Publisher: Random House
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
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Summary: Spellbinding Account of Ancient Greece's "Civil War"
Ever since I had the pleasure of hearing distinguished classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson deliver a spellbinding lecture at New York City's Onassis Cultural Center a few years ago, I have been a great admirer of his splendid writing, which appears frequently here in New York City on the pages of The New York Post. His writing, replete with fine prose, is often pregnant with brilliant insights, offering succinct commentaries on America's ongoing War on (Islamofascist) Terror. So I am not surprised that Hanson has offered in "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War" a splendid history which succinctly explains how and why both great Greek city states waged a horrific twenty seven year-old conflict, which Hanson observes was Western civilization's first great civil war. There have been many great histories devoted to the Peloponnesian War, beginning with Thucydides' and concluding with the excellent works by Yale University classicist and historian Donald Kagan, but here Hanson offers a vivid, yet surprisingly terse, account which should appeal to a wide readership. Unlike both Thucydides and Kagan, whose histories are chronological in nature, Hanson instead presents a historical overview of this war devoted to themes which are the titles of individual chapters: fear, fire, disease, terror, armor, walls, horses, and ships.
In the opening chapter, "Fear", Hanson observes how Sparta, alarmed by Athen's imperialist ambitions, stumbled into war, unsure as to how to defeat its wealthier, predominantly maritime rival. One of its two kings, the elderly Archidamus, warned on the eve of battle against going to war, observing that "War is not so much a matter of men as of monetary expense" (Ironically he would lead his Spartan warriors on two consecutive annual invasions of Attica, ravaging the countryside, before retiring, which Hanson chronicles in the next chapter "Fire".). Indeed, Hanson notes that Archidamus was quite correct, though the king himself did not live long enough to see his city state emerge victorious, due in no small measure to generous financial assistance from the Persians.
In "Disease" Hanson suggests that the outbreak of a mysterious plague in 430 B. C. would cast a long, dark shadow on Athens' prosecution of the war, leaving as its bitter legacy, Athens' reckless conduct near its end, most notably the disastrous Sicilian campaign from 415 to 413 B. C. against the larger, democratic city state Syracuse, and the bloody Ionian war from 411 to 405 B. C. which led to Athens' capitulation to Lysander's victorious fleet in the spring of 404 B. C. The plague of 430 to 429 B. C. (which would return in a less virulent form in 426 B. C.) not only killed Pericles, Athens' visionary statesman who had ruled the city for nearly thirty years, but also many influential citizens who could have steered Athens from pursuing reckless campaigns against Syracuse and Sparta near the end of the Peloponnesian War.
Hanson stresses the importance of asymmetric warfare waged by Sparta and Athens against each other and their respective city state allies in succeeding chapters entitled "Terror", "Armor" and "Walls". Contrary to popular belief, most of the land-based battles of the Peloponnesian war were not classical Greek battles between opposing phalanxes of armored hoplite heavy infantry (Only two major battles were decided between opposing hoplite phalanxes.). Instead, Hanson notes the growing importance of lightly armored troops and cavalry at both major battles and daring raids, marked by savage behavior which was hitherto unknown to Greek military elites and ordinary citizens and slaves. Both of these forces were often responsible for committing atrocities against men, women and children, adopting scorched-earth policies reminiscent of modern campaigns like Union general William T. Sherman's infamous 1864 march to the sea. Although secure, almost impregnable, walls were to become important defenses of many Greek city states during the Peloponnesian War, Hanson observes in the chapter "Walls" that they were often far from successful in protecting cities from determined besieging armies, due to starvation and treachery.
In "Horses" Hanson argues that Athenian campaign against Syracuse failed due to inept generalship and an insufficiently small force of cavalry; it was a poorly led, poorly organized, overseas military adventure against the Greek world's second largest democratic city state, which was contrary to Athens' claim that it was waging war to spread democracy throughout the Greek world. He also strongly questions the judgement of Athens's leading politicians, who missed more than once, excellent opportunities to forment rebellion amongst Sparta's vast, often restless, population of Messinian helots (Agrarian serfs conquered and enslaved by Sparta.). Not only did Athens lose tens of thousands of its best soldiers killed in battle, executed or enslaved by the victorious Syracusans and their Spartan allies, but it also lost its veteran, battle-tested fleet of over one hundred triremes and its distinguished admiral Eurymedon.
So why did Sparta win the Peloponnesian War? Hanson attributes Sparta's success in part to its excellent military leadership, which would yield a maverick, brilliant commander in Lysander, the victorious Spartan admiral who accepted Athens' surrender in the spring of 404 B. C. He praises both the quality of Sparta's military leadership and its willingness to retain capable, decisive leaders as generals and admirals, even if they failed in battle. In stark contrast, nearly every distinguished Athenian general and admiral, from Demosthenes to Alcibiades, was executed or exiled for his failure(s) often under orders by the Athenian assembly, finally yielding a timid, inept military leadership unable to defeat brilliant Spartan commanders like Lysander. But Hanson also observes that Spartan king Archidamus's astute, prescient remarks at the eve of the war, were ultimately correct; Sparta could not have won without substantial financial aid rendered by Persian satraps (governors) of western Asia Minor (in what is now modern Turkey). And yet, did the Pelopennesian War truly settle the intense rivalry between Athens and Sparta? Hanson offers no compelling answer, but instead, he does emphasize the war's horrific cost to ordinary citizens, as well as the elites, of Sparta, Athens and their respective allies, as if he was echoing William T. Sherman's astute remark that "war is hell".
Summary: The Best Kind of History
Anyone can write a book on history that outlines what happened - it's the rarer teacher who can write what happened in a way that makes the past relate to the present, so that you find yourself saying "I understand that!" Hanson is one of those rare teachers and his is the first book of the several I have read on the Peloponnesian War that helped me make connections not only to what happened back then, but how two great peoples (the Athenians and Spartans) could have conceivably made such a horrific set of choices, so as largely to destroy their own cultures over a 30-year war.
Mr. Hanson is a historian of war, and he was constantly able to make enlightening comparisons between the mind-sets of the two great adversaries, whether with the American Civil war leaders, the Europeans who blundered into, and remained, in World War I, the battles of WWII, and more. Often this kind of comparison can be dangerously facile - every time is truly different, and drawing parallels can be difficult. But his usually worked for me, and truly helped me understand this awful war.
He goes into much more detail than the general reader may be prepared for, and his discussion is grouped (as he clearly sets forth in his introduction) around grand themes of the war, less than a year-by-year or blow-by-blow annalistic approach. I have read Kagan's great work on the war, and I actually found Hanson's approach easier to comprehend. He has a wealth of truly stunning and terribly sad statistics at his fingertips, whether it is the total number of vessels destroyed and sailors lost in the horrific final years of the sea contest, or the amounts of food and fodder required for a besieged city; the sheer sweep of death from the plaque that struck Athens only a year into the war, to the fact that every single general and admiral Athens possessed would, over the course of the war, die, be exiled, or be executed for his conduct. The facts weigh one down over time with the conviction that here was one of those rare moments when the fallible decisions of fallible men did much to snuff out a spirit of civilization that might have meant an incalculable difference (for the better) in the history of the world. Equally, one realizes this kind of fallibility is still alive and well in world events today.
Hanson also makes it clear that this was a brutalizing war, and men conventionally were destroying the lives and property of men, women and children on both sides at its end, who would have found such behavior despicable at its beginning. Nor does he fall for the Victorian concept that, after the war, Athenian culture died; he does show, however, that it was permanently changed and that life in Greece was forced to go in a far different direction than its classic culture might have found without the war.
All in all, bear with the statistics for the sheer sweep of this war and the lessons you cannot help drawing about war in general, and in our own day.
Summary: Excellent on many levels
This is not a typical narrative history that starts at the beginning and systematically presents a chronology of events. Instead, it makes repeated passages over the history from different topical standpoints. So it helps to already have a basic understanding of the chronology. For that reason, the later chapters were easier going for me than the earlier because I didn't have this background. As I gradually formed a picture of what happened over the entire period, each chapter got more fascinating for me.
This is actually a pretty depressing book to read. The author has a very negative view of warfare and the ability of the human species to learn from his mistakes. Throughout the book he illustrates over and over how throughout history mankind has made the same mistakes it did in this war, almost as if we cannot learn from our mistakes and there is very little hope that we'll be able to in the future. Unlike at least one other reviewer up here, I found his analogies to current events for example pretty much on the mark.
The author has a depressing and pessimistic view of human nature, which seems to lose all sense of proportion and reason the longer a war proceeds. Sound familiar? I think his assessment of human nature is pretty much on the mark.
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