{"id":6534,"date":"2013-09-23T09:58:05","date_gmt":"2013-09-23T16:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6534"},"modified":"2013-09-23T09:58:05","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T16:58:05","slug":"the-end-of-sparta-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-sparta-a-review\/","title":{"rendered":"“The End of Sparta” — A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

A classicist’s exemplary historical novel.<\/h3>\n

by Albert Louis Zambone \/\/ BooksandCulture.com<\/a><\/p>\n

\"images\"Classicists should infuriate other humanists, in the way that the handsome scholar-athlete who volunteers to help dyslexic children and is a genuinely nice guy should infuriate the guy who just made it onto the football team and has a hard time keeping up his GPA, or the kid with the great GPA who can’t do a pull-up\u2014but they don’t hate him, because he’s just so\u00a0good<\/em>. That, at least, is how this historian feels whenever he reads a classicist.<\/p>\n

These feelings of bitter self-recrimination are a normal part of the intellectual life, according to most intellectuals, but especially strong within me because I have just finished Victor Davis Hanson’s\u00a0The End of Sparta<\/a>, first published in 2011 and issued in paperback this spring. It was an absolutely infuriating experience. Isn’t enough for Hanson to have conceived of a genuinely original theory for the development of classical Greece? Can’t he be satisfied with roiling the waters of military history with his arguments for a “western way of war”? Doesn’t he realize that publishing a book a year is a little \u2026 excessive, particularly when he is still working on the family farm in the Central Valley of California? And then he has to go and write a novel; which, worst of all, is really pretty good.<\/p>\n

It used to be that academics, at least the Oxbridge variety, when writing novels in their spare time would confine themselves to mysteries, which appeared under a pseudonym. J. R. R. Tolkein transgressed that unwritten code by writing a massive work of literature that he took far too seriously, so far as his fellow dons were concerned, and which had far too much of his own learning and preoccupations within it. It was one thing to simultaneously slum and show one’s cleverness by writing locked room puzzles; to take one’s literature seriously was not the done thing.<\/p>\n

Hanson’s novel arises from the problem that classicists and medievalists so often have: a lack of evidence. In his study\u00a0The Soul of Battle, focusing upon democratic generals engaged in wars of liberation, Hanson devoted a chapter to the Theban general Epaminondas, and there wrote just about as much as it possible to write of this mysterious man. Subsequent Greeks and Romans thought Epaminondas to be the greatest man of the ancient world, but his biographies\u2014including the life that Plutarch wrote\u2014are lost, or fragmentary. What\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0known is that Epaminondas was a Pythagorean, a devotee of the secret wisdom of that mythic figure; that he was elected general by the Boetian Confederacy, whose chief city was Epaminondas’ native Thebes; that he was dedicated to the abolition of slavery throughout Greece, and to the ending of Spartan hegemony over other Greek cities and states; and that he destroyed Sparta’s power in a series of brilliant battles and campaigns over the period of a decade.<\/p>\n

In the many gaping holes of this epic tale Hanson plants the seeds of his story, there growing all the preoccupations of his scholarly career. The protagonist, Mel\u00f4n, is a Boetian farmer, an independent man with slaves, the type of Greek that Hanson has argued was much more fundamental in establishing Greek democracy and civilization than urban-dwellers, as in Athens. Mel\u00f4n’s farm is a marvel of permaculture, designed to take advantage of nature’s harmonies. Terraced into the side of Mount Helikon\u2014where the Muses lived and gave Hesiod the farmer the gift of poetry as he tended his sheep\u2014is the farm that Mel\u00f4n inherited from his formidable father, who had homesteaded the land.<\/p>\n

The lower terraces are seeded with grain. Farther up the mountain, catching the heat of the sun, are the terraces of grapes, from which wine and raisins are both taken (Hanson is himself a raisin farmer). Yet farther up, where the soil is rocky and poor for grain and vines, are the olive trees, from which comes all else needful for the life in the Mediterranean, not least of which was light from the oil. Like all farmers, Mel\u00f4n continually tinkers with his agrarian paradise, tearing down and improving, building new, trying again to do things in a slightly better way. Through Mel\u00f4n’s farm, as through all farms, runs the boundary between nature and culture. For Hanson, author of two elegies for the ending of the culture of American family farming, Mel\u00f4n and farmers like him created Western civilization in the crucible of the constant give and take between nature and culture.<\/p>\n

Yet the story does not begin upon the farm, but on the eve of the Battle of Leuktra, where Epaminondas led the Boetian Confederacy against the best soldiers of Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies. In the first chapters Hanson skillfully depicts the mustering of Greek citizen-soldiers, the eve of the battle\u2014and then, the clash of arms, about which he has had so much to say in his scholarly works. Spears reaching forward to pierce neck, or groin; men falling wounded to be trampled to death by the ranks of friends and neighbors pressing behind them; the smash of shield on shield, and of shield on skull; the moment when swords are drawn, and the phalanxes disintegrate; the death of kings and of captains, and the shouting of victory and defeat.<\/p>\n

This is not rendered in the staccato prose of a thriller, which these days seems to be most strongly influenced by the editing of Ridley Scott or the over-caffeinated Michael Bay; there are no explosions of olive oil bombs in Hanson’s book. Hanson’s prose is deeply affected\u2014but not affectedly so\u2014by his reading as a classicist. From time to time he delivers a sentence that is a rescanned, reimagined line from Homer, but he does not burden us with these. He does not try to create a faux-Homeric style. But neither do his characters converse like 20th-century people, as do so many protagonists of even the better historical novels; they have neither the language, nor, more important, the sensibilities that allow them to talk in a way outside their own time.<\/p>\n

Nor does Hanson choose to focus on the doings of the great and famous. True, they appear\u2014Epaminondas himself, of course, but also Plato and the future Phillip II of Macedon\u2014but only because of historical plausibility. They are not making appearances in order to comfort the reader by providing them with a name with whom they are familiar, a familiar piece of furniture in a strange room. Hanson’s focus is always upon Mel\u00f4n, but also upon others from the farm on Mount Helikon, particularly Mel\u00f4n’s three slaves: Gorgos, a former Spartan Helot who prefers being a slave to noble and vicious Spartans rather than to democratic and agrarian Boetians; Chi\u00f4n, purchased as a child, now grown to Herculean strength, who fights alongside his master at Leuktra and gains his freedom; and Neto, a prophetess now more devoted to the mysticism of Pythagoras than her skeptical owner, whose prophecy that Mel\u00f4n will kill the King of Sparta brings him reluctantly to the field at Leuktra.<\/p>\n

The result is that this story is strange and otherworldly, more so than a fantasy novel that is a half-baked, badly digested, pseudo-faux semi-allegory of the present; and yet at the same time it is familiar. This is, I think, Hanson’s overriding intent, and his greatest achievement in this novel. Historians strive their entire career to make the past intelligible, and yet also preserve the sense of distance from the present to that past. This is what Hanson does in\u00a0The End of Sparta.<\/p>\n

Al Zambone lives in southern New Jersey, where he practices history at night, and education reform during the day.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2013 Books & Culture.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A classicist’s exemplary historical novel. by Albert Louis Zambone \/\/ BooksandCulture.com Classicists should infuriate other humanists, in the way that the handsome scholar-athlete who volunteers to help dyslexic children and is a genuinely nice guy should infuriate the guy who just made it onto the football team and has a hard time keeping up his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87],"tags":[1028,1067,1019,306],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Ho","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1651,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-sparta-an-excerpt-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":6534,"position":0},"title":"The End of Sparta: An Excerpt","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Private Papers After the battle of Leuktra, and the defeat of Sparta, the Thebans parley with the Spartan general Lichas, who remains as defiant as ever: \u201cI\u00a0said hear your Lichas. You won a battle. A big one. But not this war. A bigger war \u2014\u00a0megas kindunos. That you will have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Literature"","block_context":{"text":"Literature","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/literature\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1647,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ancient-world-as-it-was\/","url_meta":{"origin":6534,"position":1},"title":"The Ancient World As It Was","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Cody Carlson The Deseret News Review of\u00a0The End of Sparta\u00a0by Victor Davis Hanson, Bloomsbury Press, 2011 Having written extensively on the history of ancient Greece, it is no surprise that classics professor Victor Davis Hanson would set his first novel in that era. His new book,\u00a0The End of Sparta\u00a0is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1437,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-sparta-an-excerpt\/","url_meta":{"origin":6534,"position":2},"title":"The End of Sparta: An Excerpt","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 20, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson As the Thebans help the freed helots build their new city of Messen\u00ea, the Argive general Epit\u00eales decides his men are no longer needed and will head home to Argos, leaving the Thebans and Messenians to their work: Epit\u00eales did not back down. \u201cI and my\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "History"","block_context":{"text":"History","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/history\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12797,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-spartan-way-of-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":6534,"position":3},"title":"The Spartan way of war","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 21, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ The New Criterion Sparta\u2019s check of imperial Athens in the inconclusive so-called First Peloponnesian War (460\u2013445\u00a0B.C.) foreshadowed a remarkable subsequent twenty-eight-year growth in Lacedaemonian power and influence. At the war\u2019s end, Sparta had established itself as the only impediment left to an increasingly Athenian Greece. Fourteen\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1304,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-novel-vdh\/","url_meta":{"origin":6534,"position":4},"title":"A Novel VDH","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Reliving the fall of Sparta: An interview. by Katheryn Jean Lopez National Review Online Victor Davis Hanson, known as VDH to his fans, has a new book out. This time, it\u2019s a novel,\u00a0The End of Sparta. He talked with\u00a0National Review Online\u2019s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the Greeks and the novel.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Greece"","block_context":{"text":"Greece","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/greece\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1944,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/excerpts-the-end-of-sparta\/","url_meta":{"origin":6534,"position":5},"title":"Excerpts: The End of Sparta","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 16, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The End of Sparta\u00a0[2] comes out today. Now and then I will post excerpts from the novel. Today\u2019s is the Theban council before the battle of Leuktra. As the Thebans debate whether to meet the Spartans the next morning on the plain of Leuktra,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Literature"","block_context":{"text":"Literature","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/literature\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6534"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6536,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6534\/revisions\/6536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}