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

by Victor Davis Hanson

For the German military historian Hans Delbrück, such total war evolved into a more complex strategy of attrition waged against the moral and economic capital of a state rather than the more straightforward idea of annihilation in which an army seeks to destroy through hammer blows its counterpart in the field. Why waste lives battering away at like forces when softer and more important resources could be targeted over a longer period and at much less cost? Could a Greek polis really win a war by ignoring the main infantry forces of its adversary in the field? Pericles thought so. The morality of waging exhaustive war was a new and unsettling enterprise for Athens and Sparta, as both sides lacked accessible hard targets and thus soon sought to prevail through ruining civilian resources and attacking third parties.