The Classical World

When you left Stanford, you went back to farming, though. You didn't practice your classics right way.

No. I finished pretty quickly, and I lived in Greece for two years, doing the archeological part of the research. I came back in 1980, and I had a brother who had dropped out of medical school, and another brother who was working. My grandparents had passed away, and my parents were living in Fresno, and the question was: "If somebody doesn't run this ranch, we're going to have to sell it." So the three of us ran it, and we did a lot. It had fallen in decay during my grandfather's later years. So we put in a new irrigation system, we built sheds, we redid it. By 1985, unfortunately, that was right during the agricultural collapse, so I went and got a job. I was lucky enough to have a university within commuting distance -- the good news. The bad news was they had never had a classics program. It was very hard to convince them they should be teaching Latin and Greek at Fresno State.

So you established a program there?

I did. There was nothing there. I started off as a part-time Latin teacher, and the next year I offered Latin and Greek, and I taught five classes a semester for probably eight years. Then I was lucky. I hired more colleagues, and now we have four people, and it's a very good program.

But over time you became disillusioned with the study of classics, generally, in the United States. In fact, you wrote a book with a coauthor called Who Killed Homer?

Yes, John Heath was a student I had met at Stanford, and he had started the same thing that I had done, only in Florida. We had talked over the years about why it was that all the values that reflected Greek values -- egalitarianism, education, practicality, pragmatism -- were not being honored by the profession. In other words, it was becoming highly theoretical. The key was not to teach, it was to publish for narrower and narrower audiences. It was not to use the clarity of expression the Greeks had embraced. And it was careerist. So we wrote sort of a diatribe, or a critique, about the profession, and why such a wonderful thing as classics was down to 600 majors a year, and I think 4,000 classicists.

Throughout the country.

Yes. And in that tiny world of classics, it had an earth-shattering effect, if you can say that, because we quoted research, we quoted what people wrote. People became hysterically angry because the world really hadn't paid any attention to classics, but now it was being discussed in larger venues, and the only message that was getting out was our message. They didn't think that was fair at all.

Why do the Greeks still matter? You were focusing on the Greeks at a time when one could say that nationally we were losing our commitment and understanding of what Western civilization meant.

A couple of reasons: Historically, there is no West before the Greeks. Even in Greece before the seventh century [BCE], you had the Dark Ages, and the Mycenaean are not Western in the sense as we know it. So this idea of what is consensual government? What is capitalism? What is freedom? What is individualism? What is secularism? All of these ideas were not only apparent in Greece, but they were discussed, the contradictions of them: Is it good to have democracy? Is it good to dumb-down culture to the lowest denominator? Is it good to have religion as a state religion or as a coercive mechanism to instill good behavior? All of these things that we wrestle with today were discussed by people who in some ways were not confused by technology. They were empirical. They just wrote down the world that they saw. So I thought that message had been lost.

They had a tragic view of the world, that we all die, we all grow old. It wasn't old age as the "golden years," or it wasn't "Isn't this wonderful that -- " you know, if you have a divorce or you have a death in the family, "-- maybe we can learn from this." No, no, no, it was bad. There was an honesty in expression, and an appreciation of how tenuous life is, and how appreciative you should be to have shelter and food.

Now, over these years, you were also focusing on being a military historian. The Greeks had a lot to tell us about war that we were losing sight of in this post-Vietnam era.

Yes. What happened was that military history as a discipline was discredited after Vietnam. There were few people -- John Keegan in England surely is one -- who wanted to look at it as a social/cultural phenomenon. I did, and so I wrote a series of books that tried to suggest that this is the way that Westerners fight. It's predicated on cultural and political assumptions. This is how it relates to society. It's amoral in the sense that war itself is not bad, it's that particular wars are good or bad. I tried to establish criteria for them. So I wrote a series of books on comparative military history. It was a lot of work, because I had to go to the Civil War, or the Ottomans; I went beyond classics.

One of your major books is called The Western Way of War. Tell us what you found there. One of the things that struck you as you were getting into these studies was the notion of the destruction of Greek farmland in warfare that didn't make sense to you because you were a farmer.

The standard opinion was that armies went in, a historian like Thucydides or Polybius would say "They ravaged the land, and they were trying to starve the enemy out." But there were problems. When I reexamined that, I would see things like "They came every year." Well, obviously, if they cut down all the olive trees, there would be no need for that. And then growing up on a farm, I noticed that it was very hard to cut down an olive tree. It's very hard, actually, to burn grain, except for a brief window. So I realized that there were physical problems with doing it, and, more importantly, I started to see the psychological ramifications, that it was a catalyst to insult the pride, to instill anger. From that germ, I began to reread Greek literature [as though] for the first time, and ask wider questions: Why do people go to war? Is it always because of materialism? This was very unpopular, because at this time in classics, Moses Finley and other people were talking in very Marxist terms about material reasons. The idea that it would be, in a Greek's way, psychological or spiritual, and about honor and fear and envy and jealousy was considered kind of crazy.

In The Western Way of War you help us understand what Greek warfare was like in this period from 700 BC to ...

Roughly, 700 to 350 or 340.

... to 340. There was a real integration of the way of life of the solder and the kind of war they fought, and the way it was fought. Tell us a little about that.

It was in a Mediterranean climate, so there was a campaigning season that was predicated on the agricultural year. You were a farmer and a militiaman. You had your own responsibilities back home on the farm, and you couldn't be away from your farm very long. It was a consensual government, they had to have a majority vote, so usually the two sides would meet by, I guess, convention. They would meet in a flat plain, they would put on this absurd heavy armor because they had like purposes, they would crash together, and then there would be an artificial understanding that the one who won would establish a trophy, and the question would be resolved. Usually, it was pretty worthless borderland. As this got going, people began to realize that it was economical, but absurd, because one army might have reserves, or one army might have a big navy, or Athens might have light-arm troops, or might not. So it was artificial, especially when you met the Persians, and you saw that this was a whole different challenge. So I was very interested in how this system unwound. The social ramifications of letting people fight who didn't own land, who weren't citizens, who were former slaves; the question of utility versus efficacy, or honor. It was very interesting to me.

Was there a corruption of the political system that had worked so well in an earlier period?

There was, and there was also an honesty to it. It starts, actually, with Athens, the democracy that was not a landed oligarchy. I could sum it up by saying, "Who are you farmers to decide that the whole city-state should rest or fall with a one hour ceremonial collision when we have other assets like walls that we can hide behind, or we don't have to come out and fight, or we can fight at night, or we can poison the water, or we can fight at sea, or we can fight with arrows?" So you had all this literature from Homer onward, criticizing the slave, the criticizing the bowman, criticizing the javelin thrower. What was interesting is the more warfare became democratic and was not predicated on social class, the more destructive it became and the more amoral it became.

But in this earlier period there was a movement for a decisive finite war, which was very nasty, but which put an end to the matter.

Yes, and that was important because that idea, even though it was no longer an infantry battle, survived in Greek thinking, that if you had a sea battle, the point was to destroy the enemy's assets. This is important because there was a lot of other traditions -- the nomadic tradition, or the Chinese tradition, or the tradition in Latin America -- of ceremonial wars, of hostage-taking, of cattle-raiding; the indirect approach. There are anthropological explanations for it. But the idea is that when war is declared, you find the enemy's military forces and you find the quickest way to get there, destroy them, and get home is very familiar to us in America today.

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