Lendon, J.E.

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Lendon, J.E.

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Yale University, B.A., 1986, Ph.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Corcoran Department of History, P.O. Box 400180, Randall Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904.E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, associate professor of ancient history, 1997—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

John M. Olin faculty fellow in history, 1992-93; Center for Hellenic Studies junior fellowship, 1999-2000; University of Virginia teaching award, 2002; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellowship, 2004-05.

WRITINGS:

Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World, Clarendon Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2005.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Research in Greek and Roman foreign affairs.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian and educator J.E. Lendon is the author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, in which he contends that military ritualism has not changed much from ancient times to the present. He compares how American soldiers risked their lives to recover the bodies of their dead, very much like their Greek counterparts thousands of years earlier. He notes that the Roman army suffered in what is present-day Iraq, just as American soldiers have in that same land. Lendon further writes that the Greeks conducted their wars to conform to the strategies of Homer's Iliad, eschewing technology available to them in favor of man-to-man combat. The Romans, who had no military history of their own upon which to draw, in many ways emulated the Greeks.

In a review of the study, Michael Vlahos applied ancient history to modern times when he wrote for UPI Security & Terrorism that Lendon points out how President George W. Bush "has in our lifetime become as much the war leader as any chieftain of classical antiquity. His martial homilies are full of reminders of the glorious deeds of our ancestors." Vlahos noted that speeches by Bush and other leaders "are like battle speeches from Xenophon or Thucydides or Caesar—especially when President Bush, as he so often does, delivers his orations before assembled troops. Emotive metaphor and allusion makes clear what war's ritual means: it is the celebration and reaffirmation of America's very identity. It is through our struggle to become worthy of our ancestors and through our sacrifice to join them that American identity itself is reaffirmed."