Historical fiction is a difficult genre to write effectively. You need all the gifts of a great novelist and, if you want to write a truly great novel, a historian.
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And few writers display the combination of careful research and creative license the genre requires like Steven Pressfield.
Pressfield is probably best known for his novel The Legend of Bagger Vance, the story of a WWI-vet golfer and a mystical caddy who helps him recover from his battlefield trauma in time to manage a three-way tie with Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen in an exhibition tournament, which was later adapted into a film starring Matt Damon and Will Smith.
While Pressfield’s work often ventures into the 20th century, he clearly has a passion for Ancient Greece, the setting for another novel, Tides of War.
Pressfield structures the novel with as a story within a story, a common theme throughout his work. In this case, it’s more like a story within a story within a story.
The over-arching narrator is an Athenian living several decades after the city’s defeat by the Spartans and their allies during the Pelopennesian War. The novel begins with the narrator visiting his grandfather, Jason, and inquiring after his memories of the city’s golden age and its great men.
Jason, a disciple of Socrates and a naval commander, was present to watch the city rise and fall, making him a valuable source of persepective on the city, democracy, and the shifting tides of war.
Is there a man, the narrator asks Jason, who he finds his thoughts returning to often now in his old age?
Jason replies that there is. But he’s not a great man. He was a criminal condemned to death who once asked him to take his case.
The man’s name was Polemides, he says. His crime? The assassination of Alcibiades.
Polemides serves as the true narrator of the story. He was Alcibiades’ friend and bodyguard throughout 27 long years of war. It is through his eyes that we watch Alcibiades’s story unfold.
Alcibiades is a brilliant general and statesman, but in a larger sense, he is Athens itself.
Driven by an ambition that seeks to elevate men to the plain of the gods, Alcibiades is a peerless commander. But his success and bold plans inevitably draw the jealously and fear of rival politicians, who stoke the fears of the city against him with claims of impiety and a desire to make himself king.
Time after time, as Athens stands on the edge of a great victory under Alcibiades’ leadership, their nerve breaks and they exile him, only to call him back to the city when they realize how badly they need him.
Like Polemides, the city both fears and loves him.
This relationship between greatness, self-doubt, democracy, and love forms the central theme of the novel.
What is it that drives a man, or a democracy like Athens, Pressfield asks, to sabotage themselves when they can see the final victory in the distance?
Is it an internal fear of success (an unseen force in men’s souls that Pressfield calls “Resistance” in another book, Do the Work)?
Or is it simple jealously, as Jason implies in an moving speech before the Assembly later in the novel?
Pressfield uses the story of Alcibiades to probe these questions, set within a gripping tale of battles and life in Ancient Greece.
Pressfield’s ability to seamlessly integrate these grand questions with the mud and blood of ancient warfare is peerless. He knows when to take enough dramatic license to transport the reader into the setting in a visceral way, while still remaining true to the historical period.
Pressfield is a true historian, one who clearly pays homage to the scholars of an older period. In fact, he often apes the grand language of the 18th century when writing dialogue.
For instance, in one exchange between Alcibiades and Lysander, who has allied with the Prince of Persia against the Athenians, Alcibiades, who always knows how to court a crowd, calls out, “Do you see, men of Greece? A Spartan fights at the barbarian’s shoulder!”
“For freedom from thou, prideful villain!” Lysander calls back.
This sort of language is clearly meant as an homage to the tradition of elevating the past to a grander level than the present, but it does sometimes serve to distract the reader from the way Pressfield excels at making characters from the past feel human.
Yet, as a whole, Tides of War is Pressfield at his finest. Believable, illuminating, and profoundly entertaining.
Click here to view Tides Of War on Amazon.
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