The Peloponnesian War: A book review

 

With any long war comes the unmistakable slide into ugliness.

 I’m reading VDH’s book A War Like No Other about the Peloponnesian War from roughly 431 BC to 406 BC. It’s a military tactics and strategy book and it’s almost more than the average reader needs to know. There is a great deal about logistical difficulties and the broad nature of the conflicts that broke out across the Aegean and Ionian communities. The two powers at the time were Sparta and Athens but a lot of the fighting took place between allies of both.

Most historians understand the conflict as between a rising power and a declining one. Or rather, Sparta attacked Athens before it could become an even bigger threat.

Athens as the great sea power had a lot of port cities that paid tribute to its sprawling empire. Not all allies of Athens wanted to fight for them and actually tried to switch sides. Sparta didn’t initially have a big navy. They were a feared infantry force (hoplites) with no equal across all of Greece. Had the Peloponnesian War been a series of battlefield clashes Sparta would’ve won in a few years. The conflict wasn’t exactly 30 straight years of fighting. There were years of calm and truce (Peace of Nicias) even with smaller city states warring with each other.

But the war is characterized by sieges and disease with the occasional hoplite battles going head to head. Sieges were easier for the Athenians to use, given their naval superiority and wealth. Sieges could take years if the community being surrounded had enough supplies to outlast an occupying force. A lot of cities used stone walls to surround their population and wait it out. During this time in history, no one was adept at making proper ladders to scale barriers or effective battering rams. It would be another hundred years until armies like Alexander the Great’s figured out how to scale walls effectively.

 The most common way for a besieged city to fall was for someone inside to open the gates and let the invading army in. It was usually the oligarchs or wealthier patrons making deals with the surrounding force. There were so many sieges it’s tough to list them all. They frequently became expensive to maintain for the invading army more so than the occupied city, and didn’t add much in the way of spoils. They tied up men and materiel for years.

If the siege proved a success, you could capture and kill the men or force them into your depleted army. But training and lodging took time and became a burden cost wise. You could sell the women and children into slavery and make a few bucks, but it wouldn’t be enough to overcome the cost of years spend surrounding the place. Play out these scenarios over the countless cities and you begin to see the problem. A lot of little wars, skirmishes and sieges made a long war into a conflict of attrition. There wasn’t much to be gained by surrounding a walled city and waiting for them to surrender. But it became the default method of fighting, despite the few hoplite battles in Delium and Sicily.

 Athens fell victim to a plague early in the war (430-429) and wiped out significant members of the military (1/3), including the great general Pericles. If not for the outbreak I think Athens would have won the war. But they never really recovered from the devastating pandemic.

It’s a fascinating read but it’s tough to keep track of all the disparate city states and regions and their allies. Hanson uses multiple definitions too for the same groups (democrats, Athenians) and introduces a torrent of new concepts and words I wasn’t familiar with before. This book requires a little prior knowledge and whatever I knew before about the war (not much) it wasn’t enough to keep up.

He doesn’t organize the text chronologically either. He sections it off in separate elements of fighting, horses, sieges, disease, hoplite infantry battles, naval warfare. I find it easier to follow along in a chronological fashion, if not only to understand the history told like an unfolding story. I found the overall reading difficult but not impossible. 

Do this. Open a map of ancient Greece and trace your finger along the Aegean sea and notice all the cities. Do the same with the Ionian Sea and imagine each city or tiny island is a sovereign territory with citizens and an army and an oligarchy. It’s impossible to keep track of them all.

If there is a general theme to the war it’s this. Warfare is ugly across all human societies and descends into increasingly worse behavior as it goes on. The collective conscious of any community at war is beset with memories of what the other side did. After a few years nearly everyone has a story about some tragedy. This bitterness increases across generations and leads to bloodier battles and outright slaughter, even whole scale genocide in some cases. It’s easy to see how this happens. When war is necessary we always want a quick resolution, so that the vitriol doesn’t set in and consume generations.

The Peloponnesian War failed in this regard and dethroned Athens as the great democratic power of the 5^th century. But their legacy is philosophy and democratic governance. They also had the first historian (Thucydides) who chronicled much of the war. If you love ancient history and warfare A War Like No Other is for you.