A Quick Note on “Two Battles in Three Years”
Detail of an early reproduction of the Darius Mosaic in Pompeii. This is in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. I doubt I will return to Russia anytime soon!
Twice in The Western Way of War (1989, my copy Oxford University Press 1990) Victor Davis Hanson makes similar statements:
In the fifth and fourth centuries, battle broke out in the Greek world nearly two out of every three years, so the chances were good that a man would have to leave his farm, take up his arms, fight in repeated engagements, and fall wounded or die one summer’s day in battle. (p. 31)
For the citizen of the fifth-century Greek city-state who saw battle of some type on an average of two out of three years, the changes were good that he would not die a natural death: in one of those years of his long service he would likely become one of the dead or wounded (p. 89)
A moment’s thought shows that this is incorrect. Even during the Peloponnesian Wars Athens or Sparta only fought a battle every few years, and not all Athenian hoplites or Spartiates fought in every battle. Plato’s Socrates was proud to have fought in one battle, a siege, and an expedition and he was an adult during intensive warfare (Plato, Apology, 28e, Symposium 219-221).1 What could Hanson have meant by the passages above?
There is no way to know for sure where Hanson found this figure because Western Way of War was written as a trade book without footnotes or endnotes. It was originally published with Alfred A. Knopf, and only taken over by Oxford University Press when it sold well. Even though it is included on many grad-school reading lists, its not written to academic standards of evidence.
Fred Eugene Ray Jr. has found about 360 historically-attested battles involving Greeks in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.2 While scholars in the 1980s might not have listed all of them, I doubt that Hanson had a statistic for the number of battles per year which showed less than one battle per year.
It looks to me like Hanson read (or heard in a lecture?) some statistic along the line of “Classical Athens was at war almost two years out of three.” He then started to generalize this and sharpen it. Classical Athens stood for “the fifth-century Greek city-state.” This is the Everest Fallacy, because Athens was very large, wealthy, and warlike and is the center of most surviving sources. The USA is bombing some other country almost every year, but Denmark can go decades without sending troops into combat. It would not be accurate to say that NATO countries bomb someone almost every year when just the UK, France, and Germany have wildly different experiences.
As Hanson sharpened his rhetoric, “at war” became “fighting” became “seeing battle” even though most ancient Greek warfare was raids, marching through enemy territory burning, stickups, piracy, naval battles, being let into a city by a discontented faction, and skirmishes. Battles were prestigious but not the most common form of warfare and did not involve all of a large city’s forces. This also often happens as people retell stories and quotes are reworded or assigned to more famous or ‘appropriate’ people.
Hanson never wanted to be a research academic, he wanted to be a farmer who gave talks to people in small-town California, and he only reluctantly submitted to the standards of academic writing like fact-checking and making sure that your logic holds up. In forty years he has only published a handful of traditional academic publications, most of them before 2001. He wrote The Western Way of War as a busy assistant professor with small children at home, and as he became rich and famous he never went back and revised it.
I have asked some colleagues and will update this post if we can guess which statistics about Athens being at war two years in three Hanson had read. Roel Konijnendijk has found the claim that Classical Athens was at war almost two years out of three in Yvon Garlan’s La Guerre dans l’Antiquité (Editions Fernand Nathan: Paris, 1972). For more discussion see Bret Devereaux’s original post.
Edit 2026-01-26: the exact passage is the first page of the main text of Garlan’s book(page 3 of the French edition):
Athènes, par example, durant le siècle et demi qui va des guerres médiques (490 et 480-479) à la bataille de Chéronée (338), guerroya en moyenne plus de deux ans sur trois, sans jamais jouir de la paix pendant dix ans de suite.
That Athens was at war more than two years out of three is not quite the same statement as either of the passages in WWoW, but its close enough for a busy writer writing a book without footnotes or endnotes in the days before Google Books and the ability to submit interlibrary loan requests at 11 pm from your home office.
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(scheduled 17 January 2026, updated and posted 18 January 2026)
It is possible that he helped suppress the Samian revolt in 440 but the single late source is not clear that his trip to Samos was a military expedition: Daniel W. Graham, “Socrates on Samos,” The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 58, No. 1 (May, 2008), pp. 308-313 ↩︎Land Battles in 5th Century BC Greece: A History and Analysis of 173 Engagements and Greek and Macedonian Land Battles of the 4th Century B.C.: A History and Analysis of 187 Engagements both from McFarland. These are not academic books either but Ray worked to source his claims in ancient evidence. ↩︎
#ancient #bonusPost #DariusMosaic #earlyGreekWarfare #hopliteWars #methodology #SocratesTheHoplite
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