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

by Victor Davis Hanson

Barry Strauss once systematically counted only the precise fatality figures for Athenian infantrymen and their landless counterparts as recorded by contemporary sources—a fraction of the actual number, since most ancient Greek historians far more often use vague words like “many were lost” or omit casualties figures at specific battles altogether. He nevertheless observed that over twice as many Athenian thetes (who were mostly sailors) died than hoplites during the twenty-seven-year war, most of them in the brutal final decade of naval fighting. If the hoplites and cavalrymen had suffered inordinately in siege and amphibious operations during the first decade of the war, the greater losses after 413 were almost all among the rowers. When one speaks of the Peloponnesian War, the specters of Sicily, the plague, and the executions at Melos and Scione haunt our imaginations. Yet the real carnage came late in the war and at sea battles whose names are now mostly forgotten.