On the Wrong Side

Nov 2021
Thebes - Paul Cartledge – Picador, 2020
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I know it's unfair, but this is a book that I really wish had been written by Mary Beard rather than the author. Beard's style is brilliantly balanced between academic authority and chatty friendliness. Cartledge tries something similar, but when he tries to to be humorous it comes across as painfully awkward, and when he doesn't, the dry style of a university academic is all too obvious. This is a pity because the subject matter is interesting - a history of classical Greece told from a different perspective from the usual sources (Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon). For there were many other polloi (city states) than Athens and Sparta, and their interactions tell a story of ongoing conflict between oligarchic tyranny and democracy that has become terrifyingly relevant to the current day.
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