Book Review: The Fox

M.N.J. Butler's 1995 novel The Fox was almost the one that killed my current streak of one historical novel set in Ancient Greece that I've been doing for the last two years. Following the list found here, I've been slowly but surly working my way from the mythic age, through the Trojan War, Persian War, Peloponnesian war and am now just getting into the age of Alexander the Great.

The Fox follows a spartan soldier called Leotychides who was raised as royalty, through his entire Spartan upbringing, and cleverly sets it against the fall of the Spartan Empire. Similar in many ways to John Gardiner's The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), which is itself set in the beginning of the Golden Age of Sparta and narrated by a philosopher asking where it all went wrong, The Fox shows how a society built on one principle, an elite warrior class who ignore everything else, could not easily stand against the Athenians over any length of time once a shared enemy no longer existed.

The novel was a really fun dip into an area of history I'm becoming quite fond of, and thanks to the power of Inter-Library Loans (wherein one library borrows a book from another) I was able to read this long out-of-print book and continue on with a winning streak that will take me through Alexander the Great's life next year and the fallout after his demise (sorry for the 2300-year spoiler)

A great read!