A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson

Most histories of the Peloponnesian War follow the example of the first great historian of the war, Thucydides, and narrate the history in chronological fashion. Victor Davis Hanson takes a very different approach. He instead analyzes the war an aspect at a time, looking at various aspects of life, methods of warfare, culture, and so on, describing in detail how things worked. This was a war that ended the golden age of Greece and in many ways was a very modern war. It was not a war consisting of set battles of hoplites of limited duration. Instead, it lasted for a generation, spread out over all of Greece and into Asia Minor and Sicily, and featured attacks on civilians, piracy, and at times what today we’d call “terrorism” and “ethnic cleansing.” The end phase of the war was dominated by a major power’s getting bogged down far overseas, in a conflict that spent much of its blood and treasure and left it open to its final defeat.

When the war actually started and ended isn’t really clear cut. Historians, following Thucydides and Xenophon (who picked up where Thucydides, who ended his great history mid-sentence and with several years of warfare still to go, left off), pick the start as the Spartan invasion of Attica. However, tensions had been there for months, and the lead up to the war is as complex as the lead up to World War I. Several Spartan allies went to war with Athenian allies months before the Spartan invasion. Likewise, Xenophon – and most modern historians following his lead – mark the end of the war as the capitulation of Athens after their huge naval loss at Aegospatami and the subsequent Spartan siege of Athens. After all, the Long Walls were pulled down and the Athenians had to agree to Spartan terms (which included becoming an oligarchy). Thus, historians view the Athenians as losing he war. But some early Greek historians disagree. Athens rebounded a few years later, and some of historians view their subsequent rebound – including their regaining ascendancy over Sparta – as a continuation of the war (and they therefore viewed Athens as the winner).

The key event early in the war was the plague that ravaged Athens, killing a quarter to a third of its people. We don’t know what exactly this plague was, but we do know the affects it had. But many historians, while concentrating on how awful it was, ignore its long term effects. Hanson does a more precise analysis, looking at the effect not only of lost military personnel (noting several battles where 25-30 percent more hoplites or cavalry would have been decisive), but at the impact of the huge loss in non-combatants who supported the military and of long-term economic power. In the end, Athens quite likely would not have lost he war if not for the plague. This seems even more likely when you consider that Athens lost its greatest leader – Pericles – to the plague. Pericles wasn’t only a brilliant strategist, but he could do something nobody else was able to do: hold the various factions of the radical democracy of Athens in check, and get them to follow his lead. The plague had another effect, though, perhaps more insidious: the constant exposure to death in the city coarsened the population, making many of the horrid actions of later in the war more likely (though perhaps they’d have occurred anyway, given the duration of the war).

The war changed Greece profoundly. Prior to the war, warfare (at least amongst Greek city states, as opposed to against foreign invaders) was viewed as the action of a day, in which armies of hoplites faced on another on a field and slugged it out for a few hours. Civilians weren’t touched, the survivors went home, and it was over. War was decided based on physical strength and bravery, not strategy and technology. The Peloponnesian War changed this forever. Strategy and tactics became important, as did other types of fighting (ranging from naval to cavalry to guerilla war tactics). Moreover, it became darker and nastier, as civilians and captured prisoners were massacred.

Not all these changes were bad, of course. The Athenian naval strategy went hand in hand with their radical democracy. Hoplites were property owners. Spartan society provided the extreme case. It was extremely conservative; the hoplites came from the Spartiate class, who were supported by the helots – essentially serfs, who had few or no rights. Triremes, on the other hand, were rowed by a cross-class mix. Good rowers could come from any class, and they mingled together. The reactionary forces in Greece looked down at the navy, in part because of this democratization that it caused. Later in the war (and in the wars that followed it), as Sparta was forced to create a navy, Spartan society as a result became more democratic. Yet some, both during and after the war, looked back on the good old days when war was a simple, clean test of valor. Plato laments the changes in warfare (and even muses that the great naval victory over the Persians a generation before the Peloponnesian War was a bad thing, as it lead to such changes).

But as the war changed, many who were involved in it did not adjust what they were dong quickly enough. Even the Athenians fell into the trap of assuming that hoplites were the key element in ground combat. The Sicilian disaster that lead to the war’s end game came about in large part because the Sicilians had a huge cavalry force, which the Athenians, assuming that on land they could rely mostly on hoplites, were not prepared for.

Hanson looks at the war in a number of ways. He examines the operations of the war in detail, describing, for example, how hoplite battles actually worked (and what it would have been like from a hoplites point of view) and what it was like on a trireme, as well as the tactics and strategies involved. He examines how sieges worked – or in many cases didn’t work, since, as he points out, the Greeks, who could build great temples, were not very good at breaching city walls. One gets the feel for how uncomfortable it must have been to wear hoplite armor all day or how ghastly conditions in a ship could be – especially if you were in the lowest bank of rowers, where it was hot, it reeked of sweat, you got little fresh air, and you were below two other banks of rowers who from time to time simply relieved themselves as they rowed. He also works with specific examples, describing what happened in particular hoplite battles (for all the Greek’s admiration of this type of warfare, there were only a few), naval engagements, and sieges. He also then ties these to the bigger picture – the politics, the strategy, and the aftermath.

Hanson brings a very scientific approach to his history. For example, the war started with Sparta’s invasion of Attica (the countryside around Athens), where they destroyed crops, trees, etc. Hanson was curious as to how hard this really would be. He lives on a farm, so he went out with an axe and chopped down a tree, discovering for himself how hard this was to do. He also tried to do some burning, and again discovered that this was not as easy as is sometimes thought. He then analyzed what was plausible for the Spartan army to do, and concluded that they could not have devastated the land. In some ways, their attack was more psychological than anything. What the Spartans really wanted was a pitched battle; they wanted the Athenians to come out from behind the city walls and fight, as the Spartans were convinced they had the better army. They hoped that the farmers, penned inside the city for protection, would push the city to fight. It didn’t work out that way.

Hanson also examines the roles of several of the key figures in the war. Alcibiades, who starts out with Athens, defects to Sparta, then returns as an Athenian hero is perhaps one of the most fascinating characters in all of history. His career also gives an interesting insight into the way the Athenian democracy operated. He was a hero early in the war (and a force for change, as he was someone who understood that the war was changing). Yet he was also an advocate for Athens greatest mistake – the Sicilian campaign. The assembly made him one of three leaders of the expedition (as if the usual two leaders assigned wasn’t bad enough), but when he arrived in Sicily he got a recall notice: he was to return to Athens to stand trial for blasphemy and other charges. Knowing he’d be going to his death (the assembly had a bad habit of voting for the death penalty for generals – sometimes even victorious ones – who did something they didn’t like), he instead defected to Sparta and urged the Spartans to face the Athenians in Sicily. (Yet another reason for the Athenian loss; they were only days away from completing the siege of Syracuse when the Spartans arrived.) But later he returned to Athens and was again leading Athenian naval forces, this time to key victories in the war in the Aegean. At the war’s end, he was assassinated, but nobody is sure who did it, since at that point there were so many possibilities.

Brasidas was perhaps the greatest of the Spartan commanders. He broke with Spartan tradition by putting together an expeditionary force of Spartiates, allies, freed serfs, and helots (who he promised greater freedom to if they served well). He was an unconventional commander, who, unlike most Spartans, was comfortable with the unconventional tactics of the war. Moreover, his mixed army did much to bring about change in Spartan society, as it forced the Spartiates to acknowledge that the helots could be good soldiers (and of course the helots themselves learned the same lesson). The Spartan war efforts were hampered when he was killed in battle.

The latter point leads to an important development in warfare that did not occur during the Peloponnesian War: military commanders in Greece were expected to lead from the front. Infantry commanders, for example, typically were in the lead rank of the army’s right flank. This is something that sounds very egalitarian and fair on the surface: generals, who put men at risk, are expected to take risks with them and feel what they feel. But in the long run, it’s a bad policy. Great strategists – who can lead to breakthroughs and do more for the war effort by their strategic or tactical thinking – are killed in battle and that expertise lost to the military. Yet, throughout the war, the Greek’s lost key leaders who were killed in the forefront of battle.

In the end, the Peloponnesian War is a great example of the coarsening effect of war, the way even good people can do awful things. The Athenians, who produced incredible art and philosophy, also voted to slaughter everyone in a rebellious city. It was paradoxical that the same people who voted this way also then watched Euripides’s play – produced during the war – that condemned such behavior and looked at warfare through enemy eyes. They even gave prizes to these works. Yet war induces such paradoxical behavior. Moreover, if we want to compare the war to a modern war (always a tricky thing, since there are often as many differences as similarities), World War I is probably the best comparison. In both wars, the optimism of a generation was destroyed in a dirty, nasty war that wiped out much of a generation. The Greeks in 400 BC are left in a state comparable to the post-World War I generation in Europe, reduced, pessimistic, looking to the past and wondering how this had happened to them.

Hanson’s history, looking at the war from a different perspective, is a great addition to the available histories of the war. Highly recommended.