{"product_id":"a-war-like-no-other-isbn-9780812969702","title":"A War Like No Other","description":"One of our most provocative military historians, Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date, A War Like No Other.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states of Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the collapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrote the standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has given readers throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative. But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronological account that reflects the political background of the time, the strategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle in multifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these events echo in the present.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought on land and sea, in city and countryside, and details their employment of the full scope of conventional and nonconventional tactics, from sieges to targeted assassinations, torture, and terrorism. He also assesses the crucial roles played by warriors such as Pericles and Lysander, artists, among them Aristophanes, and thinkers including Sophocles and Plato.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHanson’s perceptive analysis of events and personalities raises many thought-provoking questions: Were Athens and Sparta like America and Russia, two superpowers battling to the death? Is the Peloponnesian War echoed in the endless, frustrating conflicts of Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and the current Middle East? Or was it more like America’s own Civil War, a brutal rift that rent the fabric of a glorious society, or even this century’s “red state—blue state” schism between liberals and conservatives, a cultural war that manifestly controls military policies? Hanson daringly brings the facts to life and unearths the often surprising ways in which the past informs the present.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBrilliantly researched, dynamically written, A War Like No Other is like no other history of this important war.“The age of Pericles was also a time of famine, pestilence and atrocity: a ‘Thirty Year Slaughter.’ In order to understand the lesson this offers for civilization, one must try to feel it as the Greeks felt it, and reflect it as they did. In this dual task, Victor Davis Hanson once again demonstrates that his qualifications are unrivalled.”\u003cbr\u003e–Christopher Hitchens, author of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This book will immediately become the standard companion volume in English to Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars. Its own battle narratives are unexcelled; but its singular merit is its comprehensive and detailed description of how the actual fighting was done, how generals led, and why each side–Sparta and Athens–went to war. The author is a man of action and a practicing farmer as well as the premier classical historian and military commentator of our day.”\u003cbr\u003e–Josiah Bunting III, author of Ulysses S. Grant\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Peloponnesian War was grand and tragic but the sheer misery of those who experienced it has often been overlooked–until now. From death by trampling to cannibalism, from preteen-sized knights on ponies to deformed and ghostly plague survivors, from elegant galleys to bloodbaths in waterlogged death traps, the dark cones of classical combat are all brought to light by Hanson. This is a groundbreaking book by a great historian.”\u003cbr\u003e–Barry Strauss, author of The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece–and Western CivilizationVictor Davis Hanson has written or edited numerous books, including The Western Way of War, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and Ripples of Battle. He is also the author of two bestselling collections of essays: An Autumn of War and Between War and Peace. He is director emeritus of the classics program at California State University, Fresno, and currently a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, an Onassis fellow in Greece, Shifrin Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, and a recipient of the Eric Brendel Memorial Award for journalism. He lives and works with his wife and three children on their forty-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California, where he was born in 1953.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Fear\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Why Sparta Fought Athens (480–431)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Our Peloponnesian War\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Peloponnesian War is now 2,436 years in the past. Yet   Athens and Sparta are still on our minds and will not go   away. Their permanence seems odd. After all, ancient Greek   warring parties were mere city-states, most of them smaller   in population and size than Dayton, Ohio, or Trenton, New   Jersey. Mainland Greece itself is no larger than Alabama,   and in antiquity was bordered by empires like the Persian,   which encompassed nearly one million square miles with   perhaps 70 million subjects. Napoleon’s army alone had more   men under arms by 1800 than the entire male population of   all the Greek city-states combined. In our own age, more   people died in Rwanda or Cambodia in a few days than were   lost in twenty-seven years of civil war in fifth-century   b.c. Greece.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nor were Greeks themselves especially lethal warriors, at   least by later historical standards. Rudimentary wood and   iron of the preindustrial age, not gunpowder and steel, were   their shared weapons of destruction. Even the soldiers   themselves who fought the war were not much more than five   foot five and 130 pounds. They were often unimpressive   middle-aged men who would appear as mere children next to   contemporary towering two-hundred-pound GIs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yet for ancient folk so few, small, and distant, their   struggle during the Peloponnesian War seems not so old even   in this new millennium. During the weeks after September 11,   2001, for example, Americans suddenly worried about the   wartime outbreak of disease in their cities. In October and   November 2001, five died and some twenty-four others were   infected from the apparently deliberate introduction of   anthrax spores by unknown terrorists. During the spring of   2003 a mysterious infectious respiratory ailment in China   threatened to spread worldwide, given the ubiquity of   low-cost transcontinental airfare. The panic that ensued in   Washington and Peking during a time of global tension evoked   ancient wartime plagues, such as the mysterious scourge that   wiped out thousands at Athens between 430 and 426.   Similarly, at about the same time, Sicily, Melos, and   Mycalessus were all cited in contemporary media, as   millennia later the world once again watched military   armadas head out to faraway places, saw democracy imposed by   force, and read of schoolchildren killed by terrorist bands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But even before September 11 the Peloponnesian War was not   really ancient history. Scholarly books regularly appeared   with titles like War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of   the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War, or Hegemonic   Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age. Thucydides had   long been assigned reading at the U.S. Army War College. And   an array of statesmen such as Woodrow Wilson, Georges   Clemenceau, and Eleuthérios Venizélos either taught or wrote   about Greek history, in which the use of Thucydides’ war   loomed large. More recently, controversial thinkers known as   neoconservatives (“the new conservatives”) were for a time   influential in American strategic thinking, and the text   that they purportedly consulted frequently was once more   Thucydides’.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What is it about this particular ancient clash that causes   it to be called to mind during our present wars? Why were   the conflict’s supposed lessons both astutely and clumsily   applied to most of our own struggles of the last century?   Russia—or was it really Hitler’s Germany?—supposedly   resembled oligarchic Sparta in its efforts to destroy a   democratic, seafaring America. Did not the Cold War, after   all, similarly divide up the world into two armed leagues,   led by superpowers who had united for a time against the   common enemy only later to face off for decades of bipolar   hostilities? Was the Sicilian expedition a precursor to   Gallipoli, Vietnam, or any proposed great democratic or   imperial crusade abroad? Or does the disaster at Syracuse   show, as Thucydides oddly concluded, what happens when folks   at home do not support the troops abroad? Because Thucydides   first framed the important issues that haunt us still, we   naturally return to his original and seemingly unimpeachable   conclusions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Sorrows of War\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Why exactly is this rather obscure ancient war between   minuscule Athens and Sparta still so alive, and used and   abused in ways that other ancient conflicts, such as the   Persian Wars (490, 480–79) and Alexander the Great’s   conquests (334–323), are not? Many intriguing reasons come   to mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    First, it was a brutal and very long struggle. King Xerxes   and his enormous Persian military were routed from Greece in   about two years. Alexander destroyed the later Persian   Empire in a third of the time it took Sparta to defeat   Athens. Lasting twenty-seven years, or almost a third of the   fabled fifth century of classical Greece, the Peloponnesian   War, like the Second Punic War, the Thirty Years War, or the   Hundred Years War, was a mess that eerily crossed   generations. Those born after the first years of the war   often fought and died in the fighting before it was over.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So the catastrophe devoured entire families across   generations. The carnage reminds us of imperial Britain   tottering after the First World War, the end of empire,   aristocracy, and unquestioned patriotism all inextricably   tied to trenches that gobbled up the British elite. The   Peloponnesian War spared few Greeks, regardless of wealth or   family connections. The “great houses” of Athens, or so the   postbellum lament went, were almost wiped out.2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Take the most famous branch of the exalted Alcmaeonid   family. Pericles, the spiritual and political leader of   Athens, died of the plague at Athens in 429 in only the   third season of the war. His sister, also in her sixties,   had perished a year before from the same epidemic, along   with his sons Paralus and Xanthippus. Neither of those young   men reached thirty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Later, a much younger bastard son, Pericles the Younger, was   elected an Athenian general. He was in part responsible for   the great sea victory at Arginusae, some twenty-three years   after his father’s death. Yet the younger Pericles was   subsequently executed by an Athenian jury in an infamous   scapegoating frenzy during the battle’s aftermath. And   Pericles’ nephew, the thirty-two-year-old bright and   upcoming Hippocrates, fell at the forefront of the battle of   Delium (424). Thirty years’ worth of plague, political   intrigue, general hysteria, and enemy spears more or less   wiped out the family of the most powerful man at Athens.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The war also started at the high-water mark of Greece’s   great Golden Age (479–404). Yet the attendant calamity ended   for good such great promise that started with the defeat of   the Persians (479). The capitulation of Athens (404) and the   end of the fifth-century Golden Age remain symbolically   interconnected events to this day. They are also loosely   associated as well with the near-contemporaneous trial and   execution of Socrates (399), the last and greatest casualty   of a once wonderful world seemingly gone mad in a few   decades. Contemporaries, among them the comic poet   Aristophanes, believed that with the end of the   Peloponnesian War, Attic tragedy as emblemized by Aeschylus,   Sophocles, and Euripides had lost its splendor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Indeed, players in and observers of the war were the greats   of Hellenic civilization—Alcibiades, Aristophanes,   Euripides, Pericles, Socrates, Sophocles, Thucydides, and   others—many of whom flourished, were discredited, or   perished because of their involvement in the fighting. Much   of the greatest classical literature, such as Aristophanes’   Acharnians, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Plato’s Symposium,   and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, either deals with issues of   the war or employs the conflict as dramatic landscape,   leaving with us the depressing possibility that war, not   peace, prompted the greatest explosion in the Greek creative   genius, a frenzied outburst before a weary collapse. Most   Greeks saw the bloody struggle through the eyes of Athens,   whose writers enjoyed a near monopoly on reporting,   praising, and condemning the war—shocked that in just three   decades the entire dream of a cultural renaissance was   brought to an end. So north of the Isthmus of Corinth the   fight was soon known universally as the “Peloponnesian War,”   the conflict against those awful supermen who inhabited the   southern peninsula of Greece—not, as the parochial   Peloponnesians saw it, as a Spartan-led struggle against   imperialists in an “Athenian War.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Peloponnesian War pitted against each other two Greek   states that were antithetical in nearly every respect.   Athens had 300 warships, a population of over 300,000   residents, a fortified port, a vast countryside, some 200   tribute-paying subject states abroad, and plenty of coined   money. Sparta was landlocked. About 160 miles to the south,   it relied on an army of only 10,000 infantrymen—less than   half of them full citizens—to enforce rule over 250,000   inferiors and serfs, and a hegemony of neighboring   communities, without any tradition of either seapower or   cosmopolitan culture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Rightly or wrongly, the fighting was assumed to be a final   arbitrator of the contrasting values of each. Which would   prove to be the more viable ideology: cultural and political   liberalism or a tough, insular conservatism? Does an open   society reap military advantages from its liberality or   succumb to a license unknown in a regimented and   militaristic oligarchy? And who is the most resourceful in   an asymmetrical war when both sides either cannot or will   not face each other in conventional battle: the ships of a   “whale” like imperial Athens or the ponderous armies of the   “elephant” Sparta?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thucydides\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then there is the matter of Thucydides himself. Greece’s   preeminent historian was not merely an analytical and   systematic writer of a great extant military history of   Sparta and Athens. He was also a brilliant philosopher who   tried to impart to the often obscure events of the war a   value that transcended his age. In his own boast, his   narrative would prove to be “a possession for all time,” far   more important than the actual war itself.3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Precisely because of this didactic nature of Thucydides’   lengthy narrative—predicated on the belief that human nature   is unchanging across time and space and thus predictable—the   conflict of Athens and Sparta is supposed to serve as a   lesson for what can happen to any people in any war in any   age. 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Still, Thucydides was not an abstract theorist but a chief   player in the war he wrote about. He nearly died of the   plague and was cooped up in the city with tens of thousands   of other Athenians who sought refuge there from the invading   Peloponnesians. He fought and lost to the cagey Spartan   commander Brasidas as an Athenian general in the struggle   over the northern allied city of Amphipolis. For that   setback he was unfairly exiled in his late thirties by an   angry people back home (423), whose leaders are later   prominent in his own history. Like Caesar’s and Napoleon’s,   Thucydides’ writing is inextricably mixed up with his past   life as a man of action—and he too sometimes refers to   himself in the third person as a character in his own history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In response to that injustice of expulsion, the historian   traversed the Greek world for twenty-some years of the war   as an embedded reporter of sorts. Thucydides was eager to   hear from veterans the Peloponnesian and Boeotian sides of   the story as well, and his subsequent balanced treatment is   riveting. The history is also full of bizarre examples of   how ingenious Greeks diverted their singular energy and   talent to find horrific ways of killing and maiming one   another, from crafting a fire cannon to torch trapped   soldiers to throwing overboard thousands of captured rowers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yet for all his personal autopsy and firsthand graphic   detail, Thucydides can also be hard to read for a modern   audience: a difficult vocabulary, strange-sounding names and   places, often tedious listings of invasions and   expeditions—and long, sometimes contorted speeches whose odd   grammar and syntax seem almost impossible for even his   contemporary audiences to have understood. While it is   fashionable lately to suggest that Thucydides was our first   “postmodern” historian whose preconceived theories required   that he invent “facts” in the interest of constructing   “objectivity,” he is much too complex a mind for such a   simple sham.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Modern readers are instead more struck by Thucydides’   attempts at objectivity, by how this historian went to great   lengths to interview combatants, consult written treaties,   and look at records on stone. Thucydides was an observer who   at various times expressed admiration for the democratic   imperialist Pericles. But he also clearly liked the Spartan   firebrand Brasidas (whose more brilliant career ended his   own). He waxed eloquently over the Athenian right-wing coup   of 411 and its eccentric godhead Antiphon—even as he praised   the wartime resiliency of democracies. And though a   commander of sailors, Thucydides was nevertheless still more   enamored with infantrymen. Because his history is a classic   of literature and philosophy, the war is known to us in a   manner not true of subsequent larger and far more bloody   conflicts.4\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Athens as America\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Contemporary America is often now seen through the lens of   ancient Athens, both as a center of culture and as an   unpredictable imperial power that can arbitrarily impose   democracy on friends and enemies alike. Thomas Paine long   ago spelled this natural affinity out: “What Athens was in   miniature, America will be in magnitude.” Like ancient   Athenians, present-day Americans are often said to believe   that “they can be opposed in nothing,” and abroad can   “equally achieve what was easy and what was hard.”5 Although   Americans offer the world a radically egalitarian popular   culture and, more recently, in a very Athenian mood, have   sought to remove oligarchs and impose democracy—in Grenada,   Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq—enemies, allies, and   neutrals alike are not so impressed. They understandably   fear American power and intentions while our successive   governments, in the manner of confident and proud Athenians,   assure them of our morality and selflessness. Military power   and idealism about bringing perceived civilization to others   are a prescription for frequent conflict in any age—and no   ancient state made war more often than did fifth-century   imperial Athens.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So great were the dividends of envy, fear, and legitimate   grievance against the ancient world’s first democracy that   the victorious Peloponnesians who oversaw the destruction of   the Long Walls of Athens—the fortifications to the sea   symbolic of the power of the poor and their desire to spread   democracy throughout the Aegean—did so to music and   applause. Again, most Greeks concluded that, as Xenophon   wrote, Athens’ defeat “marked the beginning of freedom for   Greece”—without a clue that the victorious Sparta would move   immediately to create its own overseas empire in the   vacuum.6 Blinkered idealists in America who believe that the   world wishes to join our democratic culture might reflect   that at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, “the general   good intentions of people leaned clearly in favor of the   Spartans” and that “the majority of Greeks were deeply   hostile toward the Athenians.”[quote]--The New York Times;  A New York Times Notable Book","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300106948837,"sku":"NP9780812969702","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812969702.jpg?v=1767720908","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/a-war-like-no-other-isbn-9780812969702","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}