A Santayana Moment

Fire of Liberty

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana

Ilya Shapiro has a great review over at Tech Central Station on Victor Davis Hanson's(VDH) A War Like No Other, which is the professors heavily researched and highly readable book on The Peloponnesian War. If you want to get a layman's view of this epic battle between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta some 2,500 years ago, then one can't go wrong with this wonderful book. I can assure you that Hanson has another winner that will have a significant impact on current and future military/foreign policy strategist in academia and government after reading this snippet from Shapiro's review:

Simply by telling his tale, Hanson hammers home the relevance to our time of the protracted clash between Athens, Sparta, and their shifting constellation of alliances. Most interestingly, he includes long discursions on the expansion of proxy and asymmetrical warfare (complete with guerrillas and terrorists); the great powers rarely met each other head on and there were few set-piece battles between hoplite phalanxes.

Unlike in so many "unconventional" history books, Hanson's invocations of the 20th and 21st centuries -- whether for direct comparison or as a benchmark to give context -- flow logically from his presentation (rather than serving as a gratuitous add-on demanded by a sales-conscious publishing house).

While discussing the use of "triremes" -- light, fast boats propelled by three levels of oarsmen, the staple of the magnificent Athenian navy -- Hanson parallels the establishment of supply "bases" on far-flung islands and coastal communities to the British Empire's network of coaling stations. In describing the expansion of Athenian culture and dialect, he mentions this process's contemporary counterpart, the spread of the English language and American popular culture. And Corinth was not unlike Mussolini's prewar Italy, thought to be a valuable potential ally by both sides but offering little military advantage once the fighting began.

Hanson's vast array of personal experience makes the reader believe that he may well have been at the siege of Plataea or the battle of Syracuse. When Hanson writes about complications in the Spartiate campaign to destroy Athenian agriculture, he relates the practical difficulty of chopping down live fruit trees. When he describes the life of an armored infantryman in the withering heat of the Attic plain, he compares it to wearing full pads during pre-season football training. As he chronicles the grumbling of farmer-hoplites restless to return to their harvests, he shares a knowing frustration with the vagaries of agrarian life.

So raise your goblets of wine and toast VDH for another job well done.