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

by Victor Davis Hanson

there is no need for another traditional history of the Peloponnesian War. Instead, how did the Athenians battle the Spartans on land, in the cities, at sea, and out in the Greek countryside? What was it like for those who killed and died in this horrific war, this nightmare about which there has been little written of how many Greeks fought, how many perished, or even how all of it was conducted? My aim, therefore, after a brief introduction to the general events of the Peloponnesian War, 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.

The Peloponnesian War was also the first great instance where Western powers turned on each other. Their common commitment to rationalism, civic militarism, and constitutional government resulted not just in high culture but also in lethal militaries that could square off in mutual destruction. So Athens versus Sparta serves as a warning—centuries before the Roman Civil Wars, Cold Harbor, the Somme, and Dresden—of what can happen when the Western way of war is unleashed upon its own.

each of the two city-states was in its own way militarily powerful precisely because it had bucked the old Hellenic agrarian tradition that had heretofore moderated the normal conditions of warfare:

Even when one is not wearing armor or dodging arrows and javelins, the art of agricultural combustion is a tricky business.

Man’s creation of cement and steel for roads and factories possesses none of the beauty or the age or the mystique of the olive among Mediterranean peoples. That the olive is an evergreen tree in a hot climate; that it possesses enormous powers of regeneration; that it can grow almost anywhere without constant attention or great amounts of water and fertilizer; that it reaches great age; that its fruits provide everything from fuel to cooking oil to food—all that combines to surround the tree with a nearly religious awe to match its undeniable utility, both now and in the past. That majesty explains why myths surrounded the supposedly indestructible olive growing on the Acropolis and why drama praised the tree as symbolic of Attica itself. The olive tree, in other words, was a fat target, full of symbolic capital.

War is never merely a struggle over concrete things. Instead, as great generals from the Theban Epaminondas to Napoleon saw, it remains a contest of wills, of mentalities and perceptions that lie at the heart of all military exegeses, explaining, for example, why a Russian army that collapsed in 1917 on its frontier held out in its overrun interior during World War II, or how a completely outnumbered and poorly supplied Israeli army between 1947 and 1967 overwhelmed enemies that enjoyed superior weaponry and a tenfold advantage in military manpower.

Both sides would employ fear in unconventional ways, reminding us that terror is a method, not an enemy, a manifestation of how a particular belligerent chooses to wage war rather than some sort of independent entity that exists apart from men, money, and places.

The modern visitor to Plataea rarely sees a single tourist. This solitude is true of most of the killing grounds that dot the Boeotian countryside and were once so famous in Greek literature: nearby Delium (vacation homes now encroach on the landscape where Socrates backpedaled out of battle), Leuctra (a quiet grain field and irrigation ditch mark the spot where Epaminondas crushed the Spartan army), and Chaeronea (now a nondescript orchard where Philip and his teenaged son destroyed Greek liberty).

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. More often resolute action, for good or evil, can bring lasting peace, usually when one side accepts defeat and ceases its grievances through a change of heart or government—in either freedom or tyranny.