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Thank you. I very seldom buy books anymore tho I do much prefer being able to hold the book in my hand, putting a page marker in and going back to it.

I think I will buy this one. As I mentioned before, Thucydides is both fascinating and tough going at the same time. Maybe this one will be more readable.

I have a strong belief that the Greeks of the Golden age were extremely intelligent people.

Now if I can only find it at a cheap price.

Victor Davis Hanson's book A War Like No Other will bring it back to life for you. I promise.

Second the motion. The difficulty with Athenian democracy was that it was so very subject to ridiculous passion in time of war. Nearly all of the major Athenian strategoi - generals - were eventually stabbed in the back by the passions of the mob: Miltiades, Themistocles, the historian Thucydides, Pericles' own son, even, arguably, Socrates' disciple Alcibiades - stupid, wasteful behavior that cost Athens the war. The objective historian cannot avoid the conclusion that they deserved to lose.

Themistocles, however, was a military figure of the first rank. What Persia was attempting was a massive combined-forces campaign that was unprecedented in warfare. Themistocles appreciated that the defeat of either the land or sea arms would be fatal and managed to scrape together a strategic opposition on both land and sea. The land opposition took Leonidias and the Spartans (and the Thespians and the Thebans) to Thermopylae; the sea opposition a mostly Athenian fleet under Themistocles just offshore of there at Artemisium. When Themistocles was finally forced back by the superior numbers of the Persian fleet he sent a boat to inform Leonidas of the fact. They found only the dead.

Themistocles got their collective revenge at Salamis. Athens by then had been burnt twice. Had the latter not happened the apparently sincere Persian offers for peace might have been accepted. I think that the Athenians might not have been quite so insistent about building their city on Delian League money, but that's only speculation. A year later Plataea, the death of Mardonius, and the end of a truly remarkable Persian campaign.