[lmm]

Academic history has its own fashions and political movements, even over decades; if we look at academic history from 50 years ago we see plenty of cases where the popular conception was closer to the truth than the academic consensus, much less any given review article from a single academic. Devereaux make some insightful points but he also has some very clear biases of his own; you only have to compare how he writes about a lack of written culture in Native American tribes to see that he's holding Sparta to a very different standard.