Victor Davis Hanson Interview (2006): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Victor, Tom, welcome to our program. Why did you write this book, which I will now show to our audience, A War Like No Other?
I wanted to explain the Peloponnesian War from the viewpoint of the people who fought it, rather than the fine accounts that we have about the strategy, politics, and political/tactical ramifications. What it was like to be in a trireme [Ed note: an oared warship with three levels of rowers], what it was like to be on a horse, what was it like to be in a phalanx, and how did the men's experience teach us something about that war?
Remind us what the war was about. Who were the main antagonists?
It was twenty-seven-and-a-half years long, the Peloponnesian War. It started in May of 431 [BCE] when Sparta preempted and crossed the border into Attica, which was the countryside of Athens. They said they did so because of various perceived grievances on the part of Athens, [that Athens] had encroached on their territory. But it was the judgment of the historian Thucydides that they did it for fear, generic fear. They wanted to stop this juggernaut before it took over the Greek world. Sparta was oligarchic, Athens was democratic; Sparta was a land power, Athens was a sea power; Sparta was parochial, Athens, cosmopolitan. They had these fault lines that were not to be bridged, and twenty-seven-and-a-half years later the war was over.
The fascinating thing about this was to win the war, Athens has to build an army to defeat the Spartan army, or Sparta had to build a fleet to defeat the Athenian fleet. You'd think that the conniving, quick-witted Athenians would have figured that out first, but that's not what happened. Sparta built a fleet, defeated the Athenian fleet, broke up its maritime empire, bankrupted its treasury, cut off its food, and won the war.
Did both sides start the war with a strategy which they kept to, or did their strategy evolve over time?
Their strategies evolved. Sparta started the war with a very outdated strategy that had worked in small border wars among its own allies. Basically, "I will cross into someone else's territory and I will attack their agriculture and that will make them so mad that they will come out and fight." But in the case of Athens, if you have imported food, then you don't really care what happens to the agriculture around you. So, the Athenians went into the walls.
By the same token, the Athenian strategy under Pericles was simply, "We will go into the walls, we will import food, we'll keep our empire and its tribute intact, we will circle the Peloponnese and harass the Spartans. We can weather a war of attrition rather than annihilation longer, and we will not win, but because we don't lose, the status before the war favored us, so all we have to do is tie."
You and I know, Thomas, that you don't ever win a war when you think you're going to tie. So, that was tragedy to Athens.
You write: "Everything considered wisdom at the beginning of the war would be proven folly at its end." Any comments on that statement?
The Spartans thought it was wise to devastate agriculture. That didn't work. The Athenians thought it was wise to go inside the walls, and a city designed for 100,000 people quickly was decimated by a terrible plague. Maybe it was smallpox, maybe it was typhoid, but they lost somewhere around 80,000 of their own. The idea that Sparta could ever build a fleet was considered preposterous, but they turned out to be quite adept at it with Persian money. Nobody ever thought you'd go all the way to Sicily and open up another front in the middle of this war, like Athens did, and everybody thought the war would be decided by hoplites -- that's heavy infantrymen -- in fact, there were only two battles. So: terror, horsemen, ships, all of these unconventional ways of encountering enemy forces turned out to be the preferred method of battle.
A lot of histories have been written, and I'm curious why, as a historian, you chose to do these chapters that you did. Your book is not really a chronology, although the chronology is embedded, but you've taken a thematic [approach], terror and so on. Talk a little about that, as a historian.
I quickly discovered that I had two mutually inconsistent goals. One was to tell the war in chronological order from 431 to its conclusion in 404, and the other was to talk about theaters of experience, so I would have [a chapter] on fighting in the fields, fighting on ships, fighting on horses, fighting in armor, the use of terror, sieges. But the problem was that each of those didn't sequentially follow one another. We didn't just hop from one theater [to another]. So I found myself very quickly having to -- as you said, that was a good word you used -- embed the chronology, and privilege the experience of war and hope that I could still carry the tale while I was describing a particular method of combat.
A primary goal was to explain to people why the Peloponnesian War was considered so paramount to later generations in the West. It wasn't because Sparta won necessarily, because they really didn't do much with their victory and they were friends with Athens within fifteen years. But what happened was that it changed the mentality of Greeks; it was considered barbaric. To find those answers, I had to look at what actually happened.
You say in the book that in the end, the Peloponnesian Wars changed what war was about. In the end it wasn't what it had been at the beginning.
Yes. Greek warfare had had ethical constraints that were -- I guess the word that sociologists use is "constructed." That is, that people don't always employ the methodology or the technology that they otherwise would be capable of because of protocol. So, you cross somebody else's border, you allow single males, or married males, or adult males, however you define them, to get armor on and attack each other. But you don't use the Greek genius that created the Parthenon sculptures, or could measure the diameter of the sun. You don't use that technology for things that otherwise might prove very efficient in wars, such as catapults, or such as siegecraft, or such as hiring mercenary soldiers, or freeing slaves. But as this war wore on year after year, the protocols were shed and the Greek genius was applied to war without ethical constraint.
You're a commentator on contemporary events, drawing on this classical history that is your other professional work, and we're going to talk about that in one second. But before we segue into that, I want to paraphrase something that you said at the dinner last night, the Nimitz lecture, and what I jotted down was: "Human nature is constant; tragedy endures; lessons are to be learned through empiricism." Talk a little about that, because that's a segue into the present.
The reason we can study with value (and that's a key word) and profit in a didactic fashion [from] Thucydides, the chronicler of, for example, the Peloponnesian Wars, [is] that the one requisite -- human nature -- doesn't change. Humans in that book, or the humans in the Seven Years War, the humans in the Civil War, are all basically hardwired the same way, they had the same emotions, they're subject to envy, pride. The Peloponnesian War, with the necessary changes being made (that is, technology), can tell us exactly why states go to war, how they feel, balance of power, deterrence, that we see in the present. If you don't believe that, you would have to believe that just in the 2500 years of Western civilization we've had an accelerated Darwinian evolution of the human mind; or maybe [that] using computer games or using a computer has changed our circuitry and made us into people who are not subject to those [emotions]; or maybe, as therapists believe, we're so affluent or so educated now that we don't have to go back and worry about those primordial emotions. But it's my view that Thucydides was right, that human nature hasn't changed, and will not change, and therefore each war is instructive about other wars to come.
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