A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War
by Victor Davis Hanson
Random House. 416 pp. $29.95

Victor Davis Hanson, who does not mince words, once introduced himself to me as the most hated man in the classics profession. I figured he must be exaggerating, but he wasn’t. Classicists detest Hanson for Who Killed Homer? (1998), his blistering critique of their faddishness and irrelevance. Proclaiming himself an academic populist, Hanson believes that the Greek classics can and should matter to ordinary people. A War Like No Other is his latest effort to make them matter.

As readers of COMMENTARY know, Hanson is also a military historian, which helps account for his meteoric rise as a commentator since 9/11. Military historians lack status in the academy because professors, who live in a world of talk, do not like to admit how often things in the broader world are settled by force or the threat of it. But the public snaps up military history, and the prolific Hanson knows how to write for it.

A War Like No Other displays the gifts of Hanson the historian. It recounts the Peloponnesian war, the greatest conflict of Greek antiquity. Just two generations after the glorious pan-Hellenic defeat of the invading Persians, the two foremost allies in that conflict, Athens and Sparta, squared off against each other. Each boasted powerful allies of its own: the Spartan or Peloponnesian alliance dominated on land, while Athens with its maritime tributaries ruled the sea.

As Hanson stresses, following his great source Thucydides, the war was to prove far less glorious than disastrous. It dragged on for 27 years in all (431-404 B.C.E.), and the losses, both human and economic, were enormous. While Sparta finally won, the victory proved empty. Neither city would fully recover, nor would Greece as a whole: the rise of Macedonia marked the end of the heyday of the polis or Greek city-state.

The Peloponnesian war offers a great story; the problem, for Hanson as for all other modern historians, is that it has already been told. Thucydides’ contemporaneous account—he was born ca. 460 B.C.E., died ca. 395, and fought in the war as a general for his native Athens—continues to dwarf all competitors. Not only is it our sole intact and reliable literary source for the war, all others being fragmentary, but Thucydides is one of the greatest writers of any genre ever to put quill to parchment. His profundity and intensity, his narrative and rhetorical brilliance, and his unique blend of analytical rigor and imaginative sympathy make his book one of the most thrilling ever written.

True, the war lasted until 404 B.C.E., and Thucydides’ account breaks off in 411 (to be taken up by another great historian, Xenophon). True, too, there are numerous minor sources for the war, documentary and archeological, and 2,500 years’ worth of scholars second-guessing Thucydides’ interpretation. Still, Hanson appreciates Thucydides’ greatness too much to set out to rival or supersede him.

What he has chosen to do instead is to amplify one of Thucydides’ themes. His subtitle indicates his emphasis: this is a “how they did it” book, where what they did was bloody. Its subject is “the thousands of ordinary Greeks who were slaughtered for nearly three decades for the designs of fickle men, shifting alliances, and contradictory causes.” Such deep sympathy with the obscure victims of the violence of war is genuinely Thucydidean, albeit only one strand among many in Thucydides’ account. Hanson moves it front and center.

He also adopts a different method. While Thucydides narrates the war season by season, Hanson’s chapters bear titles like “Terror,” “Plague,” “Armor,” “Walls,” and “Ships” (this last, with its thorough account of naval warfare among the Greeks, being especially vivid and evocative). Each chapter focuses on a particular epoch of the war, but also on the particular aspect that dominated it. Frequently interrupting his narrative for a schematic treatment of a chapter’s featured motif, Hanson finds himself ranging both forward and backward in time for evidence, but throughout his account he skillfully maintains both focus and cohesion.

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Two elements emerge from Hanson’s valuable treatment that are largely missing from Thucydides. While the Greek historian assumed a reader’s acquaintance with the modes of warfare of the day, Hanson obviously cannot. So episodes that Thucydides merely sketches Hanson painstakingly and very usefully re-creates. The desperation of siege and plague, the strange interplay of strict order and blind bloody chaos that pervaded hoplite (heavy-armed) warfare, the unsurpassed intricacy of the seamanship required of the crew of a trireme, the massive cruelty that came to dominate the treatment of the vanquished—all take on concreteness through Hanson’s patient accumulation of detail.

In this connection, the fact that Hanson has always been an agrarian historian in addition to a military one serves him well, not least because these two aspects of life were closely intertwined in ancient times. Thus, one of his finest achievements in A War Like No Other is to explain the puzzling fact that the combatants invaded each other’s territory repeatedly but hardly ever with decisive effect. A practicing farmer, Hanson conducted the relevant experiments himself. Burning wheat fields and uprooting vines and olive trees proved slow, exhausting, and only sporadically successful. It is no surprise, then, that the invaders usually retreated with their work of destruction unfinished or even hardly begun.

The second way in which Hanson’s work augments that of Thucydides is in the richness of its statistics. Ancient writers often neglected these, and never provided them consistently or cumulatively. Some of Hanson’s numbers are well grounded, others highly conjectural; all, however, reflect his determination to leave no ancient stone unturned in the search.

Hanson’s statistics, moreover, are anything but dry. We learn, for instance, that Athens’ estimated total losses in the war were proportionate to American losses in World War II not of 400,000, the actual American figure, but of 44 million. This alone allows us to grasp what a catastrophe the war was—and how amazing was the city’s recovery in the decades thereafter. Similarly, the grievous losses in the final and most chaotic stage of the conflict, involving years of major naval battles, fell heaviest on the Athenian lower classes, which supplied the rowers, and thus altered the political balance within the city for a long time to come.

Hanson’s statistics also help to crack some thorny riddles. Why (even apart from the hardiness of vine, olive, and grain) did the early Spartan invasions of Attica prove so ineffectual? By reckoning the likely acreage of the land under cultivation there, Hanson shows that the manpower available to the Spartans simply did not permit them to ravage more than a small percentage of it. Similarly, he calculates the vicissitudes of public finance on both sides of the conflict, and the effect of these on the course and eventual outcome of the war.

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These last examples are typically Hansonian. Where Thucydides is sublime, Hanson is businesslike and prosaic. Not for him the almost biblical resonance of Thucydides’ concern with ultimate human questions of justice and piety. He leaves both deep thinking and stirring eloquence to the master, writing for readers whose curiosity about just how things were done in the past matches his own. His distinctive achievement is to show how great a contribution this approach can make to understanding why events unfolded as they did—as well as to grasping the plight of those condemned to endure them.

There are, of course, other valid approaches to the history of the war, generating the vast secondary literature to which I alluded earlier. Hanson offers many footnotes but largely spares the reader his disagreements with other scholars. Of these the most estimable, certainly in the English-speaking world, is Donald Kagan of Yale, who beginning in the late 1970’s published four massive volumes on the war and has more recently issued a condensed and revised one-volume version.

Kagan’s emphasis, unlike Hanson’s, is on diplomacy and strategy. He provides a detailed reconstruction of every major episode, relying on Thucydides where he can, correcting him where he feels he must. To put it very roughly, Kagan offers a “top-down” rather than a “bottom-up” perspective: his is the statesman’s viewpoint, from which he assesses the performance of those within each city who bore the terrible burden of decision. Hanson’s viewpoint, as we have seen, is that of those who bore the consequences of those decisions.

Obviously, we need not choose between these contrasting and ultimately complementary emphases. If Kagan’s book lacks the in-the-trenches and on-the-benches detail of Hanson’s, Hanson’s lacks the careful development of the big picture of Kagan’s. No understanding of the greatness and misery of war is complete without both perspectives.

A War Like No Other is very much a post-9/11 book. Certain of Hanson’s emphases—on the role of terror in the war, on the nature of “asymmetrical” conflict—reflect this fact. His purpose, however, is not to draw facile lessons for today from these events of so long ago. He is much too careful a scholar not to maintain a wall between his historical efforts and his journalistic ones. His appeal is to the serious reader who shares his interest both in this most fateful of Greek wars and in the anatomy of war as such. He evokes for us, today, the harsh fates of so many ordinary men of a vanished epoch, concluding with a litany of the obscurely fallen and the injunction to remember them, for if the study of war and its lessons is for all of us, the fighting of the Pelo-ponnesian war was “theirs alone.”

Last and perhaps best, Hanson’s achievement encourages us to return to the masterpiece upon which it depends. You can never be too rich or too thin, or have too many reasons to reread Thucydides.

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