The following is a compliment: this is not a scholarly book. H. presents a thoroughly readable, lucidly written account and analysis of two related events in the history of the Peloponnesian War and in the history of democracy – the Athenian victory over the Spartan fleet at the Arginusae islands in 406 and the Athenian people's subsequent decision to condemn and execute their victorious generals. These strategoi, in the view of the demos, had failed in their duty to secure the bodies or to effect the rescue of the Athenians killed or shipwrecked in the course of the engagement.

The book successfully elucidates the circumstances surrounding the battle and the generals' subsequent ‘prosecution’, and the non-specialist reader should find the work thoroughly accessible. The style is light and welcoming, verging on the informal and treating the reader as an intelligent partner in the enquiry rather than as an insensate vessel into which data and conclusions may be poured. Especially welcome are the succinct but hardly skimpy treatments of the risks run by late fifth-century Athenian leaders (who often fell foul of the demos and found themselves in precarious circumstances) and of the nature of the ancient trireme and the type of naval warfare it inspired or generated. It is admittedly quibbling to complain that H.'s preference for Whitehead's explanation of the periplous (p. 87) contributes to a misunderstanding of that tactic and of the events at Thucydides 2.91–2, where the manoeuvre described absolutely required the presence of the stationary merchantman around which the fleeing trireme turned in order to give the Athenian vessel protection as it came about and attacked its pursuer. Again, the non-specialist will find the descriptions clear and eminently readable, while the classicist or ancient historian already expert in these fields is bound to find something new and interesting. There are minor historical slips: for example, we are told repeatedly (pp. 7, 59) that the Athenians (as opposed to the Spartans) overthrew their tyrants, a mistake Thucydides was already correcting in the fifth century b.c. (6.53.3) and that the ‘Athenians spent the mid-fifth century pushing the Persians out of the Aegean’ (p. 10) and that the Spartans devoted themselves to the ‘practice of warfare’ (p. 6: where ‘practice for’ would be more accurate but perhaps still an overstatement: Thuc. 1.118.2).

H.'s book, nevertheless, should be applauded for bringing important, if less frequently discussed, aspects of the ancient Greek world to a wider audience and for doing so in an attractive and intelligent fashion. Yet it is precisely the likely popularity of this work that gives this reviewer pause, for the book presents, in the final analysis, a partial but none the less disturbing defence of one of the more heinous acts in the history of Athenian popular government. H. attempts to show that there was nothing strictly ‘illegal’ about the way the Athenians condemned their generals en masse and without individual defences or, indeed, even a trial per se. On that view, Callixenus' proposal to vote on the generals' collective guilt or innocence based on their statements before the assembly was ‘legal’ in that it did not violate any codified law and it expressed the Athenian demos' will. To defend this procedure one need only assert, as H. does (pp. 83–4), that whatever the Athenian demos determined to do was by definition ‘legal’. But surely one cannot in turn justifiably claim that Euryptolemus' motion to prevent Callixenus' proposal via the graphe paranomon was attempting to ‘thwart the process by appealing to technicalities' (p. 84). No established ‘process’ was at issue. Indeed, just the opposite: it seems much more likely that the Athenians were about to do something they had never (or rarely) done before and that Euryptolemus (understandably) raised the question of what was traditional and conventional in Athenian government (and thus consistent with nomos).

H. goes yet further, defending the demos' actions here – forcing Euryptolemus and his supporters to back down and allowing a vote on Callixenus' motion – on the grounds that there was ‘no threat of violence’ (p. 90). But that hardly squares with Xenophon's account (reported by H., p. 83) that Euryptolemus was threatened that, if he and his supporters did not withdraw their objections, they ‘should be sentenced by the same vote as the generals'. Is this not a pretty obvious (and potentially physically harmful) example of what the contemporary West so often condemns as ‘bullying’? But perhaps what is intolerable in the schoolyard or in social media is more acceptable in ‘democratic’ assemblies.

It is precisely in H.'s defence of Athens and Athenian democracy that perhaps the most striking indictment of both (and of modern democratic myopia) can be found. She concludes, apparently with sanguinity, that the Arginusae trial was not a product of ‘rash action’, but instead ‘a product of deliberate consideration’. One wonders how this can possibly serve as an exculpation, except in a world that too easily rates ‘process’ over ‘product’ and anything ‘democratic’ over anything putatively ‘undemocratic’. Can one, after all, get the Athenians and democracy itself off the hook by concluding, as H. does (p. 94), that ‘the Athenians, simply put, made a terrible mistake’? For far too long the word ‘mistake’ has been used in this way as an easy way out for malefactors. If a young thug robs a convenience store, it is not a ‘mistake’; it is a morally indefensible decision. A ‘mistake’ is taking a left turn when one should have taken a right.

To credit most of the Athenians' great achievements to democracy while treating democracy's problems or failures as mere ‘mistakes’ (p. 94) is to skirt fundamental questions about the nature of popular government and the nature of mankind, and thereby to fall far short of the Athenians and other Greeks we so often claim to admire.