Why must we pick on poor Victor Hansen? If you want to pick on a classicist who's done some real harm, start with Kagan, whose spawn seems to have spawned the latest absurd Bush policy.

Kagan made a career out of a series of not particularly inspiring books paraphrasing Thucydides plus some wingnut huffiness. He pulls a Joe McCarthy on the late British Marxist scholar Geoffrey de Sainte Croix, who wrote a far more thought provoking book on the same subject.

Hansen has put out a lot of boiler plate in recent years, and the cultivated toughness gets to be a bit much, but books like The Other Greeks are intellectually very serious and contribute to a debate that (as he points out) has largely been conducted in other countries. Beyond that, he takes seriously and treats with respect leftist historians like Moses Finley whose exile to Cambridge I'm sure suited the Kagans of this world just fine.
 Gene O'Grady | 10:23 PM