Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins

For ten years in the late fifth century BC. the dueling city-states of Athens and Sparta fought the first bloody chapter of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict that turned the Golden Age of Greece to iron.

Somber, authoritarian Sparta, with its mighty infantry, was the elderly, respected master of Greece. Democratic Athens---cheerful, mercantile, and arrogant---had acquired strength both new and naval. When Athens achieved great power, and sought to have its great-power status acknowledged, the newcomer's challenge to Sparta's primacy sparked off the Ten Years' War (431-421 BC). a fight for national honor carried out by acts of callous vengeance and surprising grace, by guile and mercy, by invasions. sea-battles, sieges, raids, and, finally, by tremendous and climatic battles on land.

A gripping account of the epic clash of Athens and Sparta. Song of Wrath charts the military and diplomatic history of ancient Greece from 479 BC. when the allied Greeks threw back the Persian host of Xerxes, to 421 BC. when the Peace of Nicias brought an end to the first ten-year season of the Peloponnesian War, In vigorous prose and vivid detail. J. E. Lendon has given us a terrifically readable account of the angry origins and furious escalation of the Peloponnesian War.

Song of Wrath offers a muscular new way of understanding national strategy and foreign relations. one that is just as powerful when applied to today's world as when it is applied to the ancient. A story of new pride challenging old. Song of Wrath is the first work of Ancient Greek history for the post-cold-war generation.

"Honor and shaming are key themes in Lendon's accomplished account of the first ten years of the Peloponnesian War. A major work of history, this well-written study provides important insights on the classical world that Lendon ably extends to contemporary international relations."---Jeremy Black. author of War: A Short History

"This provocative and persuasive analysis of the Peloponnesian War's first ten years shifts focus from the `realist' aspects of the conflict's causes and conduct. Lendon stresses instead the centrality of honor. time, manifested by reciprocal acts of destruction and revenge. Humiliation. not conquest, was the primary war aim---an aim so vague in made expanding the war easier than making peace."---Dennis Showalter. Professor of History at Colorado College

J. E. Lendon is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, runner-up for the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Prize (2006). He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.