The Soldier's Choice

City and Soul in the Life of Classical Athens

Hayden Pelliccia, Charles Brittain, Harvey Yunis

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781501783494
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

In the pitch of battle, according to Pericles, the Athenian citizen-soldier chooses to die rather than leave undefended the democratic principles that Athens embodies: this defines The Soldier's Choice. The great war between Sparta and Athens dominated the Greek world for twenty-seven years (431–404 BCE) and shaped much of the culture it bequeathed to posterity.

The Sparta of that era did not produce writers, but Athens did: Thucydides, an unsuccessful general in the war, became its first historian; Aristophanes, Greece's greatest comic poet, devoted the first quarter century of his career to plays about the war; the foundational figure of Western philosophy, Plato, grew up in its shadow and populated his works with men of the war generation.

Because their writings belong to different genres, these three seminal figures have rarely been treated together, an oversight The Soldier's Choice decisively corrects. As prominent members of a small intellectual community, each of the three wrote in profound engagement with the currents represented by the others. The contributors to this volume, experts in the relevant genres, reveal and explore these long-neglected interactions.

Contributors: Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, Terence Irwin, Richard Kraut, Mary Margaret McCabe, Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, Hunter R. Rawlings III, Ralph M. Rosen, Jeffrey Rusten, Victoria Wohl, Nancy Worman, Harvey Yunis

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Part I Pre-Plato: Athenian Democracy, Thucydides, and Comedy
• Part II Plato (and All of the Above)
• Part III Beyond Plato (and All of the Above)
• Subject Index
• Index of Passages Cited
• Index of Greek Words