re: #136 Dark_Falcon

Hanson backs up his case on Greek Warfare in A War Like None Other. He really does know his stuff for ancient Greece.

Sorry, but no. Hansen has made his career as a popular historian by abandoning rigor in favor of claiming a two-and-half millenia continuity of civic values between Greek and modern Europe/America, glossing around details that fail to buttress this position. Basically, he’s continuing a tradition of historians of past ages that have created narrative propaganda in which their empire recapitulates that positive attributes of the Classical Greeks…and in turn the Classical Greeks have had their rough edges smoothed away, and the idylls of their finest scholars are uniformly and universally held by every Hellene. Hansen fortifies his position and grouses about political correctness and multiculturalism transforming our understanding of the past, but he actively chooses to present a simplistic narrative in which the cultural features of Classical Greek have been not only rendered palatable to a modern reader, but exist to flatter the reader with a sense of moral continuity with the (fictive) enlightened men of the past.

His works on other periods similarly rely upon projection and anachronism, plus a laughable degree of assigning deep principles to desperate fights for survival…which, coincidentally, all concern how European-ness allows Europeans to triumph militarily over non-Europeans. He also makes dramatic and foolish errors with factual materials…again, coincidentally, these factual errors increase the efficacy of the described European combatants. For example, describing Rorke’s Drift, he doubles the known Zulu casualties from 381 to 800, and see no contradictory in arguing that disciplined fire and marksmanship training is what permitted Chard’s forces to survive while giving the (accurate) number of discharged cartridges as 20,000.

A War Like None Other is a joke because it discusses the Peloponnesian War without mention of the Delian League or the campaign for Sicilian Syracuse as aspects of the conflict…all the more glaring considering US-Athens and Middle East/terrorism-Sparta parallels Hansen maintains—all of which demonstrates that his intent is not accuracy—after all, he’s willing to cut-and-paste Thucydides and ignore his interpretations even as he lauds the scholar—but the creation of a tidy story. I have no idea whether Hansen “knows his stuff” but frankly he chooses to write and present such that history services his talking points, and more often than not his present-day political opinions.