THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

"No conflict in History is as rich in lessons for our time as the Peloponnesian War": this conviction lies at the heart of the inquiry conducted by historian Victor Davis Hanson into the struggle that pitted, nearly two thousand five hundred years ago, Sparta against Athens. For the Peloponnesian War foreshadows many modern conflicts: it was a titanic confrontation between two superpowers and their allies, a kind of world war on the scale of ancient Greece; it was also a bloody civil war, since it set against one another men who worshipped the same gods and spoke the same language; above all, it was a dirty war, one that invented new methods of terror far removed from the traditional hoplite battle. Sieges, raids, the murder of hostages, massacres of civilians and prisoners unfolded over twenty-seven years, until the capitulation of Athens: the Greece of the golden age was no more. To recount the first total conflict in History, this book, drawing inspiration from Thucydides, brings us face to face with the very flesh of war: the fate of Athens ravaged by a deadly plague, the terror of besieged inhabitants dying of hunger, the despair of illustrious generals, and the death, far from home, of humble soldier-farmers...