A War Like No Other

Chapter 1

Fear

Why Sparta Fought Athens (480 431)

Our Peloponnesian War

The Peloponnesian War is now 2,436 years in the past. Yet Athens and Sparta are still on our minds and will not go away. Their permanence seems odd. After all, ancient Greek warring parties were mere city-states, most of them smaller in population and size than Dayton, Ohio, or Trenton, New Jersey. Mainland Greece itself is no larger than Alabama, and in antiquity was bordered by empires like the Persian, which encompassed nearly one million square miles with perhaps 70 million subjects. Napoleon s army alone had more men under arms by 1800 than the entire male population of all the Greek city-states combined. In our own age, more people died in Rwanda or Cambodia in a few days than were lost in twenty-seven years of civil war in fifth-century b.c. Greece.

Nor were Greeks themselves especially lethal warriors, at least by later historical standards. Rudimentary wood and iron of the preindustrial age, not gunpowder and steel, were their shared weapons of destruction. Even the soldiers themselves who fought the war were not much more than five foot five and 130 pounds. They were often unimpressive middle-aged men who would appear as mere children next to contemporary towering two-hundred-pound GIs.

Yet for ancient folk so few, small, and distant, their struggle during the Peloponnesian War seems not so old even in this new millennium. During the weeks after September 11, 2001, for example, Americans suddenly worried about the wartime outbreak of disease in their cities. In October and November 2001, five died and some twenty-four others were infected from the apparently deliberate introduction of anthrax spores by unknown terrorists. During the spring of 2003 a mysterious infectious respiratory ailment in China threatened to spread worldwide, given the ubiquity of low-cost transcontinental airfare. The panic that ensued in Washington and Peking during a time of global

Victor Davis Hanson has written or edited numerous books, including The Western Way of War, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and Ripples of Battle. He is also the author of two bestselling collections of essays: An Autumn of War and Between War and Peace. He is director emeritus of the classics program at California State University, Fresno, and currently a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, an Onassis fellow in Greece, Shifrin Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, and a recipient of the Eric Brendel Memorial Award for journalism. He lives and works with his wife and three children on their forty-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California, where he was born in 1953.

The age of Pericles was also a time of famine, pestilence and atrocity: a Thirty Year Slaughter. In order to understand the lesson this offers for civilization, one must try to feel it as the Greeks felt it, and reflect it as they did. In this dual task, Victor Davis Hanson once again demonstrates that his qualifications are unrivalled.
Christopher Hitchens, author of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

This book will immediately become the standard companion volume in English to Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars. Its own battle narratives are unexcelled; but its singular merit is its comprehensive and detailed description of how the actual fighting was done, how generals led, and why each side Sparta and Athens went to war. The author is a man of action and a practicing farmer as well as the premier classical historian and military commentator of our day.
Josiah Bunting III, author of Ulysses S. Grant

The Peloponnesian War was grand and tragic but the sheer misery of those who experienced it has often been overlooked until now. From death by trampling to cannibalism, from preteen-sized knights on ponies to deformed and ghostly plague survivors, from elegant galleys to bloodbaths in waterlogged death traps, the dark cones of classical combat are all brought to light by Hanson. This is a groundbreaking book by a great historian.
Barry Strauss, author of The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece and Western Civilization