I’m an othismos literalist (this is an unpopular view). I base this on a lot of factors, including my own internality/experience in close-combat, but also on Tyrtaeus’ poetry and several battle narratives. I wrote a thread on it on here a while back, lemme see if I can find it.https://twitter.com/justsaylos/status/1225186625149448192 …
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He has *shreds* of good ideas, scotch taped onto really really really bad ones. His work, in the aggregate, isn’t to be taken seriously, IMO. His overall impact on military intellectuals who don’t have the benefit of a real background in history is immeasurably harmful.
But the shreds are concentrated. I'd say his works can be divided into two categories. On one side is Warfare and Agriculture, WWoW and The Other Greeks; they're valuable to scholars, occasionally dangerous to non-specialists. Everything else is dangerous nonsense.
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Like I said, I wouldn't judge any other historian for looking at the balance of the oeuvre and just walking away. But for myself, well - reception matters, and bad ideas belong in footnotes (with their flaws duly noted) as much as good ones.
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Glad there’s folks like you out there, Bret
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Well, you’re right to take a cool-headed view. And I certainly have read most of his work (at least his early stuff). It was jammed down my throat as a company grade officer and intelligence officer, and I only started to untangle it recently. Hanson’s theories sent me to Iraq.
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I understand that Carnage and Culture was particularly in vogue at the time. It's a *deeply* irresponsible book, designed, quite frankly, more to fool the unwary reader than to inform.
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