Opening paragraphs..............................

The Peloponnesian War is now 2,436 years in the past.  Yet Athens and Sparta are still on our minds and will not go away.  Their permanence seems odd.  After all, ancient Greek warring parties were mere city-states, most of them smaller in population than Dayton, Ohio, or Trenton, New Jersey.  Mainland Greece itself is no larger than Alabama, and in antiquity was bordered by empires like the Persian, which encompassed nearly one million square miles with perhaps 70 million subjects.  Napoleon's army alone had more men under arms by 1800 than the entire male population of all the Greek city-states combined.  In our own age, more people died in Rwanda or Cambodia in a few days then were lost in twenty-seven years of civil war in fifth-century B.C. Greece.

-Victor Davis Hanson,  A War Like No Other:  How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War