Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War [Hardcover]

Steven Pressfield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2000

In Tides of War, Steven Pressfield brings the historical precision and heartbreaking human scale that made his previous novel Gates of Fire an international bestseller to an even more epic saga of Greek strife and conflict.

One man.

Two armies.

The fate of the ancient world in the balance.

If history is the biography of extraordinary men, the life of Alcibiades (451-404 B.C.) comprises an indispensable chapter in the chronicle of the Western world. Kinsman of Pericles, protégé of Socrates, Alcibiades was acknowledged the most brilliant and charismatic personality of his day. Plutarch, Plato, and Thucydides have all immortalized him. As the pride of Achilles drove the course of the Trojan War, so Alcibiades' will and ambition set their stamp upon the Peloponnesian War--the twenty-seven-year civil conflagration between the Athenian empires, Sparta, and the Peloponnesian league.

As a commander on land and sea, Alcibiades was never defeated. The destinies of Athens and her favored son were inextricably intertwined. Man and city mirrored each other in boldness, ambition, and vulnerability. Allied, they swept from victory to victory. Apart, he guided her foes to glory. Of the spell Alcibiades cast over his contemporaries, Aristophanes wrote that Athens "loves, and hates, and cannot do without him." To the end, their renown and ruin were indissoluble.

Recounted by Alcibiades' captain of marines in a mesmerizing death-row confession, Tides of War is historical fiction at its finest--a multidimensional, flesh-and-blood renarration of one of history's pivotal conflicts.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 426 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (April 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385492529
• ISBN-13: 978-0385492522
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (137 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #240,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

STEVEN PRESSFIELD is the author of the hugely successful historical novels Gates of Fire, Tides of War, and Last of the Amazons. His debut novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was made into a movie starring Matt Damon and Will Smith in 2000. He lives in California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

189 of 240 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Demanding and Sobering History Lesson, May 2, 2000

By 

Newt Gingrich (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
("THE")   

This review is from: Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War (Hardcover)

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.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars if you havent read Gates of Fire yet, start with that, October 19, 2001

By 

steve estvanik (seattle, wa USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tides of War (Paperback)

The Tides of War - Steven Pressfield After thoroughly enjoying his previous book, Gates of Fire, about the battle of Thermopylae, I was disappointed in this followup book on Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War. In the first book, the idea of having a lone survivor tell his story to Xerxes worked well in b oth suspense and dramatic terms. This time, the narrative is given at second and third hand, through the defender of Alcibiades' assassin. The assassin also happens to be one of Alcibiades old friends, but since the book starts while he is awaiting trial, there is no dramatic buildup from this relationship. The multiple narrators work well sometimes,but other times, it just becomes an excuse to quote from Alcibiades or others' journals, piecemeal, interrupting what flow the novel achieves. The background and progression of the Peloponnesian War is not given enough space, so the reader will need to provide this background separately. The two maps are useful, but a third, showing Asia Minor in more detail would be helpful.

The book does have its strengths - as before, the battle scenes are excellent, giving a vivid sense of what it must have been like as a hoplite in these times. One set piece involves a night assault on a fortified hilltop; others depict the all or nothing dicerolls of naval warfare. These are the highlights of the book. (One reason Gates of Fire may be more successful is simply that it devotes ahigher percentage of its story to the tactical bits.) The other major strength is in depicting athe political tentativeness with which all parties worked. Neither Athenians nor Spartans compelled alliaes by their benevolence, and each sought to pull away the other's confederates. Alciabiades is shown to be several steps ahead of his compatriots, managing to survive exile, return and exile by presenting irresistible allures. The greatest temptation is alliance with Persia, which soon reveals itself to be a pact with the devil for whichever side attempts it.

In sum, this is a good book, recommended for anyone with an interest in the period (and there are few enough novels written about this era). The politics and military aspects are excellent, and will get you through the slower plot devices. But, if you haven't read Gates of Fire yet, do start with that.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If You're Up To It, This One Can Be Memorable, July 21, 2002

By 

Richard R. Carlton (Ada, MI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tides of War (Paperback)

Yes, yes, we know Pressfield's great at battle detail and historically accurate story lines. More important in this work is the brilliant choice of character (Alcibiades) and the narrative technique of using two narrators (Jason & Polemides). Then the plot thickens.....Socrates shares the jail with Polemides and enters the script as well......Jason & Polemides have their own tangled web to unweave......this is a great novel that rises far above the thunder of the battle to enter the realm of a psychological analysis of democracy, theocracy, and a slew of both the finest and basest of human motivations.

This one wins on all levels.....Pressfield is cementing a beautiful reputation on these works.