There are two Victor Hansons, both prolific: (A)
the distinguished historian of Greek warfare and (B) the hard-right
political pundit widely known in print and internet publications.[1]
Hanson A is the author of three or four major works[2]
in the past couple decades that have had a strong and salutary
influence on ancient military history. Hanson B, a darling of the
neocons, habitually and facilely extrapolates “lessons” from ancient
social, political, and military conditions to instruct or berate his
readers about the “realities” of the western way of war as it is (or
ought to be) prosecuted these days. Happily, Hanson A wrote the book
reviewed here.
In A War Like No Other, Hanson attempts to
write a history of the Peloponnesian War like no other and succeeds
admirably. Eschewing a conventional (since Thucydides himself)
chronologically consecutive narrative,[3]
he adopts a thematic approach to his subject, like a photographer
aiming his camera at the same landscape,[4]
but attaching a succession of lens-filters that throw particular
features or contours into stronger relief. He does nonetheless
manage to convey the causal links in the flow of events and give the
reader a good sense of the progression of the whole war. An
overarching concern, as in most of his other work, is to recreate,
in Gerald Linderman’s phrase,[5]
the world within war, to see things from the perspective of the
war’s actual participants: the infantryman and skirmishers, the
cavalrymen, the sailors and marines, the besiegers and the besieged,
the terrorists and the terrorized: “my 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” (xiv).
Thucydides’ history invites the reader to look
both to the past and to the future. The title of Hanson’s book is
Thucydides’ own characterization of the Peloponnesian War (1.23.1).
The extended digression known as the “Archaeology” in Book 1 of
Thucydides reviews major conflicts of the past in order to highlight
the unprecedented scale and scope of his subject. But the Athenian
historian also conjures up the future by calling his work “a
possession for all time”—one that will enable its readers in after
times to anticipate similarities in the cause, course, and outcome
of war, given the persistent tendencies of human nature. Thus, as
one historian has recently put it, “It is not surprising that in
later times scholars and others have often looked at the
Peloponnesian War as a paradigm of later wars and to Thucydides’
work for its lessons and parallels.”[6]
Hanson’s first chapter, “Fear: Why Sparta Fought
Athens (480–431),” includes a section entitled “Athens as America,”
in which he observes that
Our
leaders and pundits are eager to learn from the Athenians’ mistakes
and successes. They are unsure whether the fate of Athens is to be
our own, or whether Americans can yet match the Athenians’
civilization and influence while avoiding their hubris. Perhaps
never has the Peloponnesian War been more relevant to Americans than
to us of the present age. (9)
This statement is not, however, a harbinger of
things to come in A War Like No Other. As will be seen, the
book bristles with parallels drawn between ancient and modern wars,[7]
but the present conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not among the
comparison points. Instead we are left to draw our own conclusions.[8]
The “fear” in the chapter title is in part the
one famously designated by Thucydides as the “truest cause” of the
War: the growing Spartan fear of growing Athenian power over the
fifty-year interval between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, the
so-called “pentekontaetia.” Hanson stresses another potent stimulant
of apprehension in the ultra-oligarchic Spartans: namely, the
Athenians’ aggressive propagation of democratic institutions within
the city-states they controlled or sought to control in the Greek
world. The chapter concludes with a three-and-half-page synopsis of
the war “that gives the reader a political and strategic context to
the sometimes-confusing experience of battle that follows” (31).
In chapter 2, “Fire: The War against the Land
(431–425),” Hanson describes the failure of Spartan efforts to
provoke the Athenians into a one-throw-of-the-dice battle in defense
of their rural homes, grain crops, vineyards, and orchards. On the
advice of Pericles, the Athenians refused to take the bait and face
an overwhelmingly superior Peloponnesian infantry force. This meant
that the war would not be a quick one, on the lines of past
conflicts efficiently and definitively settled by the clash of
phalanxes for an hour or two according to what Hanson calls the
“protocols” of hoplite warfare as Greek agrarian societies had
conducted it for over two centuries. Nor were retaliatory,
fleet-borne ravaging expeditions by the Athenians in the Megarid or
the Peloponnesus any more effective. The Spartans were in for a much
more protracted war than they had anticipated. As he does throughout
this book, Hanson makes fascinating use of telling statistics, here
to convey the proportions of the problem confronting Spartan
ravagers:
The
hide of permanent plants is tougher than men’s … as the
Peloponnesians quickly learned when they crossed into Attica in May
431. Attica possessed more individual olive trees and grapevines
than classical Greece did inhabitants. Anywhere from five to ten
million olive trees and even more vines dotted the
one-thousand-square-mile landscape. The city’s thousands of acres of
Attic grain fields were augmented by far more farmland throughout
the Aegean, southern Russia, and Asia Minor, whose harvests were
only a few weeks’ sea transport away from Athens. (35)
Chapter 3, “Disease: The Ravages of the Plague at
Athens (430–426),” is a clear account of the terrible pestilence
that afflicted Athenians holed up in the overcrowded space inside
Athens and Peiraeus and the corridor of Long Walls connecting them.
To suggest the scale of this public health disaster, simply in terms
of military manpower, Hanson writes that “if 4,400 hoplite
fatalities ‘in the ranks’ refers only to losses from the 13,000
citizens who were prepared to go into battle, then over a third of
all such infantrymen were killed within four years. In relative
terms, the plague turned out to be the Athenians’ ancient equivalent
of a Somme or Stalingrad” (79). The disease killed somewhere between
a quarter and a third of the entire population, perhaps
70,000–80,000 people (82). This was, as Hanson points out, a
devastating loss to Athens right at the outset of the long war,
worse by far than the disastrous Sicilian expedition to which
Thucydides devotes nearly a quarter of his narrative.
Chapter 4, “Terror: War in the Shadows
(431–421),” describes how the supersession of the old protocols of
heavy infantry warfare led to less conventional and more vicious
styles of conflict. It became clear during the first decade of the
Peloponnesian War that provocative attacks on crops and property
could no longer precipitate the climactic pitched battle the
Spartans so desired.
The
Athenians avoided battling Spartan infantrymen, while Peloponnesian
ships were usually not willing to meet the Athenian navy in any
major engagement. The stage was set for “asymmetrical,”
“fourth-dimensional” or “postmodern” war…. Some pretty uncouth
killers would now step out of the shadows of the Greek world to do
what traditional generals and admirals could not. (89)
Hanson identifies these “uncouth killers” as the
light-armed warriors—peltasts, archers, slingers, javelin men—who
grew in numbers and importance throughout the war, beginning with
their decisive role in forcing the shocking Spartan surrender at
Sphacteria. Despite their effectiveness, such irregulars, because
they operated outside the old ethos of heavy-infantry combat, were
looked on with disdain. Many were freed slaves, mercenaries, or
“foreigners” like the Thracians who massacred the inhabitants of
Mycalessus, including the children at a school for boys. “Unlike
hoplites, ancient skirmishers, … like modern insurgents, were more
likely to target civilians, whether on Corcyra or in the small
Boeotian hamlet of Mycalessus” (93). Thucydides’ personification of
war as a “harsh teacher” was borne out in acts of “ethnic cleansing”
and retaliation against recalcitrant allies. Hanson succeeds in
illuminating the “atrocious combat in the shadows” (97) too often
ignored by comparison with the major battles and sieges of the war.
Chapter 5, “Armor: Hoplite Pitched Battles
(424–418),” following on from the previous chapter’s treatment of
changing personnel types and styles of fighting, stresses the
infrequency of major straight-up heavy-infantry clashes. In the
twenty-seven years of the Peloponnesian War, only the battles of
Delium in 424 and Mantinea in 418 conformed to some extent to the
near ritualistic style of infantry fighting common within the
agrarian culture of Greece over the preceding three centuries or so.
To be sure, hoplites saw action in venues other than “regular
battle,” as seaborne rapid deployment strike forces or providing
cover for light-armed forces ravaging enemy crops or as marines
aboard triremes. But for the most part, in the new conditions of
warfare, “hoplites enjoyed a role similar to that of the majestic
dreadnoughts of the First World War…. Highly prized and much touted
even in their anachronism, such imposing ships could blast apart in
minutes an entire fleet and thus change a war—and yet rarely got the
chance to fight one. So it was too with a classical hoplite phalanx”
(146). Even the two great pitched battles featured novel tactics,
more diversified combatants in atypical formations, and the shrewd
use of reserves, auguring things to come in the armies of
Iphicrates, Epaminondas, Philip II, and Alexander. This chapter also
contains extremely graphic descriptions of the horrors of hoplite
battle—a strong point in all Hanson’s work on the combat experience
in Greece.
Chapter 6, “Walls: Sieges (431–415),” is devoted
to siege warfare, the frequency and duration of which were
unprecedented in earlier Greek history. Many more lives were lost
and much more property destroyed during the twenty-one sieges of the
Peloponnesian War, against cities large (Potidaea, Athens, Syracuse)
and small (Plataea, Melos). “With many more sieges than hoplite
battles … the practice of Greek warfare changed almost overnight.
The inordinate wealth and manpower expended on sieges meant vicious
reprisals against the citizens of captured cities: enslavement and
executions en masse.” After a long litany of such actions against
both soldiers and civilians, Hanson remarks that a better name for
the war might be “Thirty Years of Slaughter” (191). Moreover, the
besiegers often sustained heavier losses than defeated defenders.[9]
Chapter 7, “Horses: The Disaster at Sicily
(415–413),” pinpoints lack of cavalry as the critical factor in
Athenian failure. Had the invaders been better able to match the
defenders in cavalry forces, they could more easily have secured
links to possible allies on the island, protected foraging parties,
and completed construction of siege works. But the Athenians had
made two grievous and ultimately fatal strategic errors. First, the
expedition’s planners had been wrong to think superiority in
hoplites would make all the difference. Even Alcibiades, who, as an
old cavalryman himself, should have known better, claimed that
victory would be easily achieved because Syracuse and the other
Sicilian states were deficient in infantry. “Yet almost immediately
upon arrival, the Athenians discovered that their thousands of
hoplites were mostly irrelevant for victory, and that they lacked
the one resource—plentiful horsemen—that might have given the
protection needed for a successful siege. There was little excuse
other than hoplite chauvinism to account for such strategic naïveté”
(208). At the conclusion of a dramatic thirty-page narrative of the
Sicilian expedition, Hanson muses that “Gone … was the parochial
idea that aristocratic knights were to remain prancers on the flanks
of the phalanx rather than packs of mounted killers who, if not met
by like kind, could limit the operations of even the largest
forces—and alter the very course of sieges and naval engagements”
(232).
Chapters 8, “Ships: The War at Sea (431–404),”
and 9, “Climax: Trireme Fighting in the Aegean (411–405),” both
treat the nearly non-stop operations and clashes of navies. Chapter
8 parses the naval war at both the high level of the strategic and
economic considerations of conducting wars at sea, and the more down
to earth, or down to sea, level of the design, construction, speed,
maneuverability, and tactics of battleships. Hanson again makes good
on his promise to highlight the circumstances of the war’s actual
participants, here those who manned the ships, as he had already
done for the hoplites in the bloody-awful atom-smashing collisions
of heavy infantry. Here, for example, he vividly recreates the
painful conditions endured by the thalamites, the triremes’ lowest
tier of rowers:
These
poor crewmen rowed from deep in the hold (thalamos), crammed
in a scant eighteen inches above the water…. Seawater always
splashed in … and bilge water also seeped through the planking near
their feet. Sailors were probably soaked on and off throughout the
entire voyage. As a rower pulled and leaned back and then pushed
forward, his rear scooted to and fro along the bench, explaining why
seamen considered seat cushions as important as good oars—and why
rump blisters were a common complaint.
Because of the crossbeams and the other seamen
rowing directly above their heads, the thalamites could see almost
nothing. The sweat from the two superior banks of rowers—the
posteriors of the seamen above were more or less in the thalamites’
faces—drenched them as well…. Aristophanes joked that the thalamites
were often farted upon and even showered with excrement from the
straining oarsmen above …. Sweat, thirst, blisters, exhaustion,
urine, feces—all this was in addition to the billows of the sea and
the iron of the enemy. (237–38)
This chapter shows a close familiarity with
recent research into trireme warfare, including the trial runs,
since 1987, of the joint British-Greek reconstructed trireme, the
Olympias.[10]
Chapter 9, focuses on the intensification of
naval warfare in the period after the Sicilian expedition. In these
years, the Athenians were fighting for their lives as the clamp
closed on the crucial grain-supply lifeline that ran from the
Crimean Peninsula through the Hellespont bottleneck. The
Peloponnesians had by now acquired a fleet to match the Athenians’,
largely thanks to funding from the Persians. As both sides sustained
heavy losses, they resorted to freeing slaves to man ships and
hiring mercenaries, often away from each other. The mayhem at sea
was appalling, rivaling even the horrific losses at Syracuse. In
land battles, casualties, even on the side of the defeated, rarely
ran higher than 15%. (At Delium, the Athenians lost 1000 of 7000
hoplites.) In big sea battles, because many more men participated
(200 per ship) and death by drowning or being speared like fish was
very common, casualties ran much higher. In three battles
(Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Aegospotami) fought within a sixty-mile
radius in the Hellespont and Propontis, the two sides lost some
50,000 men killed, missing, or taken captive. The Spartans and their
allies, in the five years up to their defeat at the battle of the
Arginusae Islands, lost 250 battleships and some 50,000 rowers and
marines. For their part, the Athenians lost more men at the
climactic battle of Aegospotami in 405 than they did during the
battles of Delium and Mantinea. This marshalling of dramatic
statistics is a (maybe the) distinctive strength of Hanson’s
book.[11]
Chapter 10, “Ruin? Winners and Losers (404–403),”
begins with a question: “Was Athens—or Greece itself—destroyed by
the war?” (289) The answer is both yes and no. Hanson cautions
against seeing an artificial division between a glorious fifth
century and a fourth century of lesser achievement in the aftermath
of a civil war that crippled all its participants. The basis of
agrarian life at Athens had not been removed, and the city would
rebuild its walls and its fleet. Cultural life, too, which had never
ceased or waned, continued to thrive. But the scars of the war were
long-lasting, in terms of property destroyed and lives lost. “To
imagine in contemporary terms the effect on Attica of losing an
aggregate third of the population, assume that the United States
suffered not a little over 400,000 combat dead in World War II … but
rather over one hundred times that figure—or some 44 million killed
in combat in the European and Japanese theaters” (296). In addition,
the conception of war and how it ought to be conducted was altered
forever.
The
Peloponnesian War introduced into Western philosophy the
comprehensive idea that war was not always noble or patriotic but
often nonsensical, suicidal, and perhaps intrinsically wrong,
especially when it lasted twenty-seven years, not a few hours on a
summer day…. Fourth-century Greeks … realized that the Peloponnesian
War had been something uniquely awful in the Hellenic experience. It
destroyed the idealism and spirit of Panhellenic unity that was so
critical to the defense of Greece against the Persian invader. (308)
* * *
A War Like No Other does not break new
ground—that would be a lot to ask today of any account of a war that
has been analyzed so thoroughly for so long, especially in the
absence of any earthshaking new source material. Even as regards
Hanson’s own contributions to the study of Greek military
history—and they are considerable—there is nothing new here. And,
too, some readers may miss the stronger sense of cause and effect
that a more strictly chronological record of the war provides. In
that regard, Kagan’s one-volume history[12]
is a better choice if one were to read only one thing on the war.
But I would advise those coming from a reading of Kagan or, better
yet, Thucydides himself, to make Hanson’s acute, lively, reliable,[13]
and eminently readable re-presentation of the Peloponnesian War
their very next book to read.
Eastern Michigan University
jholoka@emich.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[2] See esp. The Western Way of War: Infantry
Battle in Classical Greece, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: U California
Pr, 1998; orig. 1988), Warfare and Agriculture in Classical
Greece, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: U California Pr, 1998; orig.
1983), The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian
Roots of Western Civilization (1995; rpt. Berkeley: U
California Pr, 1999).
[3] Excellent modern accounts of the war in the
conventional manner are readily available, as Hanson notes,
including “fine narratives in English by George Grote, George
Grundy, B.W. Henderson, Donald Kagan, John Lazenby, Anton
Powell, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, and others” (xiv).
[4] The “landscape” in this case is the extant
body of source material: principally, besides Thucydides,
Xenophon, Hellenica, and Diodorus Siculus, Library of
History, the latter used to especially good effect by
Hanson. Besides these major sources, available to scholars from
the Renaissance onward, papyrology and epigraphy have made
valuable additions to the record in the past century and a half:
e.g., the Constitution of the Athenians, by an anonymous
author traditionally dubbed The Old Oligarch; the fragmentary
work of the “Oxyrhynchus Historian”; and the Athenian Tribute
Quota Lists.
[5] Gerald F. Linderman, The World within War:
America’s Combat Experience in World War II (NY: Free Press,
1997).
[6] Perez Zagorin, Thucydides: An Introduction
for the Common Reader (Princeton: PUP, 2005) 2. See, e.g.,
Gilbert Murray, Our Great War and the Great War of the
Ancient Greeks (NY: Seltzer, 1920) or D. McCann and Barry
Strauss, eds., War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the
Korean War and the Peloponnesian War (NY: East Gate, 2001);
and for many other examples, Richard N. Leblow and Barry
Strauss, eds., Hegemonic Rivalry from Thucydides to the
Nuclear Age (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991).
[7] Hanson makes over 150 comparisons of persons
and particulars of the Peloponnesian War to those of later
conflicts, including World War II (35x), World War I (16x), the
Napoleonic wars (12x), and the American Civil War (11x). Some of
these amount to shooting from the hip, e.g., Brasidas = Che
Guevara; Plataea caught between larger powers = Armenia, Cuba,
Taiwan, Tibet, and Poland. Others are both more adroit and more
thought-provoking, e.g., Thracians (massacring schoolboys at
Mycalessus) = Chechnyan terrorists; the Theban admiral Erianos
(planning to reduce Attica to pasture land) = Henry Morgenthau.
[8] “Hanson B” is far less subtle: see the essays
archived at Private Papers (n. 1, supra), where a graphic
at the head of the webpage shows Hanson against a backdrop of
the Parthenon juxtaposed against an image of Muslims burning an
American flag.
[9] In one of his more apt comparisons, Hanson
notes that “throughout history attackers often paid the higher
price. During the savage though unsuccessful siege of Malta in
1565, over 30,000 Ottomans perished, while killing only 7,000 of
the defenders. At Vienna in 1683, the besieging Turks withdrew
after suffering over 60,000 losses, twelve times the 5,000
deaths of the defending allied Christians. The Japanese took
Port Arthur (1904-05) after a five-month siege, but only after
suffering 90,000 dead and disabled from hunger, disease, and
Russian fire—three times the casualties of the defeated Russian
garrison. For all the misery of being inside a trapped city. it
was sometimes worse to be exposed outside without permanent
shelter, secure walls, and stockpiled food” (195).
[10] See J.S. Morrison, J.F. Coates, and N.B.
Rankov, The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction
of an Ancient Greek Warship, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge U
Pr, 2000) and the highly informative website of the
Trireme Trust.
[11] With the caveat that ancient historians,
including one so seemingly careful as Thucydides, give
statistics that are likely rough estimates.
[12] Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War
(NY: Viking, 2003), reviewed in MWSR
2005.06.01.
[13] There are, however, occasional erroneous or
misleading statements in the book: Hanson equates 6500 talents
to “about $3 billion in contemporary value” (16–17)—$40 billion
would be a better estimate. The claim that Pericles “was at
heart an admiral” who had not “even led a hoplite army into
pitched battle” (20) prior to the Peloponnesian War is a little
misleading, since he had fought with great distinction at
Tanagra in 457 (Plutarch, Pericles 10.2), probably as an
officer (he was by then a leading democratic official at
Athens). Hanson calls the Peloponnesian army of ca. 60,000 that
invaded Attica in 431 “far larger than any commanded later by
either Philip or Alexander” (50), but Alexander’s initial force
in Asia Minor in 334 was 65,000. On page 66, he describes the
Athenians as building walls around Athens and the Peiraeus as
well as the Long Walls “in a fevered state of anxiety” (66)
during “postbellum tensions with the Spartans” (i.e., in
479–478: Thuc. 1.90), but the Long Walls were not built till the
450s (Thuc. 1.107.1). On the map on p. 95, Mthone [sic,
read Methone] appears to be an island. The calculation that 2000
talents would build 2000 triremes and fund their operation for
six months (97) is incorrect; the number should be 286 triremes (cf.
116). Hanson says on p. 124 that Herodotus called the hoplite
pitched battle “a silly and most absurd” way of fighting (Hdt.
7.9), but these are words attributed to the Persian Mardonius.
The claim on p. 142 that it was only during the Peloponnesian
War that “the Greeks first began to explore the dilemma of
proper depth versus width” overlooks Miltiades’ tactics at the
battle of Marathon in 490. To say (203) that in 416 “Athens had
not been in an active battle with Sparta in six years” neglects
Mantinea just two years earlier. It is incorrect to say, p. 246,
that those who manned the Persian fleet at Salamis were “unused
to the water,” since many were Phoenicians, among the best
sailors in the ancient world. Aegospotami is not “a few miles”
north of the Arginusae Islands (283)—more like 100. On p. 295,
the death dates for Cleon and Lamachus should be 422 and 414,
not 423 and 413 (correct dates in Appendix II). Finally, the
Spartiate population in 371 was 1200, not 1500 (299).
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