Book Review – The Virtues of War – Steven Pressfield
Author Steven Pressfield’s books never disappoint. His “The Virtue of War” novel is a ‘fictional’ recounting of events of Alexander the Great’s brief and violent life. The story was told in the first person of what could easily be assumed as a ‘make-believe autobiography.’ The book paints a vivid picture of Alexander's life through a brilliantly told narrative. Some of the battle sequences were written as if Pressfield was sitting right there on the battlefield. The remarkable descriptions were combined flawlessly with gruesome action and Pressfield's superb ability to introspectively describe the conflicts of war and conquest. I was impressed with Pressfield's portrayal of Alexander the Great. He shows him as a fierce warrior hell bent on victory, but also a man with a strict set of values - virtues of war - that he would not let himself nor any of his men abuse. The tale shows the relation between emotion and fascination and thorough details of battle tactics and maneuvers that Alexander performed. He was a military genius. This novel is about Pressfield doing what he does best, mixing excitement and stimulating accuracy with great storytelling of one of the greatest military strategists and leaders in world history - Alexander the Great. A captivating and thought-provoking historical war and military read…

I have read many of Steven Pressfield’s books, eliciting accounts of great warriors and generals, of epic ancient battles that most have heard before. In “The Virtues of War” he defies what I assumed not possible, he surpasses the greatness of some of his more well known books. Other may disagree, saying “Gates of Fire or Tides of War” are better and they could be right. They are fantastic books but I have never felt so much emotion while reading a book. I laughed, cried, felt anger, disgust, happiness and a whole range of other feelings. When a book can do all that as many other things in life can’t, you know it’s good. I recommend this book to anyone interested in a great author that even Stephen King said “was the greatest military author of all time”. If you read nothing else, read this book.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. The in depth look inside the conqueror’s mind, complete with constructed conversations brings history to life. Historical fact mingled with Pressfield’s imagination made this a joy to read. Anyone enamored with ancient kingdoms and the art of warfare may enjoy this book. My favorite scenes involved Alexander meeting with his foes prior to battle; chivalry and ritual, respect and honor...at least some of the time!

Alexander the Great. Even the name by which we reference him conjures up a person larger than life. A man who was tutored by Aristotle himself and ascended to his father’s throne at 20 years old. By the time he was 30, he ruled over one of the largest empires in history, a true warrior king who was undefeated in battle. One would think he would have found satisfaction, but as anyone familiar with the introduction to Ecclesiastes knows, sometimes getting everything you want can be one of the worst things that can happen.

But who was Alexander, the man? As we read in this insanely well-researched novelization of Alexander’s life, he knew the people in his army. He was lavish in his praise and reward of his men. In return, his people loved him, some even going so far as to see him as one of the gods.

After reading this book, you will know Alexander the man much better than you will from simply reading his military exploits, although there is incredible information on these, as well. There were a few places where the pacing was a little slow, but Pressfield’s battle descriptions are very detailed and draw you in so that you feel like you’re on the field. Granted, some of the historical spaces are filled with artistic license, but I learned more about Alexander the Great and his campaigns—not to mention the cost of victory—than I thought possible.

If you’re interested in the history of Alexander the Great or this time period in general, read this book.

This was a hard march for me, a dedicated life-long pacifist. I found myself skipping the long paragraphs of "[Unpronounceable Greek Name] holding the left wing"; these got especially dense toward the end. The battle scenes were similarly grueling, but I found myself reading them, and all knotted up with anxiety. I suppose this was magnificently researched, to the extent that one can trust what comes down to us from 2,354 years ago. The character of Alexander, so carefully developed, meshes nicely with my sense of the nobility of the best military leaders from time immemorial: like me, they hate war, and especially the part where nobles are seldom seriously damaged, but the soldiers are slaughtered in the thousands. How does that work?

Not as good as The Gates of Fire.


Quotes:

"Those who do not understand war believe it contention between armies, friend against foe. No. Rather friend and foe duel as one against an unseen antagonist, whose name is Fear, and seek, even entwined in death, to mount to that promontory whose ensign is honor."

""Does it hurt?" he bawled, spurring up in the flush of victory, and when I answered yes, he roared, "Good, it's supposed to!""

"There are further items, Telamon taught, which have no place in the soldier's kit. Hope is one. Thought for future or past. Fear. Remorse. Hesitation."

"For the self-control of the warrior, which we observe and admire in his comportment, is but the outward manifestation on the inner perfection of the man. Such virtues as patience, courage, selflessness, which the soldier seems to have acquired for the purpose of defeating the foe, are in truth for use against enemies within himself - the eternal antagonists of inattention, greed, sloth, self-conceit, and so on. When each of us recognizes, as we must, that we too are engaged in this struggle, we find ourselves drawn to the warrior, as the acolyte to the seer. The true man-at-arms, in fact, can overcome his enemy without even striking a blow, simply by the example of his virtue. In fact he can not only defeat this foe but also make him his willing friend and ally, and even, if he wishes, his slave."

"But tell me, my son, how will Achilles of old fare in our modern era's corrupt and inglorious affrays?
He will elevate them, Father, by his virtue and by the purity of his purpose. And where he stands, even in this degraded latter day, shall be a noble world and uncorrupted."

"He who would wake must cease to dream."

"We have all seen zealots and fanatics, eager for death. These men are not that. They are rational men, defenders of their homes and families, who simply would not quit. We make out faces of individuals now. Their postures of devotion, each true to his mates and his corps, derive from that code to which we, too, have sworn allegiance. Not a man speaks, yet each of us of Macedon, beholding the exhaustion and soul-spentness of these warriors, understands that they have fought, this day, upon a plane that we have not. They have given more than we. They have suffered more than we. And we reckon, too, that if we aim, as we do, to cross to Asia and overturn the order of the earth, we must mount to that sphere of sacrifice that we read now upon their beaten, shattered visages. This knowledge sobers us. Our hatred is supplanted by compassion, even love."

"You could have eaten the lion's heart, my son. But you gave it back to him. He will hate you for it, I fear. You will pay on another day for this act of misplaced chivalry."

"He is not me, but a creature to whom I am bound. It is as if this thing called 'Alexander' has been twinned with me at birth, fully formed, and that I only now discover it, aspect by aspect, as I grow. This 'Alexander' is greater than I. Crueler than I. He knows rages I cannot fathom and dreams beyond what my heart can compass. He is cold and canny, brilliant and ruthless and without fear. He is inhuman. A monster indeed, not as Achilles was, or Agamemnon, both of whom were blind to their own monstrousness. No, this 'Alexander' knows what he is, and of what he is capable. He is I, more an I myself, and I am indivisible from him. I fear I must become him, or be consumed by him."

"Eventually it came to me that, rather than endure them beneath compulsion, which rendered them doubly abhorrent, I would elect to do them on my own."

"Men believe a boy's concerns to be those of a child. Nothing could be further from the fact. At ten I apprehended the world as keenly as I do today, more so, as my instincts had not yet been dulled by schooling and the stultifying superimposition of conventional thought."

"Do you think me vain or self-inflated? Consider" What has Almighty Zeus portioned out for man, save this earth? Heaven He has kept for Himself. But this sphere here, beneath this sky, we mortals may roam with naught to hem us but our own will and imagination. Do you know what faculty I claim in myself as preeminent beyond all rivals? Not warcraft or conquest. Certainly not politics. Imagination."

"Mark this, my young friend. Sear it into your soul with brands of iron: Never, never take anything for granted. Never believe you know, so that you cease to probe and query."

"What I want you to apprehend, Itanes, is the concept of effective strength. The enemy outnumbers us nearly five to one, yet where the action is decisive, we, not they, possess numerical superiority."

"His gift to me is a teak box, inlaid with ivory and gold. For a thousand years lords of the Punjab - he explains through an interpreter - have been presented with such a casket on the morn of their accession.
"What does one keep in it?"
"Nothing." The box is meant, Porus declares, to remind the sovereign of man's proper portion."

"Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and this commands the action. To attack makes me brave; to defend makes them timorous."

"When deliberating, think in campaigns and not battles; in wars and not campaigns; in ultimate conquest and not wars."

"Seek the decisive battle. What good does it do us win ten scraps of no consequence if we lose the one that counts? I want to fight battles that decide the fate of empires."

"It is as important to win morally as to win militarily. By which I mean our victories must break the foe's heart and tear from him all hope of contesting us again. I do not wish to fight war upon war, but by war to produce such a peace as will admit of no insurrection."

"The objective of campaign is to bring about a battle that will prove decisive. We feint; we maneuvers; we provoke to one end: to compel the foe to face us in the field."

"As commanders, we must save our supreme ruthlessness for ourselves. Before we make any more in the face of the enemy, we must ask ourselves, free of vanity and self-deception, how the foe will counter. Unearth every stroke and have an answer for it. Even when you think you have thought of everything, there will be more work to do. Be merciless with yourself, for every careless act is paid for in our own blood and the blood of our countrymen."

"No advantage in war is greater than speed. To appear suddenly in strength where the enemy least expects you overawes him and throws him into consternation."

"All tactics in conventional warfare seek to produce this single result: a breakthrough in the enemy line."

"A static defensive line is always vulnerable. Once penetrated in force at any point, every other post on the line becomes moot. Its men cannot bring their arms to bear and, in fact, can do nothing except wait in impotence to be overrun by their own comrades fleeing in panic as our penetrating force rolls them up form the flank."

"Be conservative until the crucial moment. Then strike with all the violence you possess."

"Don't punch; counterpunch. The purpose of an initial evolution - a feint or draw - is to provoke the enemy into commiting himself prematurely. Once he moves, we countermove."

"An office must lead from the front. How can we ask our soldiers to risk death if we ourselves shrink from hazard?"

"War is academic only on the mapboard. In the field it is all emotion."

"Entering an territory, capture the wine stocks and breweries first. An army without spirits is prey to disgruntlement and insurrection."

"A cavalryman's horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be allowed to know this."

"Heaven speaks with the same voice in Memphis and in Macedon; I despise the man, however learned, who does not grant this. God is God, in whatever form He chooses to appear."

"How is one to command? By consensus of his subordinates? Listen indeed. Weigh and evaluate. Then decide yourself. Are you stumped at the crossroads? Pick one way and don't look back. Nothing is worse than indecision. Be wrong, but be wrong decisively."

"All that being said, how does one make decisions? By rationality? My tutor Aristotle could classify the world, but couldn't find his way to the village square. One must dive deeper than reason. The Thracians of Bithynia trust no decision unless they make it drunk. They know something we don't. A lion never makes a bad decision. Is he guided by reason? Is an eagle "rational"? Rationality is superstition by another name."

"The temptation is to stop thinking and yield to momentum. This must be resisted at all costs."

"Sweat, speed, action - these are the antidotes to fear."

"Nothing so steadies a company confronting great odds as a sober recitation of the facts. The more dread-inducing the reality, the more directly must be faced."

"This is an article of faith with me, brothers. I believe that a man, witnessing the selflessness of another, is compelled by his own nobler nature to emulate that virtue. No harangue can make him do this; no prize or bounty. But the sight of his fellow;s gallantry cannot be resisted. This is why your officers must always be first to strike the foe. By your example, you compel the hearts of your men to follow. And their courage ignites valor in the ranks of our countrymen succeeding."

"Do we make war for blood or treasure? Never! But to follow the path of honor, to school our hearts in the virtues of strife. To contend chivalrously against the chivalrous for refines us, as gold in the crucible. All that is base in our natures - cupidity and greed, timorousness and irresolution, impatience, niggardlines, self-infatuation - is processed and purified. By our repeated undergoings of trial of death, we burn these impurities out, until our metal rings sound and true. Nor are we ourselves, as individuals only, purified by this ordeal, but its demands bind us to one another at such a depth of intimacy as not even husband and wife can know. When I call you brothers, it is no figure of speech. For we have become brothers in arms, you and I, and not hell itself holds the power to divide us."

"A million men stand in arms against us. I will rout them by my will alone."

"The ordeal of command consists in this: that one makes decisions of fatal consequence based on ludicrously inadequate intelligence."

"He has demanded everything of me, and, receiving it, has borne me beyond myself."

"This victory has brought us back. We are ourselves again. Nothing else matters. Believe in our destiny and press on. No force on earth can stop us now!"

I picked this because I LOVED❤️ Steven's non fiction. I also love listening to him talk about writing.

This book however, is painfully dull. I couldn't read past a hundred pages.
Maybe, I'm not the target audience for this stuff. This was the first historical fiction I ever read and it has way too many 'historical' qualities than it has 'fictional'.
The characters are stuff too. Though, if you're interested in battle tactics and history, you might like this.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad book, but I didn't feel ANY emotion while reading this

Εξαιρετικό και πολύ ευχάριστο στην ανάγνωση, σε μεταφέρει πίσω στον χρόνο στο πλάι του Μ Αλέξανδρου.

Well, I gave up. Didn't even make it halfway.
This one is a real slog! Stopped for a while to read Hereward; came back, stared at it for a while, then just said screw it. Life is too short, and there are plenty of other books to read.

My only other attempt at Steven Pressfield was Gates of Fire. I made it through that one, but it was tough. Something about Pressfield's style just doesn't do it fore me.

In this one, I couldn't handle the first-person narrative with multiple tense changes. Past, present and future tense all in the same paragraph? Not for me.

I own the book, so I may pick it up again one day . . . but I doubt it.

this was a beautiful and well written book and i think that i really would have loved it if i had been able to read it all at once. however, there were so many names and places and historical details that it became overwhelming and made it difficult for me to read a large chunk of the book in one sitting. granted, the exploits of alexander ranged over many countries and many years, conquering and encountering a great number of peoples and places, so it makes sense. it just became difficult for me to continue reading, but if i had been able to remember all the little details, it would have made this book that much more emotional and impactful for me.

pressfield has a lovely prose style and is great at character building. his characters are very real, each with its own developed personality, ambitions, emotions, etc. my one complaint is the lack of female characters, though i suppose it makes historical sense. i also really did love reading about alexander, who was viewed as a god by so many, but we heard a point of view from someone close to him that understood that he really was just a young man. i was so intrigued reading about how his inner thoughts were different from everyone else around him, making him into a tactical and respected leader. i did really enjoy this book, even if the names could get clouded at times.

though pressfield’s gates of fire will always be my favorite, he produced a beautiful and moving read with the virtues of war.

Haunting.

Pressfield summons the shade of Alexander and has him lay his soul out onto the pages for all to see and judge as he recounts his battles.

“The sarissa’s song is a sad song.
He pipes it soft and low.
I would ply a gentler trade, says he,
But war is all I know.”

Excerpt From
Virtues of War
Steven Pressfield

I generally like my historical fiction from the first person perspective, but not from the point of view of the grand historical figures themselves as is done here. Alexander, Socrates and Alcibiades are made deliciously tantalizing in the care of Mary Renault and the latter by Pressfield himself in Tides of War.

But preference aside, this is indeed as close to Alexander's voice as could be contrived.

"Like them, the daimon knows no pity. Like them he owns no fear of death. You have asked, Itanes, if the daimon is properly identified with the soul. He is not. The daimon and the self are subordinate to the soul, but the daimon, should he overcome the self, may abrogate the soul. At that point a man becomes a monster."

Tremendous.