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A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. By Victor Davis Hanson. New York: Random House, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-6095-8. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Works cited. Index. Pp. xviii, 397. $29.95.
The Los Angeles Times (25 February 2004 = History News Network 26 February 2004: http:/hnn.us/roundup/archives/14/2004/02/) reported that Random House offered Victor Davis Hanson a half million dollars to produce a new history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.)-allegedly the largest advance in publishing history for a work of Classical Studies. Scholarly need cannot be posited: new studies appeared in 2003 (D. Kagan, The Peloponnesian War) and 2004 (J. Lazenby, The Peloponnesian War: A Military History). Hanson's meteoric rise over the last decade from classicist to popularizing military historian and pundit of contemporary issues has attracted an audience: his Carnage and Culture (2001) hit the New York Times bestseller list after 9/11. But this Socrates of Selma has become controversial: a gadfly to postmodernist, politically correct trends in higher education and a "true believer" in current American foreign policy, in support of which classical parallels are frequently cited. Which Victor Hanson do we find in this work? The scholar or the conservative publicist?
The dust cover's inside flap alludes to Hanson's contemporary commentaries: "he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns." Thus a contrived account of the Peloponnesian War as a parable of the war in Iraq (Athens = America) might be expected. If current buzz words ("terror," "ethnic cleansing," "hearts and minds," "shock and awe," etc.) dot the narrative, such language denotes popularization-modernizing antiquity for nonscholars. The preachy, moralizing...