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

by Victor Davis Hanson

For example, iron spits, not coinage, served as money precisely because in such a strange moral universe they could not be used with the ease of ordinary (and thus corrupting) currency. Third-party boatbuilders or rowers for hire did not flock to Sparta in hopes of being compensated with a hoard of metal barbecue skewers. The Spartans had been warned on the eve of the war by their allies that their ossified manner of envisioning war as hoplite battle was a formula for suicide. The harping Corinthians continually urged them to strike out to help friends around the Aegean to resist Athenian imperialism. Pericles was probably right when he claimed, “The Peloponnesians have no money, public or private.” There was certainly no imperial tribute pouring into the Spartan acropolis, and there were few Spartan colonies. Should Athens choose not to fight a pitched battle, Sparta possessed neither the capital nor the material reserves to keep an army in the field for any great length of time. Much less did it have either the know-how or the desire to conduct an unconventional low-intensity war of raiding, plundering, and sustained sieges.