Zelanator reviewed A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson
Review of 'A War Like No Other' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I enjoyed Hanson’s explanation of the Peloponnesian War. I previously read Thucydides in graduate school, and so having that context certainly helped me understand some of Hanson’s assertions here.
Hanson places much needed emphasis on the physics of the battlefield. Modern readers of the Peloponnesian War cannot intuit that the average Spartan or Athenian cavalryman was about 5’2’’ and 120 pounds, or that the normal hoplite warrior was only a bit more robust at 5’5’’ and 140 pounds. By way of comparison, a cavalryman fighting in the failed Sicilian campaign during the Peloponnesian Wars was about the average size of a 12-year-old boy in the 21st century.
He goes beyond this, though, to explain how physically and emotionally taxing it would be to serve as an oarsmen in the depths of an Athenian trireme, or to be ensconced in the hoplite panoply of bronze armor with the Corinthian helmet obscuring …
I enjoyed Hanson’s explanation of the Peloponnesian War. I previously read Thucydides in graduate school, and so having that context certainly helped me understand some of Hanson’s assertions here.
Hanson places much needed emphasis on the physics of the battlefield. Modern readers of the Peloponnesian War cannot intuit that the average Spartan or Athenian cavalryman was about 5’2’’ and 120 pounds, or that the normal hoplite warrior was only a bit more robust at 5’5’’ and 140 pounds. By way of comparison, a cavalryman fighting in the failed Sicilian campaign during the Peloponnesian Wars was about the average size of a 12-year-old boy in the 21st century.
He goes beyond this, though, to explain how physically and emotionally taxing it would be to serve as an oarsmen in the depths of an Athenian trireme, or to be ensconced in the hoplite panoply of bronze armor with the Corinthian helmet obscuring one’s vision and hearing during a frenzied phalanx battle. One major takeaway I had from this book was a reinforced sense of how little I understood about the actual mechanics of battle—both of land and at sea—in the ancient world because my interpretation of these events are always done through a modern prism.
As a final tidbit, Hanson de-emphasizes the hoplite warrior and his role in the Peloponnesian War. In the aggregate, much of the violence and bloodshed occurred in two theaters—naval warfare between opposing triremes and irregular warfare conducted by lightly-armored peltasts, slingers, scouts, and cavalrymen. There was a prevalent “cult of the hoplite” and the attendant phalanx formation in the literature of this period, but the actual set-piece battles that occurred between heavily-armored infantry were few and far between.
Highly recommended book for those interested in the roughly thirty-years war between Athens and Sparta.