Customer Reviews

Shades of Artemis: A Novel of Ancient Greece and the Spartan Brasidas

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This novel makes a good companion to Steven Pressfield's "Tides of War" Both take place during the Peloponnesian War. However, the focus of each novel is different. While Pressfield's work revolves around Alcibiades and the ill-fated Athenian expedition to Syracuse, neither are mentioned at all by Martin. Instead, Martin has focused on the Spartan Brasidas and the rivalries in Sparta concerning how to fight the war. Thucydides also plays a large role in the book.The rivalries in Sparta in mirrored in Athens, where Pericles wants to stay behind the walls of Athens, while Kleon wants to attack. Be forwarned, however, that Martin's work is not for those without familiarity with Thucydides or the war. There are no maps and there is little, if any, explanation of background events. For example, if you don't know where the Chalcidice is or the importance of Amphipolis, you will be lost. For those with a good knowledge of Greek history, Martin has created a stunning work of historical fiction.

I remember while reading Thucydides how I thought "Wow, this Brasidas fellow is one very competent General." Following a popular approach, Jon Edward Martin has breathed life into this historical figure, and in doing so he made the General into a living, breathing human who comes complete with a Spartan code-of-ethics.

Like most historical novels that detail ancient Sparta, we get a grand tour of the Agoge. Martin shows Spartan upbringing in all its brutal and arduous detail. While minute details of the Agoge are hard to come by, historically, Martin does a great job of expanding on the well known anecdotes that are known of the training.

The best part of the book for me was Brasidas' character development. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the sign of good fiction is that it seems more real than if it had actually happened. While much of Brasidas' makeup was obviously fabricated in this novel, I can't help but think that the historical Brasidas would have shared the core values of the Spartan represented in this novel.

If you're a fan of ancient Greece and the Spartans, this book is for you. Those who wish to learn more about the landmark Peloponnesian will doubtlessly find this historical novel insightful. In addition to this present novel I would also recommend TIDES OF WAR by Stephen Pressfield and ISLE OF STONE by Nicholas Nicastro. Both novels potray other phases of the war.

Novels about Ancient Greece are not exactly falling off the bookshelves into the laps of prospective reader's, so whenever I find one I usually snap it up as Ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt are among my favourite reading material. The author Jon Martin is the advisory editor of the magazine Sparta. This is a journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek history. Such a position leaves little doubt of his love and knowledge of the subject he writes about. He has travelled to many areas of Greece with the sole intent of adding as much authenticity to his novels as possible.

The author's books are not what I would class as light reading, but they are well worth taking the time to read properly. By that I mean that they require the reader's full attention. Not the sort of book to be read while watching the television and almost impossible to speed read but they are none the worse for this fact.

This book relates the life of Artemis probably the most famous of Sparta's commanders. It takes us from his early life in military college, the equivalent of Sparta's Sandhurst to the time when he enlists into what was probably the hardest fighting unit in the ancient world, certainly at that time. Onwards through the ranks until he attains the rank of general.

War in the fifth century BC was a brutal and bloody event fought at close quarters where you could see the whites of your opponents eyes and smell the fear in his sweat and blood. The author captures all of this and more. Artemis was one of the men who would meet in battle on the plains of northern Greece and determine the course of Western Civilization's first world war and the author sets the scene beautifully.

I have myself done a recorded course on Sparta and Spartan history, and every year I teach Thucydides in the Integrated Program in Humane Studies at Kenyon College, so I am not entirely uninformed as to the background which Mr. Martin presupposes in Shades of Artemis. It is, from that perspective, a very impressive work. Mr. Martin knows his Thucydides inside out, and from one perspective, at least, his novel reads as a most interesting commentary on Thucydides' history. There are a good many things that Thucydides doesn't tell us, and in such cases Mr. Martin often suggestively and persuasively fills in the blanks---that is, in effect, where his interpretation of events comes in. And Brasidas is a most appealing hero, in the novel, in Thucydides, and, so I must presume, in real life. The wisest and best of the Spartans. I enjoyed the work immensely.

I do not know this for a fact, but I suspect that Mr. Martin "independently published" this novel, as the saying goes. The unflattering term is "made use of a 'vanity press.'" But some independently published books have real merits, and this is most assuredly one. I presume that the reason that Mr. Martin had to take that route was that, to prospective agents and commercial publishing houses, the novel seemed to presuppose too much knowledge of the subject to be an easy read for the uninitiated. I hope that in future the excellence of this novel will persuade them to reconsider. Mr. Martin deserves a wider audience.