War Like No Other How the Athenians And Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

Chapter 1 Fear Why Sparta Fought Athens (480431) Our Peloponnesian War 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. 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. 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. 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 Eleutherios Venizelos 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 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? Russiaor 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 comHanson, Victor Davis is the author of 'War Like No Other How the Athenians And Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War', published 2006 under ISBN 9780812969702 and ISBN 0812969707.