A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

• Author: Major Eric Young
• Pages: 08

134 MILITARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 192

A WAR LIKE NO OTHER: HOW THE ATHENIANS AND SPARTANS FOUGHT THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR1

REVIEWED BY MAJOR ERIC YOUNG2

There is a commonality to war, it being entirely human, that transcends time and space.3

Over 2,000 years ago, the sight of massed Greek phalanxes likely inspired fear in their enemies in the same manner massed tank armies do today. What are phalanxes and how did they operate as such an effective and fearful battlefield formation? While various news networks and the Internet provide the modern world up-to-the minute pictures and visualizations of warfare and its toll on society, ancient warfare was not documented in the same vivid manner. Here is where A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War provides twenty-first century readers an inside look at Greek life and some of the best available "pictures" of the Peloponnesian War.

A War Like No Other is a contemporary perspective of the war between Athens and Sparta that occurred between 431 and 404 B.C. Victor Davis Hanson4 provides a richly depicted history of a war that "is now 2,436 years in the past."5 Hanson's extensive research and analysis of ancient Greek culture, society, and military capabilities ultimately provides a two-fold insight: first, that this ancient war resulted in a tragedy of then-previously unheard of human and economic destruction;

second, that war's impact on society was as devastating then as it is

today.

Early on, Hanson asks why "this rather obscure ancient war between miniscule Athens and Sparta [is] still so alive, and used and abused in ways that other ancient conflicts, such as the Persian Wars (490[B.C.], 480-79[B.C.]) and Alexander the Great's conquests (334-323[B.C.]), are not . . . ."6 Hanson points out that the Peloponnesian War was the "first great instance" where what he terms "Western powers"-the city-states of Athens and Sparta-"squared off in mutual destruction."7

So Athens versus Sparta serves as a warning . . . of what can happen when the Western way of war is unleashed upon its own. In modern terms, the Peloponnesian War was more like World War I, rather than the Second World War-the issues that divided the two sides likewise more complex, the warring parties themselves not so easily identifiable as good or evil, and the shock of thousands killed similarly grotesquely novel and marking a complete break with past experience.8

While he discusses the nature of Greek warfare before the Peloponnesian War, Hanson does so only to illustrate that it was a ritualized, seasonal event9 lacking the barbarism and terror that became the Peloponnesian War's norm. Hanson's primary focus is explaining how both Athens and Sparta were required to change their tactics and operational goals in order to wage protracted, total warfare. For example, whereas wealthy citizens, as well-armed and armored infantry, had previously defended their city-states, twenty-seven years of warfare quickly eroded this practice.10 Both Athens and Sparta came to rely on light cavalry, siege warfare, and even mercenaries to overcome heavy-laden and outdated infantry battles on open terrain.11

While Hanson is a noted historian who has written extensively of late about the U.S. military and political involvement in Iraq,12 he discusses only generally the political reasons for the Peloponnesian War. Instead, he states that his real aim is to "flesh out this three-decade fight of some twenty-four hundred years past as something very human and thus to allow the war to become more than a far off struggle of a distant age."13

The challenge for Hanson is explaining the horrors of the Peloponnesian War in a manner that people can relate to in the same way photography and video capture the horrors of modern conflicts. Hanson generally succeeds in this endeavor by relating the nature of ancient Greek combat to modern readers through numerous examples from recent conflicts.14

The result is that Hanson clearly conveys that the war's participants, and victims, were not so different from people living today.15

Although he raises the question as to why the Peloponnesian War is still studied more than most other conflicts, Hanson unfortunately provides only cursory explanations. He discusses, with limited analysis, how such a long struggle destroyed "entire families across generations"16

and how the war ultimately began at the height of Greece's "Golden Age"17 and ended in its demise. While Hanson mentions that the war was "assumed to be the final arbitrator of the contrasting values"18 of

Athens and Sparta, he only references the economic, social, and political aspects of each city state to set the conditions for what he is really trying to convey: that the prolonged war eroded each city's ideology and changed the nature of Greek warfare itself.

Hanson explains that his intent is not to address or answer the strategic reasons for the war's campaigns,19 which often challenges the reader's ability to place the lessons of A War Like No Other in context. Instead, Hanson provides extensive details when explaining the intricacies of Greek warfare. Readers wanting to know how, rather than why, this brutal conflict was waged will feel right at home with A War Like No Other's intimate...