An intimate and thorough account of one of the most far-reaching conflicts of the Ancient World One of the most horrific civil wars in early recorded history, the Peloponnesian War was a conflict between the two superpowers of the Hellenic world, oligarchic Sparta and democratic Athens, and embraced terrorism, revolution, assassination, and genocide, unfolding among a baffling array of shifting allies and bloody enemies. It was a brutal and long struggle, lasting 27 years, almost a third of the fabled fifth century of classical Greece - many born in the first years of the war were dead before the fighting was over. The war ended with the defeat and destruction of Athens, and a blow for democracy in the Ancient world. A War Like no Other is at once a compelling narrative and an accurate historical document. Socrates, Thucydides, Alcibiades and Pericles - many of the great personalities of the ancient Greek world populate these pages. Historian Victor Davis Hanson, narrates from the battlefields, palaces, peasant homesteads, and besieged city states, to bring to life this momentous conflict, which not only altered the ancient world but cast a long shadow even until today. Through lively narration and first-rate scholarship, A War Like No Other finds striking parallels in contemporary struggles in which conflicting ideologies are pitched against each other. The contention at the heart of the book is that people, not politics, are the real stuff of history. An absorbing contemporary history of an ancient conflict with peculiar resonance to our times Compare to Rubicon, Tom Holland (Little, Brown), and The Peloponnesian War, Donald Kagan (HarperCollins) An Autumn lead title for Random House US