The Greek way of war.

A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, by Victor Davis Hanson (Random House, 400 pp., $29.95)

DEFINITIVE. Engrossing. A masterpiece. It is difficult to marshal all the requisite superlatives for Victor Davis Hanson's new book on the Peloponnesian war. Hanson takes up the story where Donald Kagan, whose four-volume history of that world-altering conflict also deserves a passel of praise, left off. Kagan provided a sweeping political and strategic overview of the war; Hanson, a classicist, farmer, and military historian, shifts the focus and brings the reader into the guts of battle: Fear, Fire, Disease, Terror, Armor--his very chapter titles limn the grim, tactile realities of war from the inside.

The Athenian general Thucydides fought in the war and he understood that the conflict he later chronicled was "a war like no other." His great history--he rightly denominated it "a possession for all time"--is a monument in the annals of political philosophy and statecraft as well as historical reflection. When he died, in 395 B.C., Thucydides had brought the main part of his story to 411, covering the first 20 years of what was, on and off, a 27-year conflagration. (The Athenian soldier-historian Xenophon would carry the story to the end of the war and beyond.)

By any standard--lives lost, money squandered, property and culture destroyed--the generation-long war between Athens, Sparta, and their proxies was among the most horrific in history. Had the United States suffered a corresponding loss in World War II, its casualties would have numbered 44 million, not 400,000. And it was, Hanson points out, not so much a war in any conventional sense as a collision of ideologies, "the Great Ancient Greek Civil War" that pitted rich, democratic, expansive Athens against the bizarre police state of Sparta, a polity so stunted that it used iron spits for currency lest its populace be corrupted by luxury.

Hanson has two main goals in this book. The first is to bring the reader face-to-face with the particulars of 5th-century Greek warfare. This he does brilliantly. He knows what it felt like to man a Greek warship (pretty bad, especially if you had the misfortune to be consigned to the lowest bank of oars). He knows exactly how a hoplite, a heavily armed infantryman, maneuvered and wielded his weapons. And being a farmer himself, he knows how futile was the Spartan tactic early in the war of ravaging the Attic farmland: "A few years ago I tried to chop down several old walnut trees on my farm. Even when the ax did not break, it sometimes took me hours to fell an individual tree.... It was even more difficult to set them afire. Living fruit (like vines) will not easily burn."

Hanson's command of his subject is as impressive as his erudition is lightly worn. He moves fluently from, say, the minutiae of ancient Greek siegecraft or the design and operation of triremes to the larger canvas of military strategy and cultural aspiration. He is as at home with Pindar and Aristophanes as he is with the tactics of military men like the Spartan admiral Lysander--"the unqualified military genius of the entire war." All this makes A War Like No Other more a searchlight than a chronicle: the revelation of a culture--of a culture in active self-dissolution--rather than a recitation of a calendar of events.

Hanson's second goal is to assess the significance of the war, both for ancient Greek culture and for our own. Two questions stand out. The first is, How could rich, cosmopolitan Athens have lost to the "garrison state" of Sparta, the North Korea of its day? The second is, What lessons does the war hold for succeeding generations?

The power of Athens lay in its navy and its treasury. Sparta's power came from its unsurpassed army and its martial fanaticism. Pericles, the first citizen of Athens, knew that he could not hope to win in direct land battle with Sparta. So he determined to play a waiting game, gathering the local populace in behind Athens's protective walls when Sparta threatened. His goal was not to win but to survive.

The Spartans could not penetrate the Athenian defenses. But providence could. In 430, a devastating plague swept through the overcrowded city, killing thousands. Pericles himself succumbed to the mysterious ailment in 429. Thucydides believed that the plague (which recurred, with less virulent results, in 426) did more damage to Athens than any other calamity.

But if disease struck a serious blow to Athens, strategic miscalculation and treachery were not far behind. In 415, Athens assembled a huge armada and undertook the ill-fated Sicilian Expedition--a piece of hubristic military folly that ranks with Napoleon's (or Hitler's) invasion of Russia. In one of the most compelling parts of the book, Hanson shows how the vacillating leadership of Nicias--"the one man," Donald Kagan observed, "who was able to turn a mistake into a disaster"--coupled with the Athenians' lack of cavalry led to a complete rout. More than forty thousand Athenians and their allies were killed in the holocaust. Seven thousand were enslaved in the mines. In a ghastly tribute to the cavalrymen who won the battle, the image of a horse was branded on the forehead of every prisoner.

The Sicilian Expedition was probably the biggest mistake of the entire war. But possibly even more fatal to Athens was one of its greatest assets--Alcibiades, the rich, handsome, immensely talented, and eminently corruptible soldier and playboy. Educated in part by Pericles, Alcibiades (as readers of Plato's Symposium will remember) became an intimate of Socrates. Boundless narcissism combined with extravagant gifts of fortune made Alcibiades a prodigy of ambition. Hanson calls him "Kennedyesque," the mot juste. He helped win several important battles for Athens. Then he defected to Sparta and helped lay the groundwork for her eventual victory.

But Sparta would never have won had she not also had the support of Persia--immemorial enemy of the Greeks--which after the Sicilian Expedition subsidized the construction of a Spartan fleet. In the final years of the war, Persia sat back and watched the Greeks tear each other to pieces, thus achieving what Marathon, Salamis, and other battles failed to obtain. The end for Athens came at Aegospotami in 405, when Lysander caught the beached Athenian fleet unawares and destroyed it along with its crews. But was it really the end? In 404, Lysander dismantled Athens's defensive walls to the accompaniment of flute girls. In little more than a decade, however, Athens had rebuilt its walls, its fleet, even to some extent its empire. Something was lost. Athens did not cease to exist, it wasn't even poor; but it was no longer rich, no longer splendid, no longer the repository of civic amplitude and youthful vitality.

Ever since Thucydides took reed to papyrus, the Peloponnesian war has been understood to be a paradigmatic conflict. But the exact nature of the paradigm in question has varied with the age it has served. In recent years, as America has moved to disarm tyrants in the Middle East and terrorists wherever they may turn up, the Peloponnesian war is adduced as an admonition. America is rich, as was Athens; America is powerful, as was Athens; America is (or is said to be) arrogant, as was Athens. Athens lost its empire, the war, and finally its freedom. Does some such fate also await America? Doubtless, there are parallels. "Enemies hated Athens," Hanson notes, "as much for what it was as for what it did." Ditto America. Athens was a city that "often blamed itself more in victory than in defeat, ... conducting postbellum hearings to assess blame in the midst of a war for its survival." One hears many such voices raised today as America--as all of Western civilization--confronts a new and implacable enemy in the form of Islamofascism. The choice before us is between the dubious pleasures of self-loathing and the astringent satisfactions of duty acknowledged and discharged. Hanson, like Thucydides, teaches us about the tragic nature of war. What makes war tragic is not the horror of war but rather the recognition that, often, only what Hanson calls "resolute action" can bring lasting peace. As the Roman military strategist Vegetius put it, Si vis pacem, para bellum: If you want peace, prepare for war.

Mr. Kimball is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books.