The Soldier’s Choice

In the pitch of battle, according to Pericles, the Athenian citizen-soldier chooses to die rather than leave undefended the democratic principles that Athens embodies: this defines The Soldier's Choice. The great war between Sparta and Athens dominated the Greek world for twenty-seven years (431-404 BCE) and shaped much of the culture it bequeathed to posterity.

The Sparta of that era did not produce writers, but Athens did: Thucydides, an unsuccessful general in the war, became its first historian; Aristophanes, Greece's greatest comic poet, devoted the first quarter century of his career to plays about the war; the foundational figure of Western philosophy, Plato, grew up in its shadow and populated his works with men of the war generation.

Because their writings belong to different genres, these three seminal figures have rarely been treated together, an oversight The Soldier's Choice decisively corrects. As prominent members of a small intellectual community, each of the three wrote in profound engagement with the currents represented by the others. The contributors to this volume, experts in the relevant genres, reveal and explore these long-neglected interactions.

Contributors: Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, Terence Irwin, Richard Kraut, Mary Margaret McCabe, Heinz-Guenther Nesselrath, Hunter R. Rawlings III, Ralph M. Rosen, Jeffrey Rusten, Victoria Wohl, Nancy Worman, Harvey Yunis