Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. I'm very pleased to introduce or reintroduce the conversation I had in

2015 with Don Kagan, the great Yale professor and historian of classical Greece to pass away this summer.

Welcome back to Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal and I'm very pleased to be having me today,

Donald Kagan, a distinguished longtime professor. I guess now Professor Emeritus at Yale University.

Thanks for being here. Pleasure to be here. That's great to have you. So I told someone

in Washington I was coming down to coming up to New Haven to do a conversation with you and Donald

Kagan. He said, oh, I love Don Kagan. He's the war guy. So you're a great professor, distinguished

ancient historian, yet in Washington, you don't notice the war guy. I think that's mostly because

of your book, the Arabic book, the origins of war, but talk about the book and about war.

Well, the book is called on the origins of war and the preservation of peace.

Yeah, people drop the second death. They do. They drop the second part nice. But I think that the

connection is very crucial and to infrequently attend it too. And the other rest of the title,

a little bit of it, is O2 Closivates, who wrote his famous essay on war. Well, I'm concerned,

particularly with the origins, how wars come about, not how you fight them. But the other thing is,

I think there's an inherent, important linkage between thinking about how wars come. And then,

since most of us find it unfortunate when wars come most of the time, how in fact wars don't come

about. And in some one sense, how wars can be prevented, that sounds like a bit of a more

active and hopeful way of looking at things, or how you can avoid going to war, which is a different

thing, but has the same outcome. So, on the on the on the origin of war and the preservation of

peace. Well, I mean, why would you write it? What, what, what prompted you to do it? You would.

I've always been interested in the general subject and my, my own life's work about

Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War naturally leads me to think about war in general. And of course,

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