198 Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
perceptions regarding Lacedaemon by delivering a lecture entitled “The Spar-
tan Way of Life” to a learned audience at a Vortragsabend sponsored by the
Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung in Munich. The final revisions of this
manuscript were completed while, with added assistance from the Earhart
Foundation, I was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National
Fellow at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University. These
were invaluable opportunities, and I am grateful for the support I received.
For the most part, however, this book was written in years in which I was
teaching history at Hillsdale College. I am grateful to the Charles O. Lee and
Louise K. Lee Foundation, which supports the chair I held and still hold at the
college; to the trustees of the college and to its president, Larry Arnn; and to
my colleagues and students there, who were always supportive. I owe a special
debt to Dan Knoch, the director of the Hillsdale College library; to Maurine
McCourry, who arranged for the purchase of books; and to Judy Leising and
Pam Ryan, who handled interlibrary loan. I also owe a particular debt to one
of my anonymous readers, who went over the manuscript with great care and
made a multitude of helpful suggestions. Librarians and those who read man-
uscripts for academic presses are the unsung heroes of the academic world,
and no one knows better than I how much we scholars owe them.
The fact that I was able to finish this book I owe to Dr. Marston Linehan,
Dr. Peter Pinto, and the staff at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes
of Health in Bethesda, Maryland—where in the summer of 2012 I was treated
for prostate cancer and for complications attendant on surgery. Had Dr. Pinto
not devised a new method for diagnosing prostate cancer, had he not done my
surgery with great precision, and had he and his colleagues not found a way
to eliminate the lymphocele that bedeviled me in the aftermath, I would not
now be in a position to write these words.
Throughout the period in which this book was written, my four children
were patient, and they and my wife kept me sane. From time to time, they
brought me back to the contemporary world from classical antiquity, where,
at least in my imagination, I may sometimes have seemed more at home than
in the here and now.