The Thirty Years Slaughter

Of the many obscure conflicts of the ancient world, the Pelo- ponnesian war is perhaps the least obscure to us, thanks to Thucydides’ carefully written, if unfinished, account of it. Despite the enormous influence it grew to have on the practice of history itself, Thucydides’ achievement did not prevent future historians from tackling the same subject — of whom Victor Davis Hanson, a prolific author of books on classical Greece and ‘the Western way of war’, is only the most recent.

Hanson’s approach is not simply to recount the war’s events or its campaign strategies, but to describe how the war was actually fought, and thus ‘to flesh out this three-decade fight of some twenty-four hundred years past as something very human’. He has organised the book thematically rather than chronologically, its chapters identified with perhaps intentionally daunting one-word titles like ‘Fear’, ‘Fire’, and ‘Terror’.

These chapters are filled with fascinating details.