[.ca] The Greek World 479-323 BC (ISBN 0415153441)

Can't see the forest for the trees:
I read Thucydides as an undergraduate, and had some knowledge of ancient Greece, and came to this book hoping to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge, thinking it was aimed at a general reader. If it is, it does a terrible job. It assumes the reader already has a fairly advanced knowledge and doesn't bother clarifying this for the general reader. An example is Chapter 7 when he speaks of "an appalling outbreak of stasis," using a Greek term he does not explain. In English "stasis" means state of inactivity or equilibrium. Why "appalling"? I happen to have a Greek lexicon and the Greek term has the meaning of "faction." How many general readers can dust off their Greek lexicon to clarify that confusing detail, without which the whole following discussion will leave the general reader scratching their heads. As well, Hornblower has the specialists penchant for going off on scholarly tangents that may be important for the specialist but merely frustrate the general reader. For example, the chapter on the run up to the war does very little to inform the general reader about the events leading up to the war, which is what I was primarily interested in reading about. Instead we get an in-depth analysis of the reliability of Thucydides and what he did and did not say. Important, maybe... but when the chapter concludes by saying "We have seen in this chapter that Corinthian unease at Athenian e3xpansion... was important in bringing about the Pelopnnesian war, I am left wondering. Somehow I didn't get that at all, the point being entirely sidelined by other issues. In general I got the feeling that I could not see the forest for the trees, that is, that Hornblower's concern for scholarly detail distracted him from the real story. There is, in fact, a complete lack of any narrative sense. We hop from place to place, from Italy, to Egypt, to Persia, to ARgos, to Corinth, to Sparta, to Athens, looking at each in detail. But there is little sense of the big picture. All in all, a disappointing book despite its obvious scholarly merits.