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Article: 2 MINDS MAKE `PELOPONNESIAN WAR' VIVID
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- May 13, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2003 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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As the war between Athens and Sparta was beginning, late in the
fifth century BC, Thucydides, a young Athenian aristocrat, wrote that
he had decided to write a history of the conflict because he believed
"it would be great and noteworthy above all the wars that had gone
before."
For Donald Kagan, a Yale historian, writing some 2,500 years
later, the story of that war remains "a powerful tale that can be
read as an extraordinary human tragedy."
And, Kagan adds in "The Peloponnesian War," although "I have
avoided making comparisons between events in it and those in later
history . . . many leap to mind" - and they do emerge, even if Kagan
for the most part leaves readers "to draw their own ...