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

by Victor Davis Hanson

A central theme is the use and abuse of power, and how it lurks behind men’s professions of idealism and purported ideology.

What men say, the speeches diplomats give, the reasons states go to war, all this “in word” (logos) is as likely to cloak rather than to elucidate what they will do “in deed” (ergon). Thucydides teaches us to embrace skepticism, expecting us to look to national self-interest, not publicized grievances, when wars of our own age inevitably break out. Still,

In turn, at Athens an entire generation had grown up in Periclean splendor. It, too, seemed deathly afraid of inevitable generational decline, a common apprehension among elites in Western societies that are free, affluent, and experiencing social and cultural change.

especially among generations in both Athens and Sparta that “were unfamiliar enough with war to welcome it”

Thousands were to die on both sides because their leaders took them to war without a real plan of how to defeat the enemy on the battlefield and destroy its power.

Athens was a true hegemon, not, like Sparta, the premier state in a coalition of the willing. Thus the Athenians could craft strategy in a unilateral fashion impossible among the Peloponnesians. Another of the ironies of the war was that oligarchic Sparta was far more democratic in its attitudes toward its coalition members than was democratic Athens in relation to its own imperial subjects and allies.

the Thucydidean discourse on the plague becomes a reminder of how close humans always are to savagery—and how precious is their salvation won through law, religion, science, and custom.

Poor generalship is often synonymous with frequent requests for more troops.

At the most basic level, ships gave to a state a vast array of alternatives, both military and economic.

The Peloponnesian War taught Westerners that the logic of military efficacy should trump tribalism, tradition, and arbitrary constructs of wealth and power. Plato, who wrote in the aftermath of the three-decade disaster, saw this more clearly than any other Greek thinker—and resented it bitterly.17

War, then and now, is a destroyer of protocol, privilege, and tradition, and that is not altogether always a bad thing.20

Sphacteria, who, when chided about the surrender of Greece’s best infantrymen to poor javelin throwers and archers, snapped that the old hoplite courage was not worth much when an enemy showered his phalanx with womanly arrows and missiles, killing the brave and cowards alike.

In his narrative there emerge four reasons why Sparta triumphed; none of them can be attributable to the oligarchy’s strategic insight or imaginative tactics. The plague was nature’s bane. Sicily was Athens’ own strategic mistake and was compounded by tactical blunders. The creation of a fort at Decelea and the use of Persian capital to build a fleet are attributed by Thucydides and Xenophon to the advice and machinations of Alcibiades, an Athenian. So naturally observers look to what Athens did wrong rather than to what Sparta did right to explain how such a dynamic imperial city was not merely beaten but nearly ruined.30

If the Peloponnesian War still teaches us something about men at war, it is the lesson that interim armistices may quiet down the fighting but cannot with any degree of consistency end the conflict unless they address why one party chose to go to war in the first place.