphates and the Gordyaean mountains and saw the entire plain agleam with the watch-fires of the barbarians, while from their camp there arose the confused and indistinguishable murmur of myriads of voices, like the distant roar of a vast ocean. They were filled with amazement at the sight and remarked to one another that it would be an overwhelmingly difficult task to defeat an enemy of such strength by engaging him by day. They therefore went to the king as soon as he had performed his sacrifice and tried to persuade him to attack by night, so as to conceal from his men the most terrifying element in the coming struggle, that is, the odds against them. It was then that Alexander gave them his celebrated answer, ‘I will not steal my victory.’ Some of his companions thought this an immature and empty boast on the part of a young man who was merely joking at the presence of danger. But others interpreted it as meaning that he had confidence in his present situation and that he had correctly judged the future. In other words, he was determined that if Darius were defeated, he should have no cause to summon the courage for another attempt: he was not to be allowed to blame darkness and night for his failure on this occasion, as at Issus he had blamed the narrow mountain passes and the sea. Certainly Darius would never abandon the war for lack of arms or of troops, when he could draw upon such a vast territory and such immense reserves of manpower. He would only do so when he had lost courage and become convinced of his inferiority in consequence of an unmistakable defeat suffered in broad daylight.” p.70-1

This is a great little book. I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the life of the man who conquered the world before he was thirty—literally!

{Video from the BBC Documentary In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great.}

GREEK WARS

A review of Sir Nigel Bagnall's The Peloponnesian War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Greece (2004)

(Rating: 3 of 5)

Sir Nigel Bagnall was a British military officer during the mid-to late twentieth century rising to become Chief of the General Staff. After an extraordinary military career, he began a second career as a writer during which he wrote two volumes in ancient military history. This work was his last book which was published posthumously. His first work, The Punic Wars, which will be reviewed later, focused on the war between Rome and Carthage; this work focuses on the even earlier conflict, the Peloponnesian War. This famous conflict between the two most famous city-states of Ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta, is a conflict that is at best really confusing, and unfortunately this book does not succeed in making it less confusing. As a historian telling a tale, one must decide if he or she is to proceed chronologically or categorically, most historians do some of both but Bagnall leans a little too heavily with a categorical focus.





The first forty-five pages of the book are historical notes that deal with all the Greek cities that participated in the conflict. In doing this he should have limited these brief histories up to the start of the rest of the book instead of the roles that each city played during the conflict. Sir Nigel might have been better served scraping the whole forty-five pages and instead give us a one-page timeline in bullet points in order to give a clear picture to his reader about how this whole event happened. Also, we do not arrive to the actual Peloponnesian War into chapter 6 starting on page 131! The earlier Greek wars with Persia dominated the first four chapters, I understand how a historian might feel that one event cannot be explained without really explaining an earlier event, but in doing so he over explains somethings and under explains others. For example, an explanation into the forming of the Delian League and how Athens itself became corrupted with power transforming the League it into an Athenian Empire that was ruthless—to say the least—to dissenters, is confusing. How central figures played role in the war and the events leading up to it deserves more attention than it gets. I realize that Bagnall was a military historian and not a political one, but his take on Pericles is so choppy and out of order that at times it is difficult to put into context.



One of the strengths in the book is how Bagnall uses his own knowledge of military history, plus what he saw in his own career to help compare and contrast the Peloponnesian War to more commonly understood historical events, such as World War II or the Cold War, to increase the readers understanding of this ancient conflict.

This is an okay book but it is more suited for someone who understands a good deal of the material already, such as a person with a focus of study on ancient or military history. I would not recommend it for the average reader wanting to learn about ancient Greece for the first time since public school.

{Video posted by phenomenos on YouTube}