About book A War Like No Other: How The Athenians & Spartans Fought The Peloponnesian War (2006)
Having enjoyed another book by Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle, I picked this one up when a copy was put up for sale at the Hayward, Wisconsin Public Library over the Memorial Day weekend. Since reading Thucydides freshman year at Grinnell College, the history of the Peloponnesian War has held interest. This account was no disappointment. Indeed, compared to others, it was original.The originality of Hanson's book is that he doesn't summarize Thucydides and the Oxyrhinchos Historian. He assumes some background on the part of the reader and proceeds instead to detail the war in terms of its practice, focusing on its innovations. Thus one learns about siegecraft, hoplite battle, trireme tactics--precisely the kinds of details that Thucydides assumed his readership familiar with. Doing so, A War Like No Other serves as a useful adjunct to the normal high school or college reading assignment.Beyond that, Hanson writes with an intention of exploring and exploding common misconceptions of the decades-long conflict between the ancient democratic imperialists of Athens and the oligarchical traditionalists of Sparta. One, of course, is the usual exaggeration of the goodness of Athens during its "golden age" from the defeat of Persia until at least the plague during the war. Although a radical democracy in ways quite different than ours, Athens was also, by the standards of its time, an imperialist superpower and bully, maintaining its far-flung commercial interests by means of tribute and an unmatched fleet. Sparta, however, while the bully of the Peloponnese, was the advocate of what today would be termed "national self-determination." A land power, it felt increasingly threatened by Athenian innovations and self-aggrandizing encroachments and became, with Thebes and Corinth, a leader of liberation movements throughout the Greek-speaking world extending from the Black Sea to Egypt to Asia Minor to Italy and Sicily. Of course, it wasn't as simple as that moralistic calculus might imply. Athens really did generally promote a kind of democracy in that its client poleis tended to favor egalitarianism while Sparta's notions of self-determination tended to mean oligarchical rule.The irony of the war is (1) that innovative, proto-capitalist Athens lost against reactionary Sparta and (2) that Sparta won by adopting many of the innovations which they, and their proponents like Plato, originally decried. The consequence of the Athenian defeat, moreover, were unintended. Sparta, long in decline, ended up becoming a virtual client of Persia before its defeat at the hands of formerly-allied Thebes and Athens, after a period of dictatorship, returned to democratic power to ally with its former Theban enemies in overthrowing oligarchies established by the Spartiates. Meanwhile, military innovations introduced by the war were perfected to the north and the whole hellenic order of things was overthrown by the Philip and his son Alexander.Hanson's focus, however, is primarily with things military and the myths he attacks are both ancient and modern. A primary one is that of hoplite warfare, a form of warfare identified with the virtues of a yeoman citizenry. In fact, as he shows, very little hoplite battle was conducted during the Peloponnesian war. Calvary, light infantry and marines were coming to the fore and the fighters were increasingly the lumpen, slaves and mercenaries. Further, as in almost all wars, the real misery, quantitatively speaking, was more from the externalities of conflict than from the direct exercise of it. Far and away the greatest dying on Athens' part occurred during its plague and resulted from the Periclean strategy of avoiding infantry contests with the invading Spartans.Hanson, a farmer himself, brings to his book much information about the ancient economics of warfare. How much did a trireme cost to build and maintain exactly? How much the hoplite panoply? How easy was it, really, for the occupying Spartans to devastate the Attic countryside? Were did the food come from?--the money?
I enjoy reading classical Greek and Latin literature of all sorts: drama, poetry, and history, as well as books about these topics. So it was with the anticipation of something good that I sat down to read Hanson’s “A War Like No Other”. Hanson is a noted author, historian and classicist, so what could be more interesting than his take on the Peloponnesian war? A lot of things, actually.Not that “A War Like No Other” is bad. Hanson, as has been noted in many reviews, departs from the typical linear presentation of the war, taking instead a topical approach. In each chapter he examines the war as a whole through the lens of a particular aspect of the war. In “Armor”, he focuses on the life of the Greek Hoplite soldier, the main Hoplite battles, and how the nature of those battles changed radically from the opening to the closing of the war. Likewise in “Walls” he investigates the ancient Greek practice of siege warfare. Naval battles are discussed in “Ships”, cavalry in “Horses”, and so on. As he examines these topics in detail he also touches on several recurring themes, chief among them the cost of the war in material treasure, human lives, and the way the Peloponnesian war changed Western concepts of war forever. All of this is fascinating.The issue I had was not with the information presented, but how it was presented. The topical approach simply did not work for me. It was too fragmented and disjoint. I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again. True, each chapter varied from the last in topic, but too many of the events and characters were repeated. The narrative thread provided by a linear history was disrupted as those characters and events lost their normal place in a timeline. It did not help that this was my first reading of a book on the Peloponnesian war. Perhaps if I had already read Thucydides, “A War Like No Other” would have been more accessible. On the whole, Hanson’s book is worthwhile, but I cannot recommend it to a newcomer to the war between Athens and Sparta. Start with Thucydides. I intend to make him my next stop.
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This was a book I was greatly looking forward to reading when it first came out. I waited some time to get it and then to read it and it didn’t quite live up to the anticipation. It’s a military history by a widely-respected expert and quite a serviceable read, not fully engrossing but good enough. Applications to modern times—references to terrorism as a method, not an enemy—are useful reminders of true conservative thinking. Hanson is a smart writer and I’d be interested in other books he’s written on the ancient world. A War Like No Other is a very good companion book to Thucydides and to Donald Kagan’s work. Hanson can put you inside the combat, on land or sea, the besieged cities and towns, the minds of the strategists and conspirators. He points out the brutal, even self-destructive accountability of the Athenian democracy, an extreme contrast to the total lack of the accountability in the administration of our war in Iraq. He uses the literature of ancient Greece, particularly the work of historians, philosophers, and the great playwrights to illuminate, not decorate, his account.
—Rick
I expected that I'd like this book. I thought it would be pretty good. Then I started reading it, and by the time I finished I realized it was great. I've read my handful of VDH, but this book is really right in his wheelhouse. A classicist by training, he hits this out of the park, but not necessarily in the way one would think. It is historically engrossing, and a very tight narrative, but more than that it is exceptionally moving. Because the Peloponnesian War is not examined merely from a strategic point of view, but more by examining the nitty gritty of the conflict, we see how it was fought from the perspective of those you fought it. In that regard, Thucydides is an excellent choice (in reality the only choice) for a primary source. He lived during the conflict, fought in it, and interviewed people from both side to better understand the brutality and tragedy of the conflict.The Peloponnesian War pitted Athens and her empire against Sparta, Thebes, Syracuse, Corinth, and various other city states. Lasting 27 years (431-404 BC), it was, as VDH points out in the title, like no war before it. It was not short, or honorable, and lacked the moral clarity of previous conflicts. It was fought because fear and a desire for hegemony blotted out all over motives. Because this type of war was a new war, VDH walks us through specifically how it was fought. Sieges, hoplite warfare, trireme battles at sea, the necessity of horses, etc. We see the war from the ground, as if we stood in rank with the Mantineans as they marched to annihilation against Sparta's red-cloaked professionals in 418, or rowed in a trireme in Syracuse's Great Harbor as Athen's mission in Sicily was shattered in 413. We meet many unforgettable characters, such as Pericles, Archidamus, Cleon, Nicias, Lysander, Demosthenes, Socrates (yes, that Socrates), and Alcibiades. Some were honorable men, while others were scoundrels and megalomaniacal killers.Something that VDH does very well is placing this conflict in the greater scope of the story of ancient Greece. This conflict lies almost directly in the middle of the Persian wars of 490,480-79, and the Macedonian invasion of Greece in the 330s. How the former impacted the Peloponnesian War, and how the Peloponnesian War impacted the latter are critical details. Also, it has long been presumed that the Peloponnesian War marked the end of the Greek "Great Century," but when one looks at the excellent drama that was produced directly because of the war, how Platonic thought was influenced both by Socrate's and Plato's lives during the conflict, and how Thucydides's narrative was produced (as well as Xenophon's additions, as Thucydides narratives stops in 411), and finally when one examines the resurgence of culture in Athens following their defeat in 404, one must ask: would much of Greek history and the arts even exist without this war? It is not quite a counterfactual, but something that must be considered. I won't even get into the rise of Theban democracy--ultimately stemming from the war--that eventually dismantled a tyrannical Spartan state within 40 years.All in all, a powerful book about a war that must be studied, as many conflicts in the subsequent 2400 years fall into pattern's very similar to the Peloponnesian War.
—John Pinegar
This is a great book on the Peloponnesian War, because it is different than other texts. Most texts approach the war from a chronological perspective. This one instead approaches it from the perspective of military technology and tactics and effectively leverages modern analogies to similar issues. It covers how the ancient greeks employed infantry, cavalry, fortified and besieged cities, used terror tactics and fought asymmetrical war, triremes. One thing from the infantry chapter that was helpful was a very detailed description of how hoplite warfare in a phalanx was really like and how it was intimately tied to civic virtues: discipline to stay in formation and trusting your neighbors to protect you. Thucydides has been studied by generals and heads of state for 1000's of years and the lessons appear to be eternal. This is a nice companion to reading Thucydides.
—Greg
