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Brutal.
"Gates of Fire" was my first Steven Pressfield book, and it was particularly brutal and gritty that I had to put it down for a few months before returning to it. It was extremely graphic in its depiction of the physical traumas of Spartan training and ancient hoplite combat.
Ultimately, "Gates of Fire" is a love story, about comradery and the love that develops between men who fight and campaign and ultimately die together.
"Tides of War" is almost the exact opposite. Covering the period of time commonly called "the suicide of Greece", it starts, after some mildly confusing setup (your POV is that of a young man listening to his grandfather tell a story of also being told a story by someone else), dropping you right into the grime and muck, as Polemides, the assassin of the epic Athenian hero Alcibiades, is being held in the same prison as Socrates and ultimately destined to be sentenced to the same fate.
Polemides' story starts briefly with his upbringing as an Athenian son of a minor aristocrat, sent to Sparta to hang around the agoge a bit and make friends with other Spartans, only to be evicted as a young man upon news of the start of war between Athens and Sparta.
The story that unfolds covers many of the "greatest hits" of the Peloponnesian War, from the Siege of Potidaia, the plague of Athens, the Sicilian Expedition, and the Ionian War, in such brutal and explicit detail and an overwhelming sense of helplessness and dismay in the face of constant strife, disease, and war, with no hope for any future that isn't full of nonstop barbarity, cruelty, and hardship, that the only thing keeping a man such as Polemides alive at times is pure habit.
The author also sticks closely to the overall themes of Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War", giving his own gritty interpretation of the arrogance and restless lust for glory, wealth, and expansion that drove Athens to empire and eventual destruction. It works almost as a companion piece to Thucydides.
Pressfield's writing style is identical to that established in "Gates of Fire", full of anachronistic turns of phrase, a penchant for nicknames and English slang, and a vocabulary both modern and charmingly antiquated (frequently using phrases like "dame", "urchin", "jack", "villain", "sons of whores", etc) that could be a bit offputting for some readers if they don't find the narrative compelling.
I wish this work was as highly acclaimed as "Gates of Fire", but the complexity of the narrative (often speeding through entire days or weeks and stopping for a line or two of dialogue before moving on a year or more, or spending entire chapters on lengthy monologues and philosophical discussions with Socrates and/or Alcibiades) and the brutally pessimistic tone is pretty much guaranteed to make this work niche by comparison.
I first read this book around 2006/2007, then re-read it in 2012, 2013, and now 2024.
"Gates of Fire" was my first Steven Pressfield book, and it was particularly brutal and gritty that I had to put it down for a few months before returning to it. It was extremely graphic in its depiction of the physical traumas of Spartan training and ancient hoplite combat.
Ultimately, "Gates of Fire" is a love story, about comradery and the love that develops between men who fight and campaign and ultimately die together.
"Tides of War" is almost the exact opposite. Covering the period of time commonly called "the suicide of Greece", it starts, after some mildly confusing setup (your POV is that of a young man listening to his grandfather tell a story of also being told a story by someone else), dropping you right into the grime and muck, as Polemides, the assassin of the epic Athenian hero Alcibiades, is being held in the same prison as Socrates and ultimately destined to be sentenced to the same fate.
Polemides' story starts briefly with his upbringing as an Athenian son of a minor aristocrat, sent to Sparta to hang around the agoge a bit and make friends with other Spartans, only to be evicted as a young man upon news of the start of war between Athens and Sparta.
The story that unfolds covers many of the "greatest hits" of the Peloponnesian War, from the Siege of Potidaia, the plague of Athens, the Sicilian Expedition, and the Ionian War, in such brutal and explicit detail and an overwhelming sense of helplessness and dismay in the face of constant strife, disease, and war, with no hope for any future that isn't full of nonstop barbarity, cruelty, and hardship, that the only thing keeping a man such as Polemides alive at times is pure habit.
The author also sticks closely to the overall themes of Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War", giving his own gritty interpretation of the arrogance and restless lust for glory, wealth, and expansion that drove Athens to empire and eventual destruction. It works almost as a companion piece to Thucydides.
Pressfield's writing style is identical to that established in "Gates of Fire", full of anachronistic turns of phrase, a penchant for nicknames and English slang, and a vocabulary both modern and charmingly antiquated (frequently using phrases like "dame", "urchin", "jack", "villain", "sons of whores", etc) that could be a bit offputting for some readers if they don't find the narrative compelling.
I wish this work was as highly acclaimed as "Gates of Fire", but the complexity of the narrative (often speeding through entire days or weeks and stopping for a line or two of dialogue before moving on a year or more, or spending entire chapters on lengthy monologues and philosophical discussions with Socrates and/or Alcibiades) and the brutally pessimistic tone is pretty much guaranteed to make this work niche by comparison.
I first read this book around 2006/2007, then re-read it in 2012, 2013, and now 2024.
