Donald Kagan, the celebrated American historian and classicist who specialised in Ancient Greece died last Friday 6 August in a retirement home it has been reported.
Kagan regarded himself as Greek to his very soul and wrote the acclaimed four-volume series on the Peloponnesian War.
“A study of the Peloponnesian War is a source of wisdom about the behavior of human beings under the enormous pressures imposed by warm plague, and civil strife,” he wrote in 2003, “and the limits within which it must inevitably operate.”
In his The New Yorker review, George Steiner said “the temptation to acclaim Kagan’s four volumes as the foremost work of history produced in North America in this century is vivid.”
Until his retirement in 2013, Kagan was Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University. His “The Origins of War” was one of Yale’s most popular courses for twenty-five years. Over an even longer timespan he taught “Introduction to Ancient Greek History” and upper level History and Classical Civilization seminars focusing on topics from Thucydides to the Lakedaimonian hegemony.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Donald Kagan the National Humanities Medal in 2002, and selected him to deliver the 2005 Jefferson Lecture.
Kagan titled his lecture, “In Defense of History”; he argued that history is of primary importance in the study of the humanities.
According to Politico, “Kagan’s unapologetic advocacy for the study of Western civilization and for protecting the right to air unpopular and even abhorrent views made headlines not just at Yale but around the country. He never understood the tenured academics who claimed to be afraid to speak up, and he loved to say that he kept making trouble — and getting promoted.”
