Josiah Ober

Various vignettes over the course of ancient history featuring many well known battles and participants. The authors necessarily do not go into great detail into each encounter and the personalities as entire books are written on each subject. Nonetheless, sufficient context is provided so that the reader can appreciate the authors' analysis of the factors that led to defeat.

As a fan of ancient history familiar with each of the battles described, I could easily follow the rather cursory summaries provided. Perhaps this would be a bit more difficult for those with no background into the subject matter.

The book flows well and objectively described the various encounters. Further, the authors' analysis of the strategic errors are interesting and rarely found standard battle narratives.… (más)

A mixture of fascinating and frustrating. I liked the quantitative approach to Greek history, the data Ober presented about the size of Greek poleis and their economies, and the nature of their constitutions. But after 3-5 pages of fascinating data you'd inevitably reach the end of what could be stated with confidence and come to a sentence like, "We can guess that..." followed by an extensive section based on a supposition.

This book expanded my knowledge of classical Greece, but I don't think I can recommend it as a standalone book. It's a good supplement if you already have a solid knowledge base about the period, to be able to take its facts apart from its speculation. (And I don't object to its economic-political science approach to classical history, though I imagine some people might not like reducing the period to numbers and rational choice theory. Frankly I wish the book had gone further with this approach — or recognized that the data didn't support going further and refrained from extrapolating based on theories.)… (más)

Fairness warning: my rating is unfair. I'm just trying to correct for all the equally unfair five star reviews. This is a solid three star book. My review is more negative than it should be, only because others have been too positive.

The three stars are due to the impressive attempt to study the actual material conditions of an ancient society. Two cheers! My two negative stars were caused by i) the book's neo-liberal triumphalism, and ii) its extremely shoddy historical thinking, which claims causation where there is maybe, kind of, sort of, perhaps, some correlation, but also just ignores historical events that can't be reduced to numbers.

i) Little more needs to be said. The point of this book is that Classical Greece was Great because it was more or less a modern, neoliberal state; all such states, we can assume, are, in turn, great. This is transparently false (e.g., they had slavery and we have capitalism; also, we are not great). I hesitate to say that Ober's book caused Trump's election victory, but one might think its success was a sign that certain portions of the American population were at least a little bit out of touch with reality.

ii) If you have the book in front of you, you might like to have a look at figure 4.3, on page 99. This is Ober's summary of his data. It is supposed to show that 'core Greece' reached an exceptionally high level of wealth because of democracy. A quick check will suggest that core Greece's ascent started around 1000 B.C., reached a plateau during around the end of the Athenian and Spartan empires, and then rapidly descended back to historical norms. I would have thought this suggested that imperialism, rather than democracy, was the driving force behind Greece's wealth (and, if I were a good Stanford classicist, I would then immediately hint that something similar might be true of the modern West). But I would only say that because I have no Panglossian wish to pretend I live in a post-imperialist, democratic utopia, or that anyone else ever does or has, for that matter.… (más)