Free Republic

<p>In a recent review of Donald Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War, and my Autumn of War, ("Theatres of War:  Why the battles over ancient Athens still rage”  New Yorker Magazine, [January 12, 2004]), the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn  says that I believe that it is immoral to suggest defeat can be seen as victory: "The play asks the very question that Victor Davis Hanson considers "immoral": whether abject defeat can yet somehow be a victory."</p>

Donald Kagan:          (excerpts) ...The training of the intellect was meant to produce an intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction but it also had practical goals of importance to the individual and the entire community, to make the humanistically trained individual eloquent and wise, to know what is good and to practice virtue, both in private and public life. Such was the understanding of the ancient Greeks and of the Renaissance humanists but not, I fear of many teachers of the humanities today, who deny the possibility of knowing anything with confidence, of the reality of such concepts as truth and virtue, who...

Most good universities have at least one conservative professor on campus. When, for example, some group at Harvard wants to hold a panel discussion on some political matter, it can bring out the political theorist Harvey Mansfield to hold up the rightward end. At Princeton it's Robert George. At Yale it's Donald Kagan. These dissenters lead interesting lives. But there's one circumstance that causes true anguish: when a bright conservative student comes to them and says he or she is thinking about pursuing an academic career in the humanities or social sciences. "This is one of the most difficult things,"...