Tides of War

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Product Description

Brilliant at war, a master of politics, and a charismatic lover, Alcibiades was Athens’ favorite son and the city’s greatest general.

A prodigal follower of Socrates, he embodied both the best and the worst of the Golden Age of Greece. A commander on both land and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory.

But like the heroes in a great Greek tragedy, he was a victim of his own pride, arrogance, excess, and ambition. Accused of crimes against the state, he was banished from his beloved Athens, only to take up arms in the service of his former enemies.

For nearly three decades, Greece burned with war and Alcibiades helped bring victories to both sides — and ended up trusted by neither.

Narrated from death row by Alcibiades’ bodyguard and assassin, a man whose own love and loathing for his former commander mirrors the mixed emotions felt by all Athens, Tides of War tells an epic saga of an extraordinary century, a war that changed history, and a complex leader who seduced a nation.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24501 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-28
• Released on: 2001-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.com Review
After chronicling the Spartan stand at Thermopylae in his audacious Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield once again proves that it's all Greek to him. In Tides of War, he tells the tale of Athenian soldier extraordinaire Alcibiades. Despite the vaunted claims for Periclean democracy, he is undoubtedly first among equals--a great warrior and an impressive physical specimen to boot: "The beauty of his person easily won over those previously disposed, and disarmed even those who abhorred his character and conduct." He is also a formidable orator, whose stump speeches are paradoxically heightened by what some might consider an impediment:

Even his lisp worked in Alcibiades' favor. It was a flaw; it made him human. It took the curse off his otherwise godlike self-presentation and made one, despite all misgivings, like the fellow.

This tale of arms and the man requires two narrators. One, Jason, is an aging noble who serves as a sort of recording angel of the Athenian golden age. The other, Polymides, was long Alcibiades' right-hand man, yet is now imprisoned for his murder.

As they were in his previous novel, Pressfield's battle scenes are extraordinarily vivid and visceral. This time, however, many of these elemental clashes take place on water. "As far as sight could carry, the sea stood curtained with smoke and paved with warcraft. Immediately left, a battleship had rammed one of the vessels in the wall; all three of her banks were backing water furiously, to extract and ram again, while across the breach screamed storms of stones, darts, and brands of such density that the air appeared solid with steel and flame."

In addition to his gift for rendering patriotic gore, the author excels at quieter but no less deadly forms of combat. As Alcibiades' star rises and falls and rises again, we are escorted directly into the snakepit of Athenian realpolitik. Bathing us in the details of a distant era, Pressfield is largely convincing. But it must be said that his diction exhibits a sometimes comical variegation, sliding from Homeric rhetoric to tough-guy speak to the sort of casual Anglicisms we might expect from Evelyn Waugh's far-from-bright young things. No matter. Tides of War conquers by sheer storytelling prowess, reminding us that war was--and is--a highly addictive version of hell. --Darya Silver

From Publishers Weekly
After Pressfield's stunning 1998 best-seller, Gates of Fire, which documented the Spartans' heroic last stand at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., comes this follow-up epic novel of the Peloponnesian War, as Athens and Sparta slug it out for Greek hegemony during the Hellenic Age. Once again, Pressfield's narrator is a condemned man, in this instance the Athenian soldier and assassin Polemides, who is awaiting execution for treason. Spanning the 27 years of conflict, famine and plague that marked the Peloponnesian War, Polemides' death-row confession reveals the rise and fall of the powerful and mercurial Alcibiades, a brilliant general and shrewd politician, whose ego and ambition were as threatening to his jealous friends and allies as to his enemies. As his formerly trusted bodyguard, Polemides shows Alcibiades battling his enemies in his relentless pursuit of glory and power, only to die in exile at the hand of a familiar assassin. Despite his bloody victories on land and sea, Alcibiades changes sides too often to ensure his long-lasting legacy, and though over time he fights for the Athenians, Spartans, Persians and Thracians, he eventually discovers that he is an outcast and perceived as a danger to all of them. The voice of Polemides is ideal, for he relates this astounding, historically accurate tale with the hot, sweaty hack-and-stab awareness of an armored infantryman, the blood lust of a paid killer and the wisdom of a keen observer of complex and deadly Greek politics. Pressfield is a masterful storyteller, especially adept in his graphic and embracing descriptions of the land and naval battles, political intrigues and colorful personalities, which come together in an intense and credible portrait of war-torn ancient Greece.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The battle of Thermopylae doesn't sound like best seller material, but Pressfield made it work in Gates of Fire. Here he moves on to Greek military leader Alcibiades (c.450-404 BCE).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

My first but not my last
This is my first Pressfield book and I must say the similarities to Clarence Cage's epic novel Ashes Divide Ashes Divide (it is a must if you haven't read it yet) are strikingly similar. Both plunge you into a world that is long extinct. The battles, life, and scenery of Ancient Greece are brought back to life in such vivid detail that the reader feels like they are part of the fabled legend. The complexity of the story is also amazing. The references to Homer's Iliad are also made apparent within the writing. Pressfield is good - real good. And his ability to accurately portray a world that has been forgotten is amazing. I would highly recommend it to anyone. I would also recommend Ashes Divide if you're one of the few who haven't read it: Ashes Divide

A Demanding and Sobering History Lesson
This is a much more complex and demanding novel than his brilliant and fast moving Gates of Fire (reviewed March 28, 2000). This is also a very sobering novel for any American who assumes that our economic prosperity, our international position of unchallenged leadership and the stability of our political institutions are safe and unchallengeable. Pressfield's novel carries Athens from a position of stunning power and wealth just before the beginning of the Peloponnesian War to its defeat and subjugation to the Spartans after 29 years of conflict.

Athens was so powerful and so wealthy that it could survive a plague that may have killed one-third of its population (brought on probably by the need to crowd inside the city's walls to avoid the Spartan Army) and it could fight off Sparta, most of Greece and the Persians for decades. Pressfield makes vivid the decay of Athenian democracy into a bloodthirsty system of revenge and brutality that helps us better understand our own founding fathers' fears of mob rule, tyranny and direct democracy. He uses the life of Alcibiades, a brilliant general and politician whose victories were undermined by his enemies, as a thread that holds together a generation of war and pain.

This is a slightly demanding book to read but it will profoundly trouble anyone who worries about the human propensity to repeat history rather than learn from it. There is much in this work for any American to think about.

Review of Tides of War
I was drawn to Tides of War after reading Steven Pressfield's historic epic Gates of Fire, and found it extremely entertaining both in writing craftsmanship and in subject matter. The book's greatness lies not only in the enormous sweep of the Peloponnesian War with all its triumphs and tragedies, but also in the fast-paced and riveting "narrative-within-a-narrative" writing style, which Pressfield uses very successfully. Polemides, a first-person observer narrates the story of the charismatic Alcibiades, who rose to fame as an unsurpassed Athenian general/admiral who, at the height of his rising star, changed allegiance to become a top war leader for rival Sparta. Jason, the legal advocate of Polemides and who renders the second narrative of the book by recounting the war to his grandson, elaborates upon and "fleshes out" the story of Athens' downfall by adding his own experiences as an Athenian admiral and by divulging anecdotal stories of important third party Athenian generals during the war. Pressfield's writing genius is much in evidence for his vivid and majestic description of the departure of the Athenian war fleet for its invasion of Syracuse and for the Alcibiades-led Athenian surprise attack on Spartan-held Ephesus, as well as for Polemides' narration of the crushing, spirit-numbing final Athenian defeat at the hands of the Syracusians. Pressfield's unique prosaic ability accurately captures the dialogue of such diverse characters as Socrates in his discourse on Athenian democracyand the obligation for obedience to its laws, to the coarse, uneducated banter of the common foot soldiers and Athenian street-kids. This book is well worth reading, not only for its highly interesting subject matter, but equally for its masterful presentation by a truly fine historical novelist who is peerless in his knowledge and depiction of ancient Greece.