Written in 2005, during the height of America’s military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, the book attempts to draw sweeping parallels between the Peloponnesian War and contemporary American foreign policy dilemmas, particularly those involving Islamic fundamentalism, Middle Eastern civil strife, and global anti-American sentiment.
Hanson's central proposition—that ancient Athens mirrors modern America, while Sparta represents the authoritarian threats of the modern world—is both historically unsound and intellectually disingenuous.
In a television debate from that period, Hanson criticized Islamic intellectuals for seeking answers in the era of the Rashidun Caliphate, branding them as fundamentalists trapped in a nostalgic past. Yet, in an ironic twist, he himself turns to the fifth century BCE to rationalize twenty-first century geopolitics. What he derides in others—an appeal to antiquity—he champions in his own work, revealing not only a double standard but a lack of self-awareness.
Hanson’s comparison of Athens to the United States and Sparta to the autocratic regimes of the Middle East—or worse, to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—is deeply problematic. His historical analogies are neither nuanced nor scholarly. They are blunt instruments of ideological affirmation, not analytical tools. The Peloponnesian War, fought between two Greek city-states that shared language, religion, customs, and military traditions, cannot be transposed onto the civilizational binaries Hanson constructs. To do so is to ignore the very Greekness that both Athens and Sparta represented.
Moreover, Hanson distorts the political dynamics that led to the Peloponnesian War. He simplistically casts Athens as the democratic protagonist and Sparta as the reactionary villain, echoing a Cold War narrative ill-suited to classical antiquity. As historians like Donald Kagan have convincingly argued, the war was not a struggle of ideologies but of strategic, economic, and political interests. Far from a peaceful democracy, Athens was an ambitious empire-builder, often more provocative than Sparta in the lead-up to war. Hanson’s refusal to engage with this complexity reveals a dogmatic worldview rather than a historian’s curiosity.
His language further betrays his bias. Terms like “roughneck Lacedaemonian granddads” and “oligarchic fundamentalists” are jarring, unsubstantiated, and unbecoming of serious historical writing. His invention of terms like “Athenianism” to suggest a coherent ideology where none existed, or his description of Alcibiades as “Kennedyesque,” speak more to rhetorical flourish than intellectual rigor. The phrase “Lebanonization of Greece” is particularly absurd—an anachronistic metaphor that conflates vastly different geopolitical contexts in an attempt to sensationalize.
Hanson’s portrayal of Sparta as a foreign, slave-based tyranny alien to the West is not only misleading but historically inaccurate. Athens, in fact, possessed more slaves than Sparta and was far more exclusionary in its treatment of women. Spartan women, by contrast, could own and inherit property, and the Spartan system commanded widespread support across the Peloponnesus and beyond. Their strategic sophistication is well documented; they engaged effectively with both oligarchic and democratic institutions, something Hanson conveniently omits.
A major flaw in A War Like No Other is Hanson’s uncritical reliance on Thucydides and, for the later years of the war, Xenophon. He treats these sources with a reverence that borders on faith, ignoring the literary conventions of ancient historiography. Greek historians were not chroniclers in the modern sense—they were storytellers with license to dramatize, invent speeches, and embellish events for didactic or artistic effect.
Herodotus’s claim that Xerxes invaded Greece with five million men is a case in point—modern scholarship places the number closer to 200,000, if not far fewer. Hanson ignores this historiographical reality and clings to Thucydides as an unassailable authority, thereby undermining the methodological integrity of his work.
His earlier book, Carnage and Culture, displays a similar ideological rigidity. There, Hanson argues that democracies inherently triumph over autocracies, using the Battle of Salamis as a case study. Yet his analysis is one-sided. He omits the Persian perspective and ignores the provocative Athenian attacks on Persian territories that precipitated the conflict. Nor does he acknowledge the eventual defeat of democratic Athens in the Peloponnesian War, or the conquest of the Greek world by Macedonian monarchs—developments that directly contradict his thesis that democracies are destined to prevail.
Ultimately, Hanson’s historical writing is not motivated by a quest for truth about the past, but by a desire to affirm the military and moral supremacy of what he calls “the West.” This agenda-driven approach not only narrows the scope of his inquiry but also renders his conclusions suspect. Good history demands a multiplicity of perspectives, critical engagement with sources, and an openness to complexity. Hanson’s work offers none of these. Instead, it reduces antiquity to a simplistic morality play, with the West as hero and its adversaries as villains.
By distorting the past to serve the ideological imperatives of the present, Hanson does a disservice to both history and his readers. He writes not as a historian, but as a propagandist. And propaganda, no matter how well-packaged, is no substitute for scholarship.
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