A discussion of our most balanced history written by a participant—all of whom were Arуans of the warrior class—is beneficial for the investigation of Arуan war ways for the book Hounds of Arуas, being written with young W.C. and is also being undertaken in preparation for a discussion with the Myth of the 20th Century crew, concerning culture war parallels between antiquity and modernity.

For the most concise, pre-delusional reading, read J. B. Bury’s History of Greece, written about a hundred years ago. For the best example of the delusional polar misreading of this event in terms of modern analogy, read Victor Davis Hansen, A War Like No Other, an excellent inquiry that unfortunately remains enthralled to Cold War academic thinking, equating Democratic Athens with Republican America and Monarchial Sparta with the anti-monarchial Soviet Union.

Since the Soviet Union did not share proximate geography, metaphysic worldview and common language with the U.S., as Sparta did with Athens, it is more reasonable to equate rural, hinterland, conservative Sparta with rural, hinterland, conservative America, and urban, coastal, democratic Athens with urban, coastal, democratic America. Furthermore, just as Sparta and Athens had previously cooperated to combat overseas enemies and internal uprisings, so have rural and urban America joined against enemies foreign and domestic.

For an excellent, recent [1990s] hardback version consider, The Landmark Thucydides, edited by an author who has slipped my mind, an excellent text using sidebar annotations, as did Bury’s earlier work.

This will be my third reading of Thucydides, and the last. This document is incomplete, the author, a combatant in the war, having died before he completed his task; a task which was taken up by his fellow Athenian—and eventually exile—Xenophon in his Hellenica. The war was called the Peloponnesian by the Athenians as it pitted them against many rival communities of the Peloponnese, or Red-face-island, connected by the relatively tiny Isthmus where Megara [Chambers] and Corinth are situated. One assumes that the Vietnamese do not call America’s Vietnam War, the Vietnam War, and one wonders what the Spartans would have called this war had they fielded a historian from their ranks. They had to make do with the exiled Athenian Xenophon, who they adopted, and who wrote as the “student” of Thucydides. It is a remarkable thing that in this one case, that the losing side provided the war’s historian. Although, Josephus did write the history of his own nation’s defeat at the hands of the Romans, who adopted him.

The preeminent naval power was Athens, which had committed two genocides, including the necrocide of Delos, where the dead ancestors of the erased people were exhumed, and the annihilation of Aegina, and would commit more atrocities.

The second naval power, was Corinth, a more cosmopolitan city than Athens and its chief rival on the waves.

The first land power was Sparta, a tiny military cast enslaving a larger nation known as Messenia and maintaining a somewhat feudal relationship with numerous third-rate allies of Red-face-island.

The second land power was Thebes, destined to crush Sparta 30 years after Sparta won this war.

Traditional historians liked the Cold War analogy because Athens could not contend with Sparta by land and Sparta had no navy, and it was considered a foregone conclusion that the Soviet navy was inferior to the U.S. navy and would be swept from the seas in the event of a war and that the American mind could have never abided the horrendous casualties that land conflict with Soviet armored divisions would have entailed.

Red-face-island was so named for a migrant king, Pelops, or Red-face, an infamous drunk, who essentially bought the rich farmland. The inhabitants were Dorian, speaking that dialect of Greek.

Athens was situated on a marginally arable peninsula named Attica, and they spoke the Attic dialect. The poverty of their soil made of them colonists and they shared many boons with trading partners around the Middle Sea, racial cousins in Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor, and harbored a disdain for the inhabitants of the nearby hinterlands and looked to the wider world.

A better modern analogy for the Athenian-Spartan rivalry would be England and France in the Napoleonic Wars, a land power versus a naval power in a generation-long struggle, in which the sea power won. The best ancient analogy was Rome and Carthage in which the land power won. Furthermore, Rome, like Sparta, defeated an enemy which began with sea supremacy by developing a navy, something which the Spanish, French and German rivals of England-become Great Britain were never able to accomplish.

In terms of the cultural aspects of the struggle, conservative versus commercial, hinterland versus cosmopolitan, the values of the citizen soldier versus the values of the mercantile imperialist, farmer versus outsourcer, then Sparta and Athens fit the model of the current, faltering America: Rural Red versus urban Blue.

Thucydides’ work is over 200,000 words and I will make no attempt at summarizing the narrative. Suffice it to say that the war was more horrible than anyone thought war could be and that Sparta would win with massive foreign aid from Persia, with the character of both small nations twisted and ruined in the process. This foreign aid aspect is present in the current U.S, cultural tension as global banking concerns all favor the coastal democrats over the hinterland conservatives.

This inquiry is two-fold and carried out with respect to Thucydides’ stated objective, presenting the tragic end of his age as an abject lesson to those who would come after. The intent is to mine his account for clues as to the deeper character and substance of Arуan prehistory, and assigning suitable analogies from modernity and post modernity for the belligerents who vied for mastery over a shared age which they at once extinguished and immortalized in the passion of their furious folly.

I will limit my summation to pulling minimal quotes for brief discussion.

I hope the reader finds this pursuit worthwhile.

James, LaFond, Saturday, 4/18/2020