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

The Los Angeles Times (25 February 2004 = History News Network 26 February 2004: http:/hnn.us/roundup/archives/14/2004/02/) reported that Random House offered Victor Davis Hanson a half million dollars to produce a new history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.)—allegedly the largest advance in publishing history for a work of Classical Studies. Scholarly need cannot be posited: new studies appeared in 2003 (D. Kagan, The Peloponnesian War) and 2004 (J. Lazenby, The Peloponnesian War: A Military History). Hanson's meteoric rise over the last decade from classicist to popularizing military historian and pundit of contemporary issues has attracted an audience: his Carnage and Culture (2001) hit the New York Times bestseller list after 9/11. But this Socrates of Selma has become controversial: a gadfly to postmodernist, politically correct trends in higher education and a "true believer" in current American foreign policy, in support of which classical parallels are frequently cited. Which Victor Hanson do we find in this work? The scholar or the conservative publicist?

The dust cover's inside flap alludes to Hanson's contemporary commentaries: "he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns." Thus a contrived account of the Peloponnesian War as a parable of the war in Iraq (Athens = America) might be expected. If current buzz words ("terror," "ethnic cleansing," "hearts and minds," "shock and awe," etc.) dot the narrative, such language denotes popularization—modernizing antiquity for nonscholars. The preachy, moralizing tone of some of his other works is (mercifully) absent. He even shuns the Neocon love affair with Thucydides the realist. Hanson's Thucydides, a humanist storyteller, emphasizes war as tragedy. This view fits Hanson's cultural approach and recalls Francis Cornford's Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907) on the connections between Thucydides's history and Athenian tragedy, although Cornford is not cited. Random House has not financed a piece of propaganda.

Similarly, a blurb on the back dust cover hails the volume as "groundbreaking." But readers of Hanson's War and Agriculture (1983, 1998), Western Way of War (1989, 2002), and Other Greeks (1995, 1999) will find scarcely anything new. Scholars will soon tire of a repetitious text at least a hundred pages too long, besides flippant comparisons (p. 99: Lebanonization of Greece; p. 120: Brasidas as Fidel Castro) and marvel at the number and degree of exaggerations, including abuse of the Greek language (e.g., p. 14: attikizo, "to speak Attic Greek, to side with the Athenians," connected with globalization). Hanson applies his well-known face-of-battle approach emphasizing individual experience to an entire war with a seemingly endless litany of statistics on civilian and military casualties to dramatize how awful it all was—all encased in the Hansonian agrarian view of Greek history. A disclaimer of avoiding strategic issues (p. xiv) is false, but again the author lacks anything new to say. Thomas Kelly's analysis of Spartan strategy (AHR 87 [1982]: 25–54), emphasizing a more active naval effort than commonly supposed, is curiously absent.

The work divides into ten chapters cryptically entitled and apparently inspired (no surprise) by John Keegan's use of "Stone," "Flesh," "Iron," etc., in A History of Warfare (1994). Chapter 1, "Fear," discusses the causes of the war without properly grasping Thucydides' psychological emphasis. Chapter 2, "Fire," on Spartan invasions of Attica (431–425, 413–404) rehashes the arguments of War and Agriculture. Chapter 3, "Disease," focuses on the demographic effects of the plague at Athens, although whether experience with the plague really explains subsequent Athenian brutality in the war's conduct is moot. A connection of the plague with Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (p. 6) is false: the play cannot be securely dated. Chapter 4, "Terror," treats sea-borne raids and the war on the periphery of the Greek world—regarded as asymmetrical warfare in a...