-Robert Conquest
Victor Davis Hanson’s name has become known to millions of people since the attacks of September 11. Beginning the very day of those terrible events, he has poured forth a stream of commentary urging a tough response against…well, against somebody. At first it was bin Laden and al-Qaeda, of course. But as soon as the Bush administration announced that Iraq was a proper target for American retaliation, Hanson got on board. Since then he has briefed powerful men at the Pentagon, taught midshipmen in Annapolis, given lectures and interviews, all while maintaining a steady flow of “tough” journalism for National Review Online.
It is all quite a change for him.
Victor Davis Hanson is a fifth-generation California grape farmer. He has often expressed his admiration for the sort of men among whom he grew up: tough, hardworking smallholders, taciturn men with a sense of loyalty to their land and families. He clearly understands the privilege he enjoyed in being reared among this vanishing American breed.
He attended a nondescript state-supported college close to home and went on to graduate study in classics at Stanford. He developed an interest in ancient warfare, and found that his own farming knowledge could illuminate ambiguous and misinterpreted passages in the ancient historians.
All readers of Thucydides and Xenophon know how frequently they refer to armies “ravaging” enemy territory, “destroying” trees or “devastating” crops. The ancients could take for granted that their readers knew what such expressions signified; many had taken part in or suffered from such ravaging themselves. For today’s typical urban or suburban reader, however, vines and fruit trees are nearly as unfamiliar as Pindaric odes or red-figure vases. Some classicists have imagined such ravaging to have produced famine and long-term economic depression, or even to have been the decisive cause of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War.
Hanson, based on his own farming experience, was skeptical. Vines and olive trees have deep roots, and their permanent destruction was too difficult and time-consuming for a marauding army to attempt. Rather than being intended to starve the enemy into submission (as in modern warfare), crop destruction was a kind of slap in the face, a challenge to the enemy to come out and fight. When Pericles succeeded in convincing the Athenians not to fall into this trap and to rely instead on their naval power, it was a sign that the traditional pattern of hoplite (i.e., heavily armed infantryman’s) battle was eroding (Thuc. II, 21-22).
In 1980, Hanson submitted a doctoral thesis on this subject to the classics department at Stanford and quietly went back to farming. Three years later the dissertation was published as a book: Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (University of California, 1983). I recall seeing it on the “recent arrivals” table at a college bookstore: the back cover featured a photograph of the author in the unkempt dress of a grape farmer.
1983 saw a catastrophic fall in grape prices, and Hanson found himself, in effect, paying consumers to eat his produce. Things were so bad he found he could earn more teaching Greek. He became classics professor at California State University, Fresno—a position he still holds. His reputation as a classroom teacher is high and has won him awards.
By 1987 he had completed work on a second book, The Western Way of War (University of California, 1989). Its title may be misleadingly broad. The work is directly concerned only with infantry battle in classical Greece. The polis, Hanson explains, developed a mode of warfare peculiar to itself and with an influence still perceptible in the military practice of the occident.
Other ancient nations such as the Egyptians and Persians fought to a large extent with bow and arrow or sling, on horseback or from chariots. Attacks were often uncoordinated. Battle could be prolonged for days into a series of indecisive skirmishes. Troops were lightly armed, dressed with a view to looking fearsome and masculine, rather than heavily armored to protect themselves from blows. Warriors were as intent upon avoiding the stroke of death as they were on dealing it out to their enemies.
Greeks of the classical period had a strong preference for pitched battle between heavily armed infantry. The favored weapons were sword and hand-held spear, no arrow or throwing-spear. Ambushes and irregular skirmishing—indeed, almost all that we think of as strategy and tactics—were avoided in favor of brief, simple face-offs between identically equipped massed formations. Battle, that is, was a kind of ritualized collective dueling. Armor was designed with single-minded attention to preserving the life of its wearer. On the other hand, once battle commenced, the individual hoplite’s supreme duty was to forget about his own preservation, stand his ground, and take his chances. “Few types of fighting,” writes Hanson, “have required quite the same degree of courage, of nerve in the face of mental and physical anguish, as this…in which armed and armored hoplites advanced in massed formation with no chance of escape” (p. 25).
The terrible ordeal of hoplite battle had, however, two advantages. First, it was economical. Deaths on the winning side averaged about five percent, on the losing side fourteen percent. Armor was affordable for the ordinary farmer. There were no long or distant campaigns; service lasted a few days, with the actual fighting occupying perhaps not more than an hour. Second, no non-Western army could stand up to it. This is what saved Greece during the Persian invasions of 490 and 480 B.C. Reluctant Persian draftees were simply not prepared to face heavily armed men who fought in formation and did not shrink from death. Herodotus relates that the Persians at Marathon believed the Athenians “possessed by some very desperate madness.” The death toll he reports for the battle—6400 Persians versus 192 Greeks—gives some idea of the superiority of the “western way of war.”
Hanson’s “deep faith in democracy” seems to grow ever deeper. “It is the duty of Americans,” he writes, “to support popular governments and democratic revolutionaries wherever possible” (p. xix), and more specifically to support “the right of all Islamic peoples to self-determination through consensual government” (p. 72). Never mind that divine sanction is the only legitimizing principle familiar to ordinary Muslims. He expects that “what once happened among the enslaved peoples of the Warsaw Pact could occur again in the Middle East—and in a decade or less rather than fifty years” (p. 203). What if Muslims turn out not to care for “freedom and democracy?” No cause for second thoughts: “[i]f they wish…to elect themselves into the slavery of Islamic republics, so be it—but at least we can say that we fought for legitimacy—and they, not us, ruined their countries” (p. 143). He speaks casually of outlawing polygamy, “liberating” women, secularizing education, and putting an end to “tribalism.”
Among the more intriguing pieces in An Autumn of War is Hanson’s “interview” with Thucydides. Passages from The Peloponnesian War are turned into answers to Hanson’s queries about the War on Terror. He asks about the need for tough measures, even against those not directly connected to the September 11 attacks. "General Thucydides's” answer advocates punishment of the innocent along with the guilty. The passage, it turns out, is taken from a speech by the demagogue Cleon, whom the real Thucydides called “the most violent man at Athens.” In the speech quoted, Cleon was defending a motion to put the entire adult male population of Mytilene to death and enslave the women and children, because some of the citizens had plotted a revolt against Athens.
Hanson further sees fit to apply to Donald Rumsfeld a panegyric Thucydides made upon Pericles the Great. More recently, he has compared George Bush to Demosthenes (though not, fortunately, with any special regard for the president’s speaking ability). Thucydides’s magnificent remarks on the perversion of language brought on by war fever are turned upside down into a defense of Hanson’s own wild rhetoric about “Islamo-fascism” (pp. 75-78). Such is the “classical wisdom” he offers our age.
In the two years since writing the pieces collected as An Autumn of War Prof. Hanson has remained busy producing at least one article per week for National Review Online. He seems oddly out of place among the professional libelers and callow minds now posing as heirs to that once respectable journal, but it is only knowledge of his past achievements which allows one to say this; the actual material he now grinds out is indistinguishable from theirs. We may skip discussing it; besides being numbingly repetitious, it contains little argument or analysis of any sort. Indeed, most of it is mere cheerleading—intended to stir the reader’s enthusiasm for whatever line the Bush administration is pushing at the moment.
Victor Davis Hanson is among the most talented writers in America today. How sad, then, that precisely his worst qualities are now exerting the greatest influence. The Other Greeks will never reach the vast audience that has devoured An Autumn of War. No revival of free agriculture or classical education is likely to be sparked by his earlier work. Instead, he is now a leading proponent of policies which, it is to be feared, threaten us, our country, and our civilization with catastrophe.