For a war that's been studied to death, Hanson surprised me with this fresh take. I'm no expert by any measure but have studied this conflict for years and was taken aback at how much of the material here was "new" to me. The chapters on Triremes alone was worth the price for me. Excellent and highly recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject.

Terrible war told terribly well

A very well written investigation into numerous aspects of this most terrible and importan war. It is easy to see that the politicians of our beloved republic had no knowledge of this war when they marched into Afghanistan, as foolhardy as the Athenians landing on the beaches of Sicily all those millennia ago.

There's an adage historians use, something to the effect that if you don't make a past event relevant beyond its time you are not a historian, you are an antiquarian. I think Hanson takes this very literally as nearly ever element of the war is compared to later historical events as a point of reference (if not necessarily direct connection). Not a complaint per se, it is very helpful in illustrating how the ancient Greeks would have interpreted developments in the war/society, but it's a very noticeable quirk.

Anyway, I liked the book. I guess I have a degree in history, but pre-Roman European history is a big old blank space. And yet Hanson caught me up to speed very quickly! So clearly an effective book. Also he gets down and (especially) dirty about combat in the Ancient world. Guys! War sucks! It still does but like, holy shit when it was hordes of malnourished short guys in a field stabbing each other in the dick? Or starving out entire cities over months? Taking whole cities as slaves? Yeesh, I could go on, and yeah Hanson spares no detail. There's also more light hearted anecdotes, like how much of pain in the ass it would be for these men the size of a modern 12 year old to chop down all the Olive Trees in Attica. Another good thing to point out about Hanson, he ties the environment directly into the narrative.

I also like how he sort of challenges the orthodox viewpoint that this war destroyed Athens entirely, when like, by his account it seems like they bounced back. Depending how you view the war, they may have even won eventually. The real take away being a West Europe post WWI psychic scar about the very nature of war and of course humanity. Title serves as a misnomer. The Peloponnesian War very much resembled many a war. And they're all bad!

NNot for the casual reader, Hanson is an expert on the history of war, and how victories were obtained or lost. This is a good introduction with better books to follow. Be Brave!

Professor Hanson again demonstrates his expert knowledge of classical Greek warfare, along with a remarkable ability to describe ancient events in a clear, enjoyable fashion. I recommend this book for those who share an interest in and have already spent some time reading about the Peloponnesian War. However, readers, who dive into this book without some prior knowledge of classical history, and particularly Greek history, may struggle to keep up.

Let me first say that a three star rating for me is a good book that I would recommend to people who are interested in the subject matter. I purchased this book because I started Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War and felt that I really would not understand anything unless I read some more background first. What surprised me the most was how, in the space of a hundred years all the notable things happened in Helenistic civilization. Defense against invading Persians, battle of marathon, Peloponnesian war, Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Euripides, Sophocles, and Alexander the Great. Another thing that surprised me was just how savage the fighting was. The democracy of Athens is not necessarily the good side They democratically voted to do terrible things, destroying towns, killing all men, enslaving all women. I would say more, but I am tired of writing. I will finish just by saying that Mr. Hanson does a great job of explaining how the history is relevant to our day [ demographic change, uncertain times, the fear of meeting a strong enemy in open conflict, defense vs offense, cowardice, bravery, foolishness and wisdom].

Hanson gives us an accessible account of the ancient conflict between democracy & oligarchy-- recommended for any student of military history.

I have been a fan of Victor Davis Hanson’s (hereafter VDH) writing for a long time. His scholarship is always brilliant and extensive, and his conclusions are well-reasoned, intriguing, and illuminating.
VDH has written a great deal on the Peloponnesian War. This book, “A war like no other,” continues his scholarly excellence but takes a different approach to the war.
For those not initiated to the war and whose knowledge of Sparta is limited to watching the movie 300, the war was a struggle between the sea-based Athenian Empire and its direct democratic governance and a land-based coalition led by a Spartan militaristic oligarchy.
While the war ended with Athens’ surrender, neither side won the war. In the end, Sparta’s governance proved too insular and paranoid to allow it to rule an empire, and its coalition partners turned on and defeated Sparta.
Tactically Sparta won, but only after embracing the hated Persians and abandoning its traditional reliance on highly trained hoplite infantry. Athens rose from the ashes of defeat, demonstrating the flexible strength of democracy. While the golden age of Periclean Athens passed, Athens remained a cultural force for centuries, exerting outsized influence on the Macedonians, Egyptians, Romans, and Western political thought.
The founders of the United States understood the lessons of the Peloponnesian War, which influenced the selection of a representative republican form of democracy. Unfortunately, the lessons to be drawn from Athens’s hubristic expedition to Sicily were not learned and led to things like Vietnam and Afghanistan.
What finally comes from reading both VDH’s book and Thucydides’ ’Peloponnesian War” is that human nature, whether dressed in a toga or earth-sensitive clothing, is unchanging.

This book put ancient Greece into an entirely new light for me. The war was sporadic, but altogether lasted about 30 years. Athens was the great democracy, with a large empire of states it had conquered. Athens was the technologically superior Greek state. It relied on its advanced navy with better ships and better naval tactics. Sparta was autocratic, technologically backward, and relied on its heavy-duty infantry. Sparta also had a large number of allied states in Peloponnesia.

After a year or so into the war, a great plague hit ancient Greece very hard. Rural farmers immigrated into the city walls of Athens, which helped contribute to the high death rate in Athens. Just as many people died from disease, as from the war!

This is a history book like few others; it does not detail the war in a chronological fashion. Instead, each chapter describes a theme in some detail. A chapter on each of the city states, a chapter on infantry, on cavalry, on the navy, on slavery, tactics, torture, terrorism, and on politics. This helps to give an overall view of societies at the time. The author helps the reader to understand the concepts, by comparing the historical events in ancient Greece to better-known historical events in modern times. These analogies really helped my understanding of the attitudes and events in the history.

I didn't read this book; I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Bob Souer. He reads the book very well, in a pleasant, straight-forward manner. Highly recommended!

I enjoy reading classical Greek and Latin literature of all sorts: drama, poetry, and history, as well as books about these topics. So it was with the anticipation of something good that I sat down to read Hanson’s “A War Like No Other”. Hanson is a noted author, historian and classicist, so what could be more interesting than his take on the Peloponnesian war? A lot of things, actually.

Not that “A War Like No Other” is bad. Hanson, as has been noted in many reviews, departs from the typical linear presentation of the war, taking instead a topical approach. In each chapter he examines the war as a whole through the lens of a particular aspect of the war. In “Armor”, he focuses on the life of the Greek Hoplite soldier, the main Hoplite battles, and how the nature of those battles changed radically from the opening to the closing of the war. Likewise in “Walls” he investigates the ancient Greek practice of siege warfare. Naval battles are discussed in “Ships”, cavalry in “Horses”, and so on. As he examines these topics in detail he also touches on several recurring themes, chief among them the cost of the war in material treasure, human lives, and the way the Peloponnesian war changed Western concepts of war forever. All of this is fascinating.

The issue I had was not with the information presented, but how it was presented. The topical approach simply did not work for me. It was too fragmented and disjoint. I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again. True, each chapter varied from the last in topic, but too many of the events and characters were repeated. The narrative thread provided by a linear history was disrupted as those characters and events lost their normal place in a timeline. It did not help that this was my first reading of a book on the Peloponnesian war. Perhaps if I had already read Thucydides, “A War Like No Other” would have been more accessible.

On the whole, Hanson’s book is worthwhile, but I cannot recommend it to a newcomer to the war between Athens and Sparta. Start with Thucydides. I intend to make him my next stop.

A War Like No Other is classical historian Victor Davis Hanson's offering on the Peloponnesian War - the 27 year struggle between the Delian League (Athens and its allies) and the Peloponnesian League (Sparta and its allies) that ran on and off again from 431 to 404 B.C.

Hanson's book is perhaps also a "book like no other" if I may borrow a phrase. Despite the prominently placed quote for the New York Times on the front cover proclaiming that it is a contemporary retelling of the war, this is not a narrative history of the war. Rather, it does exactly what the subtitle promises - it tells the reader HOW the war was fought. It analyzes the techniques, the weapons, the strategies and the tactics but it is not a history per se. The book vaguely follows the course of the war, but often shifts backwards and forwards through the decades of the war and even before and after the war.

Giving this one a rating is tricky. It is well-researched and well-written. Hanson does a tremendous job of linking the events of the past with more current events, such as World War II, the Cold War and terrorism. In a way, you could say that the quote (and title of the book) from the ancient historian Thucydides was really not true, this war was not a war like no other, instead at least parts of it are like every war that followed since...

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A good introductory of Hellenistic warfare. Skip if you’ve read on this topic before.