Free The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson Page A

broader-based voting in states like Athens and Thespiae.
    Most important, only in Greece was there a constant tradition of unfettered expression and self-criticism. Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Plato questioned the subordinate position of women. Alcidamas lamented the notion of slavery. Such openness was found nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world. That freedom of expression explains why we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders of our present Western civilization—and as millions of moviegoers seemed to sense, far more like us than the ancient enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them. In the end, 300 went on to earn nearly five hundred million dollars in global box-office receipts, making it among the top one hundred grossing films of all time—a testament not only to its comic book splashy violence and video game imagery but also to an action-packed retelling of an ancient tale in which free men prevailed over their far more numerous oppressors.
    Thucydides for Everyone
    P OPULAR INTEREST IN the Greeks at war occurs at a more serious level as well. As a teacher of classics for some twenty-one years in the Central Valley of California, I was often surprised that the ancient Greek historian Thucydides was among the most popular authors I assigned to undergraduates, the vast majority of whose parents had not attended college. “An Athenian, who wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians”—with those words of introduction, the disgraced Athenian admiral matter-of-factly opens The History of the Peloponnesian War , his monumental, though unfinished, narrative of the twenty-seven-year war (431–404 B.C. ) between Athens and Sparta that left the Athenian empire and the entire culture of the Greek city-state in ruins.
    Because he had lived through and participated in the events he described, Thucydides had an advantage over later historians, who have had to dig through unreliable records and consult secondary sources about the war. But even as he set down his record of contemporary events, Thucydides was eyeing posterity. His work, he boasted, was “not an essay to win applause of the moment, but a possession for all time.”
    If his contemporaries failed to appreciate his true genius, perhaps people like ourselves would fathom it two and a half millennia in the future. And so we do. Studying how a seafaring democratic Athens fought an insular oligarchy like Sparta teaches us a lot about current world crises and the fickleness of public opinion. Thucydides knew nothing about conflict-resolution theory, God’s will, or the United Nations, but he could declare for all time that people—as the Athenians did to acquire and preserve their empire—go to war for reasons of “honor, fear and self-interest.” Period.
    Thousands of paperback translations of Thucydides are sold each year, bearing out his extraordinary boast. But if his book, like other great works, is timeless, it is also very difficult, in places even obscure. A page of Thucydides takes as long to read as five of Tom Clancy. Thucydides doesn’t dispense easy virtues and won’t do a thing to get you into heaven. And his disturbing ideas turn every modern bromide on its head.
    So it’s surprising that so many people read him at all—and in surprising places. There’s no reason to think a book by an ancient Greek would interest students at the California State University campus in Fresno, home to the wayward Bulldogs basketball team—once coached by the much maligned Jerry Tarkanian.
    To generalize, most students are the children of farmworkers and the working poor from places like Bakersfield and Tulare. They are neither privileged nor well prepared for college. Their reference points come from television, not ballet, computer camp, or prep school. Many have never been outside the Central Valley—Thucydides’ Athens might as well be Athens, Georgia. Students here confuse Cleon, the Athenian demagogue,