With Sparta’s Third Attic War, Hillsdale history professor Paul Rahe delivers the sixth volume in his epic series on The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta. The project is perhaps more accurately characterized as a history of great power politics in the Greek-speaking world during the 5th century B.C., from the Persian Wars of the 490s and ’80s to the final defeat of the Athenians at Spartan hands. It is a tour de force of historical scholarship, standing alone as an integrated and continuous account of this period based on an impressive mastery of the vast secondary literature it has generated over the years in a variety of languages. This includes detailed topographical information and archeological evidence not always covered in studies of this kind. Also, and not least, Rahe’s narrative stands out for its meticulous and fair-minded attention to the Persian side of the story.

Achaemenid Persia has attracted growing interest from ancient historians in recent years, for reasons not altogether praiseworthy. The glories of Greece and Rome no longer excite the contemporary imagination as they once did, and it is increasingly common to see their histories subsumed in larger categories such as “ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern studies.” The hostility to all things “Western” expressed by many of today’s academics can hardly have failed to affect their treatment of that defining moment in world history when “the West” (in the form of an underdog coalition of Greek city-states) decisively defeated “the East” (in the form of the massive invading armies of imperial Persia). The idea that the Greeks might represent something particularly valuable in the grand sweep of human history, worthy of special study by the men of today (and not only those of European descent), has come to seem implausible or downright chauvinistic and racist.

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Having said all this, it must also be admitted that the Persian factor has been elided to some extent in the standard picture most of us have of this formative period in the history of the Western world. More than that, we still tend to be influenced by the ancient Greeks’ own conviction of their superiority to the hereditary Persian foe. For the Greeks, all non-Greek speakers were by definition “barbarians.” The fact is, however, that the Persians were distinctly more civilized than most other peoples known to the Greeks of this era (Egyptians and Phoenicians would have been the main exceptions). This is especially the case by comparison with the succession of imperial powers that had preceded them in the Near East, which routinely imposed their rule by brute force and terror. Greeks and Persians lived in close proximity in the coastal regions of Anatolia. Even where the reach of their empire extended, Persian rule was exercised with a relatively light hand. Early on, the Persians came to appreciate the unique value of Greek heavy-armed (“hoplite”) infantry, and freely employed them as mercenaries in their own armies. But most importantly, Persia must be considered an integral part of what analysts today would call the international system of the Greek world in the 5th (and 4th) centuries.

To the extent that classical Greece is taken account of by contemporary theorists of international relations, it is in relation to the struggle between Athens and Sparta related by Rahe in Sparta’s Second Attic War (2020). This is the period so compellingly memorialized by the one-time Athenian general and historian for the ages, Thucydides. Inevitably, it has been seen as a prototype of the so-called bipolar international system known to us from the Cold War, with Athens standing in for American liberal democracy and Sparta for the authoritarian Soviet Union. Yet this first phase of what has come to be known as the “Peloponnesian War” was not exactly a template for what would follow. During the so-called “Peace of Nicias,” the Spartan alliance system largely disintegrated, while the Athenians created an altogether new theater of combat by invading Sicily. Rahe devotes a separate volume to this period, Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War (2023)—an entirely novel attempt to view Athens’ famous strategic disaster from the Spartan perspective. In the final phase (413-404 B.C., only part of which is covered by Thucydides’ narrative), the scene of the conflict shifted to the Anatolian littoral and Persia reemerged as an essential geostrategic player. During these years, the triangular diplomacy between Sparta, Athens, and the Persian Empire took on an importance rivaling actual military encounters. At a certain point, then, the “bipolar” model extrapolated from Thucydides becomes actively misleading.

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Without directly engaging these contemporary academic constructs, Rahe makes it clear that he is approaching this (as indeed he would any) period of history from quite a different theoretical perspective. Like Thucydides himself, Rahe sees international competitors not as interchangeable rational actors, but rather as distinct peoples informed by their own domestic ideals and concerns. His approach to understanding Sparta’s “grand strategy” is thus rooted in a careful analysis of Sparta’s peculiar history and its unique political culture or, in the terms derived from the classic political analysis of Plato and Aristotle, its “regime.” Rahe shows how the idiosyncrasies of the Spartan regime made it a great power—but also endowed it with crippling flaws.

Two things most distinguished the Spartans from other Greek cities, and they were closely interrelated. First, Sparta was a slave society. Its economy depended on the labor of a subjugated people—the so-called “helots” of Messenia—who significantly outnumbered native citizens. Second, free Spartans were disciplined into a regimented fighting force, constantly trained for war and severely restricted in their possession of material goods. The helots—unlike other Greek slave populations, a cohesive ethnic group with live memories of their ancient freedoms—chafed under Spartan rule and frequently revolted. This was well understood and engendered a characteristic conservatism in Spartan foreign policy. Rahe calls particular attention to an event from before the war that does not seem sufficiently appreciated. In 465, a severe earthquake in the southern Peloponnese was attended by a serious helot uprising, resulting in the deaths of many thousands of military-age Spartiates. The city never recovered from this disaster, which only reinforced its reluctance to commit military forces abroad in later years.

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Also integral to Rahe’s notion of grand strategy is his insistence on the significance not only of military engagements but of the other instruments of statecraft familiar to modern readers, especially diplomacy and economics. In the last decade of the war, he rightly underscores the shift in Sparta’s strategy from a military to an economic emphasis, focusing on the interdiction of vital Athenian grain imports departing the Black Sea through the choke points of the Bosporus and Dardanelles. This change was coupled with a functional if troubled Spartan-Persian alliance, which allowed the Spartans to finance a fleet that could finally—and fatally—challenge Athens’ mastery of the seas.

One of the most interesting aspects of this stage in the Peloponnesian War, perhaps even more neglected by modern readers accustomed to thinking in terms of unitary nation-states, is the role of individual political and military leaders. On the Persian side, two powerful “satraps” (the word in fact is of Persian origin), Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, frequently conducted their own diplomatic and military relations with the Greek powers. In the case of Athens, Alcibiades, the notorious strategic entrepreneur, sustained transactional relations with all three players, including his own side. In the case of Sparta, the behavior of lone actors reveals a potentially fatal weakness in the regime. Spartan commanders operating abroad tended to succumb to the temptations of wealth and power such as they could never enjoy at home, leading them to break loose from Spartan discipline. This was most notably the trajectory of the talented and dangerous Lysander. Though he does full justice to these various rogue individuals, Rahe could perhaps make more of the question they would appear to raise concerning the limits of regime analysis. It calls to mind an enigmatic passage from Aristotle’s Politics, in which the philosopher seems to say that should one man of exceeding virtue emerge in a polity of relative equals, the only just thing would be to make him king.

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Following the downfall of the Athenian empire in 404, the now Spartan-dominated Greek world soon inserted itself into Persian affairs. Lysander developed a personal relationship with Cyrus the Younger, a Persian prince who enlisted a large mercenary force of Spartans and other Greeks in his failed effort to usurp the throne. Less than a century on, the Greeks (now led by another dangerous individual) would make another attempt at the same intervention. The resulting destruction of Persian power by Alexander the Great would ensure once and for all the hegemony of Greco-Roman culture throughout the Mediterranean world. In one of history’s many ironies, however, this greatest of Greek commanders would also sound the death knell of freedom for the classical Greek cities.