Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #320733 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-17
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Synopsis
An intimate and thorough account of one of the most far-reaching conflicts of the Ancient World One of the most horrific civil wars in early recorded history, the Peloponnesian War was a conflict between the two superpowers of the Hellenic world, oligarchic Sparta and democratic Athens, and embraced terrorism, revolution, assassination, and genocide, unfolding among a baffling array of shifting allies and bloody enemies. It was a brutal and long struggle, lasting 27 years, almost a third of the fabled fifth century of classical Greece - many born in the first years of the war were dead before the fighting was over. The war ended with the defeat and destruction of Athens, and a blow for democracy in the Ancient world. A War Like no Other is at once a compelling narrative and an accurate historical document. Socrates, Thucydides, Alcibiades and Pericles - many of the great personalities of the ancient Greek world populate these pages. Historian Victor Davis Hanson, narrates from the battlefields, palaces, peasant homesteads, and besieged city states, to bring to life this momentous conflict, which not only altered the ancient world but cast a long shadow even until today.

Through lively narration and first-rate scholarship, A War Like No Other finds striking parallels in contemporary struggles in which conflicting ideologies are pitched against each other. The contention at the heart of the book is that people, not politics, are the real stuff of history. An absorbing contemporary history of an ancient conflict with peculiar resonance to our times Compare to Rubicon, Tom Holland (Little, Brown), and The Peloponnesian War, Donald Kagan (HarperCollins) An Autumn lead title for Random House US

Customer Reviews

Interesting but flawed
An interesting analysis of the Peloponnesian War; it describes the War in a thematic rather than chronological way and talks about the contradictions and changes the War brought to Ancient Greek warfare.
It has (IMHO) two main faults: it uses concepts that only a reader previously acquainted with the author's books on hoplite/western warfare can fully grasp; and it shows a clear (and very common) bias for Athens. This last may be due to the choice of sources (Thucydides mainly), but one suspects that it is due to the need of the author to justify his previous books on the link between hoplite and (his definition of) western warfare.
It is interesting and worth the read, but not as good as a more balanced book would have been (after all, the Spartans won the War, so they must have been doing something right).

Ancient Warfare
A great battle was occured on a late September day in 480 BC. In this dramatic story brings this landmark battle to life especially naval warfare.The naval encounter that saved Greece and perhaps western civilizaton.This is narrative history at its best and it really obsessed me.
Also recommended: Rubicon and Persian Fire by Tom Holland, Soldiers and Ghosts by J.E.Lendon