A history of battle from the age of Homer through the decline of the Roman empire, this work surveys a millennium of warfare to discover how militaries change, and fail to change, and how an army's greatness depends on the way it exploits the past.[...]
For ten years in the late fifth century BC, the dueling city-states of Athens and Sparta fought the first bloody chapter of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict that turned the Golden Age of Greece to iron. Somber, authoritarian Sparta, with its mighty infantry, was the elderly, respected master of G[...]