Review
“The age of Pericles was also a time of famine, pestilence and atrocity: a ‘Thirty Year Slaughter.’ In order to understand the lesson this offers for civilization, one must try to feel it as the Greeks felt it, and reflect it as they did. In this dual task, Victor Davis Hanson once again demonstrates that his qualifications are unrivalled.”
–Christopher Hitchens, author of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
“This book will immediately become the standard companion volume in English to Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars. Its own battle narratives are unexcelled; but its singular merit is its comprehensive and detailed description of how the actual fighting was done, how generals led, and why each side–Sparta and Athens–went to war. The author is a man of action and a practicing farmer as well as the premier classical historian and military commentator of our day.”
–Josiah Bunting III, author of Ulysses S. Grant
“The Peloponnesian War was grand and tragic but the sheer misery of those who experienced it has often been overlooked–until now. From death by trampling to cannibalism, from preteen-sized knights on ponies to deformed and ghostly plague survivors, from elegant galleys to bloodbaths in waterlogged death traps, the dark cones of classical combat are all brought to light by Hanson. This is a groundbreaking book by a great historian.”
–Barry Strauss, author of The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece–and Western Civilization
About the Author
Victor Davis Hanson has written or edited numerous books, including The Western Way of War, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and Ripples of Battle. He is also the author of two bestselling collections of essays: An Autumn of War and Between War and Peace. He is director emeritus of the classics program at California State University, Fresno, and currently a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, an Onassis fellow in Greece, Shifrin Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, and a recipient of the Eric Brendel Memorial Award for journalism. He lives and works with his wife and three children on their forty-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California, where he was born in 1953.
From The Washington Post
Inevitably, we see the Peloponnesian War through the eyes and truisms of one man. The narrative he left behind is replete with oracular insights that have supplied fodder for centuries of academic lectures: "The evils inflicted by the gods ought to be borne with patient resignation and the evils inflicted by enemies with manly fortitude." "No state can possibly preserve itself free unless it be a match for neighboring powers." "For so remarkably perverse is the nature of man that he despises whoever courts him and admires whoever will not bend before him." Proverbial nuggets like these, at once both prescient and commonsensical, threaten to upstage all the carnage of that war.These axioms, of course, come courtesy of Thucydides, the Athenian historian who (one would have thought) wrote the last word on the struggle. The Peloponnesian War -- that chain of bloody campaigns between the Athenians and the Spartans that gripped mainland Greece and beyond between 431 and 404 B.C. and seemed to risk destroying for all time so much that we think of as uniquely Greek, such as philosophical dialogues, wine parties and democracy -- bequeathed myriad benefits to students of history, not the least of which are those time-honored tips on both strategy and prudence. But time has sanitized the war for us. Only with effort do we see that this war arose not from the mist of Homeric legend but from the smoke of real battlefields where real men -- and not a few women and children -- were butchered with methods ever more malevolent and efficient. Massacre moved in those days from an art form to a science. If history ever gave us a war to end all wars, this should have been the one.
A War Like No Other can be read as an elaborate excursus on the work of Thucydides, performed by Victor Davis Hanson, a former professor of classics who has made himself one of our premier military historians. Hanson might fairly be accused of overproduction -- still in his prime, he has authored or co-authored 15 other books -- but this study demonstrates the care of an avid, meticulous scholar whose learning can be worn lightly because it's so assured. He has also become a formidable journalist in recent years, which has prompted him to produce prose that is starkly appealing, direct and accessible to the common, curious reader.
Hanson chronicles the "thousands of ordinary Greeks who were slaughtered for nearly three decades for the designs of fickle men, shifting alliances, and contradictory causes," and he explores the methods used to conduct the war over time, which makes the book not only a rapid read but also a handy reference for browsing. Hanson is at his best when wielding details (the widths of various pieces of armor, for instance). He economically traces the roots of enmity between Athens and Sparta reaching back at least 50 years before hostilities commenced in the days of Pericles, the legendary Athenian leader. We discover how land forces complemented or competed with trireme ships, how hoplites (heavily armored infantrymen) were used and ill-used, how craftily built walls led to the siege war that helped to draw out the conflict for almost 30 years. He is especially sound on the role of raw terror in war -- the festering fear of noncombatants as well as the heart-stopping fright experienced by those on the battlefront. He examines the Great Plague of 430 and shows how its debilitating effects cropped up in the literature of subsequent times. In other words, he gives us the context that Thucydides could not.
By the time we get to the shank end of the war, with the Athenian debacle on Sicily between 415 and 413 -- painful reading, whether in Thucydides or Hanson -- we have trudged a long way in the footsteps of cruel, unforgiving armies and their leaders, men like Alcibiades, Nicias, Gylippus, Cleon and Lysander. In the end, Hanson's is not a rosy view of the glory that was Greece; instead, he has produced a searing look at "the creative talent for killing" that marked the Greeks at their bravest and most heartless. After wading through the swamp of such devastation, one yearns for a sip of wine and a spot of Plato to redeem these people.
Hanson performs the difficult feat of not talking down to readers while still presuming no prior knowledge of the war. Although an understanding of Greek history of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. will certainly quicken one's pace, Hanson provides helpful appendices for the uninitiated or the rusty, identifying key terms, places and characters. His copious notes, written to inform and not to impress, will also fill in many gaps.
Hanson steadfastly aligns himself with generations of historians who believe that, while no two events are exactly alike, the past nevertheless has lessons to teach. Parallels with later wars come trippingly off his pen, though never without support. Outside of his book-lined study, Hanson does believe in what he sees as righteous causes, including the current war in Iraq. But there's nothing of the brass band about him. Where fighting and killing are at issue, no one is more unsparingly, unromantically frank. Once all the history and historiography have been set aside, we're left with the sobering words -- and one more axiom -- of the great philosopher Heraclitus: "War is the father of us all."
Reviewed by Tracy Lee Simmons
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Fear
Why Sparta Fought Athens (480–431)
Our Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War is now 2,436 years in the past. Yet Athens and Sparta are still on our minds and will not go away. Their permanence seems odd. After all, ancient Greek warring parties were mere city-states, most of them smaller in population and size than Dayton, Ohio, or Trenton, New Jersey. Mainland Greece itself is no larger than Alabama, and in antiquity was bordered by empires like the Persian, which encompassed nearly one million square miles with perhaps 70 million subjects. Napoleon’s army alone had more men under arms by 1800 than the entire male population of all the Greek city-states combined. In our own age, more people died in Rwanda or Cambodia in a few days than were lost in twenty-seven years of civil war in fifth-century b.c. Greece.
Nor were Greeks themselves especially lethal warriors, at least by later historical standards. Rudimentary wood and iron of the preindustrial age, not gunpowder and steel, were their shared weapons of destruction. Even the soldiers themselves who fought the war were not much more than five foot five and 130 pounds. They were often unimpressive middle-aged men who would appear as mere children next to contemporary towering two-hundred-pound GIs.
Yet for ancient folk so few, small, and distant, their struggle during the Peloponnesian War seems not so old even in this new millennium. During the weeks after September 11, 2001, for example, Americans suddenly worried about the wartime outbreak of disease in their cities. In October and November 2001, five died and some twenty-four others were infected from the apparently deliberate introduction of anthrax spores by unknown terrorists. During the spring of 2003 a mysterious infectious respiratory ailment in China threatened to spread worldwide, given the ubiquity of low-cost transcontinental airfare. The panic that ensued in Washington and Peking during a time of global tension evoked ancient wartime plagues, such as the mysterious scourge that wiped out thousands at Athens between 430 and 426. Similarly, at about the same time, Sicily, Melos, and Mycalessus were all cited in contemporary media, as millennia later the world once again watched military armadas head out to faraway places, saw democracy imposed by force, and read of schoolchildren killed by terrorist bands.
But even before September 11 the Peloponnesian War was not really ancient history. Scholarly books regularly appeared with titles like War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War, or Hegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age. Thucydides had long been assigned reading at the U.S. Army War College. And an array of statesmen such as Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and Eleuthérios Venizélos either taught or wrote about Greek history, in which the use of Thucydides’ war loomed large. More recently, controversial thinkers known as neoconservatives (“the new conservatives”) were for a time influential in American strategic thinking, and the text that they purportedly consulted frequently was once more Thucydides’.1
What is it about this particular ancient clash that causes it to be called to mind during our present wars? Why were the conflict’s supposed lessons both astutely and clumsily applied to most of our own struggles of the last century? Russia—or was it really Hitler’s Germany?—supposedly resembled oligarchic Sparta in its efforts to destroy a democratic, seafaring America. Did not the Cold War, after all, similarly divide up the world into two armed leagues, led by superpowers who had united for a time against the common enemy only later to face off for decades of bipolar hostilities? Was the Sicilian expedition a precursor to Gallipoli, Vietnam, or any proposed great democratic or imperial crusade abroad? Or does the disaster at Syracuse show, as Thucydides oddly concluded, what happens when folks at home do not support the troops abroad? Because Thucydides first framed the important issues that haunt us still, we naturally return to his original and seemingly unimpeachable conclusions.
The Sorrows of War
Why exactly is this rather obscure ancient war between minuscule Athens and Sparta still so alive, and used and abused in ways that other ancient conflicts, such as the Persian Wars (490, 480–79) and Alexander the Great’s conquests (334–323), are not? Many intriguing reasons come to mind.
First, it was a brutal and very long struggle. King Xerxes and his enormous Persian military were routed from Greece in about two years. Alexander destroyed the later Persian Empire in a third of the time it took Sparta to defeat Athens. Lasting twenty-seven years, or almost a third of the fabled fifth century of classical Greece, the Peloponnesian War, like the Second Punic War, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War, was a mess that eerily crossed generations. Those born after the first years of the war often fought and died in the fighting before it was over.
So the catastrophe devoured entire families across generations. The carnage reminds us of imperial Britain tottering after the First World War, the end of empire, aristocracy, and unquestioned patriotism all inextricably tied to trenches that gobbled up the British elite. The Peloponnesian War spared few Greeks, regardless of wealth or family connections. The “great houses” of Athens, or so the postbellum lament went, were almost wiped out.2
Take the most famous branch of the exalted Alcmaeonid family. Pericles, the spiritual and political leader of Athens, died of the plague at Athens in 429 in only the third season of the war. His sister, also in her sixties, had perished a year before from the same epidemic, along with his sons Paralus and Xanthippus. Neither of those young men reached thirty.
Later, a much younger bastard son, Pericles the Younger, was elected an Athenian general. He was in part responsible for the great sea victory at Arginusae, some twenty-three years after his father’s death. Yet the younger Pericles was subsequently executed by an Athenian jury in an infamous scapegoating frenzy during the battle’s aftermath. And Pericles’ nephew, the thirty-two-year-old bright and upcoming Hippocrates, fell at the forefront of the battle of Delium (424). Thirty years’ worth of plague, political intrigue, general hysteria, and enemy spears more or less wiped out the family of the most powerful man at Athens.
The war also started at the high-water mark of Greece’s great Golden Age (479–404). Yet the attendant calamity ended for good such great promise that started with the defeat of the Persians (479). The capitulation of Athens (404) and the end of the fifth-century Golden Age remain symbolically interconnected events to this day. They are also loosely associated as well with the near-contemporaneous trial and execution of Socrates (399), the last and greatest casualty of a once wonderful world seemingly gone mad in a few decades. Contemporaries, among them the comic poet Aristophanes, believed that with the end of the Peloponnesian War, Attic tragedy as emblemized by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had lost its splendor.
Indeed, players in and observers of the war were the greats of Hellenic civilization—Alcibiades, Aristophanes, Euripides, Pericles, Socrates, Sophocles, Thucydides, and others—many of whom flourished, were discredited, or perished because of their involvement in the fighting. Much of the greatest classical literature, such as Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Plato’s Symposium, and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, either deals with issues of the war or employs the conflict as dramatic landscape, leaving with us the depressing possibility that war, not peace, prompted the greatest explosion in the Greek creative genius, a frenzied outburst before a weary collapse. Most Greeks saw the bloody struggle through the eyes of Athens, whose writers enjoyed a near monopoly on reporting, praising, and condemning the war—shocked that in just three decades the entire dream of a cultural renaissance was brought to an end. So north of the Isthmus of Corinth the fight was soon known universally as the “Peloponnesian War,” the conflict against those awful supermen who inhabited the southern peninsula of Greece—not, as the parochial Peloponnesians saw it, as a Spartan-led struggle against imperialists in an “Athenian War.”
The Peloponnesian War pitted against each other two Greek states that were antithetical in nearly every respect. Athens had 300 warships, a population of over 300,000 residents, a fortified port, a vast countryside, some 200 tribute-paying subject states abroad, and plenty of coined money. Sparta was landlocked. About 160 miles to the south, it relied on an army of only 10,000 infantrymen—less than half of them full citizens—to enforce rule over 250,000 inferiors and serfs, and a hegemony of neighboring communities, without any tradition of either seapower or cosmopolitan culture.
Rightly or wrongly, the fighting was assumed to be a final arbitrator of the contrasting values of each. Which would prove to be the more viable ideology: cultural and political liberalism or a tough, insular conservatism? Does an open society reap military advantages from its liberality or succumb to a license unknown in a regimented and militaristic oligarchy? And who is the most resourceful in an asymmetrical war when both sides either cannot or will not face e...
