Barry Strauss

Response to Andrew Lambert

onates with both the grandeur and the misery of naval history. When it comes to ancient history, naval history is always a bridesmaid, never a bride. This is as true in scholarly circles as among general readers. Consider some indices. For every scholarly book in ancient naval history, there are probably two or three in ancient military history. True, there have been successes. J. S. Morrison, J. F. Coates, and N. B. Rankov, The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2000) made a splash when it came out, but it is an exception. The most influential book in ancient maritime history in recent years is Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), but, in spite of its title, it focuses primarily on the land. Furthermore, in its discussion of the sea, The Corrupting Sea emphasizes trade. The authors say little about naval history. Naval warfare figures less than prominently in overviews of ancient warfare, such as the encyclopedic two-volume survey, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, ed. Philip Sabin, Hans van Wees, and Michael Whitby (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Although of late there has been an explosion of popular, nonacademic books on ancient warfare, few of them focus on sea power. John Hale’s Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy (Viking Adult, 2009) and my own The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece—and Western Civilization (Simon & Schuster, 2004) are two of the relatively rare examples. Some recent ancient history books touch on naval themes: for example, works on Thucydides by Donald Kagan (Thucydides, Viking Adult, 2009) and Perez Zagorin (Thucydides, Princeton University Press, 2005), as well as books on the Peloponnesian War by Kagan (The Peloponnesian War, Viking Adult, 2003) and Victor Davis Hanson (A War Like No Other: How Athens and Sparta Fought the Peloponnesian War, Random House, 2005), and the best-selling edition of Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (Free Press, 1998). None of these books, however, is primarily a work of naval history. Land warfare dominates the literary marketplace. Consider, for example, the seminal works of Victor Davis Hanson on Greek infantry battle, such as The Western Way of War (Knopf, 1989), or Adrian Goldsworthy’s insightful works on Roman military history, such as Caesar: Biography of a Colossus (Yale University Press, 2006), or J. E. Lendon’s thoughtful Soldiers and Ghosts (Yale University Press, 2005), or any of a spate of good books on Alexander the Great or my own The Spartacus War (Simon & Schuster, 2009). As far as teaching, I know of no survey data, but it would be surprising if land fighting doesn’t dominate courses on ancient warfare. After all, most people prefer to read and think and learn about war on land rather than at sea, and for good reason. Land warfare is more familiar: everyone has marched or played with swords; few of us have rowed or sailed. For similar reasons, infantry history is more accessible than cavalry history. Ancient navies, like modern ones, focus on ships rather than individuals, which adds an extra step to the process of finding heroes, as many readers want to do. And so naval history tends to live in the shadows of the study of ancient warfare. Lonely as the ancient naval historian may feel, however, he is constrained to admit a kind of rough justice in this state of affairs, given the realities of the ancient world. Naval warfare played a key role in antiquity, but most fighting took place on land. It would be interesting to try to quantify the relative amounts of land and sea warfare, but my overwhelming impression is that war on land predominated. The best-known commanders of ancient warfare were nearly all soldiers and not sailors: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Spartacus, Leonidas, Scipio, Fabius Maximus, Constantine. Only Pericles and the less well-known Themistocles were admirals as well as generals (again, I’m thinking only of the famous and near-famous figures). Ancient culture privileged the land and denigrated the sea. Greek writers like Plato or Thucydides refer to the “naval mob.” The port of Athens, Piraeus, was synonymous with foreigners and poverty. Republican Rome looked down enough on the navy to leave it for a long time in the hands of its Greek allies in southern Italy. My even stronger impression is that ancient literary sources, particularly the historians, focus on land warfare. They were rooted in a tradition that, as far back as Homer, acknowledged the existence of sea power but looked with laser-like intensity at land combat. We can imagine Achilles on a ship but not dueling Hector at sea. Even Odysseus, that master navigator, does his fighting on land. Certainly, historians such as Polybius and Livy include descriptions of war at sea, but the emphasis is on land warfare. Xenophon, Tacitus, and Sallust have much less to say about naval matters. Herodotus offers a rich source of information about naval warfare, but the emotional heart of his Histories takes place on terra firma. To see this, only compare the passionate heights of Herodotus’s narrative of Thermopylae with his relatively unruffled account of Salamis. Of all the ancient historians, only Thucydides does justice to naval history, because he alone offers a theory of sea power and its importance. Some of the orators, like Demosthenes and that quirky 5thcentury B.C. Greek writer known to us as “The Old Oligarch,” also understood this. It is no accident that they all lived in an era when Athens, with its democracy and its empire (or the memory thereof) dominated Greek naval affairs. Thucydides appreciates the significance of sea power for strategy. He understands the dynamism of the sea. He recognizes its political importance, for naval power went hand in hand with democracy in classical Greece. He also highlights the intimate connection between naval warfare and finance: if money is the sinews of war, then it is the veins and arteries of war at sea. Naval warfare was much more expensive than land warfare. No money, no ships, as Alexander the Great discovered early in his career. During his invasion of the Persian Empire he dismissed his fleet. The ships were simply too expensive. This may suggest one strategy that naval historians can follow to make their subject more central to studies of ancient warfare: follow the money. We need more work on the nexus between navies and economies in antiquity. Another strategy is to produce face-of-battle studies of ancient war at sea. Ever since the pioneering work of John Keegan, this genre has reinvigorated the history of warfare. September 2010 • Historically Speaking 15

Donald Kagan: The Scholar and Teacher

• n May 12, 2005 Yale historian Donald Kagan gave the 34th annual Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This honor was the occasion for former student Barry Strauss, himself a prominent historian at Cornell, to pay tribute to his mentor. The following essay originally appeared in the May/June 2005 issue ofHumanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is reprinted here bypermission ofthe NEH. The editors.

Speaking of Books: A War to be Won

Book reviewed in this article: Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, A War to be Won: Fighting the Second World War

On public speech in a democratic republic at war

What sort of public speech is appropriate for a republic at war? At any time, public speech in a republic should be clear, simple, rational, and focused on the public interest. In the heat of war, the speaker must be not merely moral, but cunning; he should employ a rhetoric that is restrained and unemotional, realistic and hard-headed, yet also decent and principled. The study of Thucydides, particularly of his so-called Mytilenian Debate, underlines this lesson.