This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Two cities radiant on the shield appear,
The image one of peace, and one of war.
Here sacred pomp and genial feast delight,
And solemn dance, and Hymneal rite; …
Another part a prospect differing far
Glowed with refulgent arms, and horrid war.
Thus, in Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad, the god Hephaestus fashioned his panorama of life, peace, war and death upon the shield of the hero Achilles. Not unlike the smith-god, the Ancient Greek poets themselves skilfully worked to craft images for posterity of a now lost world, one that is harsh, beautiful and, even today, seductive.
Their verses are fashioned purposefully to inspire a sweet interior longing in any who attempt to read their works. There is much dancing, light and laughter; much suffering and much sorrow, of the grandest kind.
There is, then, much in Ancient Greece that should attract the modern reader. And yet, as Adrian Goldsworthy notes in his introduction to his new history, the Greeks stir the popular imagination surprisingly rarely — much less so, certainly, than the Romans — and that in a market already excessively dominated by Tudors and Nazis. It is telling that the books on the Greeks that are most frequently offered for sale are rehashed versions of the myths, traded as a frothy sub-genre of fantasy literature. Even the historical Spartans of Thermopylae become comic book superheroes in Miller and Varley’s 300.
Something is clearly preventing modern audiences from grasping the real world of the Greeks: not just the myths but the people and the culture that created them. In such historical fiction, the gripping drama of ancient fact is sadly so often lost.
Goldsworthy fills a gap in providing modern readers with an accessible introduction to this often forgotten history. Like Achilles’s shield, it is a portrait of two cities: Athens and Sparta. Leonidas and his famous 300 feature, but only as part of a much longer narrative.
The story begins with the struggle of these two polities against the Persian Empire, but then tells how these erstwhile allies came to be enemies. The ensuing conflict would “bring great evils for the Greeks”, far more even than the anger of Homer’s Achilles.
Goldsworthy is an excellent historian and skilful narrator. His previous work has mainly concerned Ancient Rome, but here he provides an accessible, sweeping introduction to Greece in the 5th century BC. Whilst scholars will find little that is new, this book should reward anyone who simply wants to know what all the fuss with Athens and Sparta was about.
That said, it is easy to see why the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) so rarely appears in popular history, or why few besides International Relations realists are especially enthused by Thucydides. In those three decades of war there are few or no characters of exceptional brilliance (the uniquely capricious Alcibiades being one possible exception). There are no Napoleons or Alexanders.
The leaders of Athens and Sparta instead consistently fail, summer after summer, to land any significant blow on their opponents, their mistakes regularly proving more decisive than their stratagems. The politics is long and complicated, involving too many actors to meet our instinctive desire for just a few heroes.
Goldsworthy capably distils all this complexity into a crisp and (even over 600 pages) comparatively succinct narrative. In truth, modern readers will probably find his book rather more manageable than Thucydides’s history, on which much of the latter part is based. And yet something of the feel of the real world that Thucydides describes is somehow still lost. Take for example just one part of his moving description of the Athenian retreat after their defeat at Syracuse in 413 BC, here given in Rex Warner’s translation:
In the actual leaving of the camp there were sad sights for every eye … The dead were unburied, and when any man recognized one of his friends lying amongst them, he was filled with grief and fear … The prayers and lamentations [of the abandoned wounded] made the rest feel impotent and helpless, as they begged to be taken with them and cried out aloud to every single friend or relative whom they could see; as they hung about the necks of those who had shared tents with them and were now going, following after them as far as they could, and when bodily strength failed them, reiterated their cries to heaven and their lamentations that they were left behind.
Compare with this Goldsworthy’s rather clinical version:
They left behind their remaining ships, as well as the sick and wounded who were incapable of keeping up.
Goldsworthy is describing real people and real events, yet much of their emotional power, expressed and preserved by our ancient authors, is somehow lost.
What makes the best history writing truly gripping are descriptions of real events conveyed with detail and drama: when we know not just what people did, but what they said, felt and looked like whilst doing it. The early history of Greece unfortunately offers little scope for this kind of history. Goldsworthy provides a serviceable account in outline of broad developments in Archaic Greece, but we simply do not know enough to tell the same kind of story that we can for the Tudors or the Nazis.
And yet later periods, most especially the 5th and 4th centuries BC, do provide such material. Unfortunately, though, Goldsworthy does not always exploit it. Xenophon’s account of his adventures in Persia as a mercenary to a renegade Persian prince, for example, is one of the most exciting ripping yarns of the ancient world. It receives only a single page at the end of Goldsworthy’s book. For those who cannot, or will not, read the original Greek texts, something more is still needed to bring the two cities of Homer, and of Thucydides, to life once again.
