Go tell the Spartans: Two books on the conflicts that embroiled the Greek world

The late Southern writer Florence King once lamented that “a cornerstone of Western thought that has vanished without a trace is admiration for ancient Sparta.” There are good reasons why this should be so. Yet in the three decades since she penned those words, there has been a resurgence of “laconomania” at the popular and academic levels. Both books under consideration here, Andrew Bayliss’s Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower and Adrian Goldsworthy’s Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, are fruit of this renewed interest. While they overlap considerably, it is the divergences between them that make them valuable, especially when read in tandem.

Both concentrate on the period from the last couple of decades of the sixth century BC to the first few of the fourth, what Goldsworthy calls “a long fifth-century BC.” Yet the two authors begin their respective tales several centuries in the past, at the origins of what would become the two greatest powers of classical Greece. For Bayliss, who aims to relate how “Sparta grew from a collection of five villages in a remote corner of southern Greece into a world superpower,” one whose ultimate collapse was as dramatic as its rise, this is something of a problem: We know “frustratingly little” about Sparta prior to 700 BC. Moreover, there are “no contemporary Spartan sources to tell the true story.” Those we have are almost exclusively by outsiders, some written long after the events they describe. The one thing that stands out about the Lacedaemonians, when we finally do get records about them, is “the ruthlessness with which they conquered and enslaved their fellow Greeks” to guarantee themselves “a captive, self-reproducing human workforce.”

Goldsworthy, too, discusses Sparta’s helots and their masters, but doesn’t get to them until over a hundred pages in. He begins at the beginning, with Homer, then follows with chapters on the Cretan and Mycenaean civilizations and the roots of Greek culture and language, the emergence of the Greek city-states, the great lawgivers Solon and Lycurgus, and the advent of the Pisistratid tyranny and its replacement by Athens’s democracy.

From there, Bayliss and Goldsworthy cover nearly identical ground. Many events, battles, and figures appear in both books, which is only natural since both are, in essence, histories of the two great conflicts that embroiled the Greek world at either end of the fifth century BC, the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War.

Despite all they have in common, the books have marked differences in emphasis and approach. Bayliss, who teaches at the University of Birmingham, is narrower and more tightly focused, concerned as he is with only one community. Goldsworthy, a prolific Oxford-trained historian who has written numerous books on classical historical subjects, encompasses more territory, not only geographically but thematically. He has informative chapters or sections on such topics as the organization of hoplite warfare, the evolution of naval combat and the development of the trireme, and the social function of the symposium, the Athenian drinking party immortalized in Plato’s eponymous dialogue. There is nothing comparable in Bayliss’s book to Goldsworthy’s narration of Athens’s cultural efflorescence after the Persian Wars. There couldn’t be. That’s not what Spartans did, they didn’t produce an Aeschylus or build a Parthenon. They were warriors, not poets or playwrights.

Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower; By Andrew Bayliss; W. W. Norton; 384 pp.; $35.00

By the same token, Bayliss provides more detail about various incidents that Goldsworthy only mentions. Goldsworthy, for example, notes that the stranded Spartan contingent at the Battle of Sphacteria received ambiguous instructions to do nothing dishonorable. What this really meant, according to Bayliss, was that they shouldn’t surrender (which they did) but “fight to the death.” Goldsworthy alludes to it several times, but he doesn’t delve, as Bayliss does, into the question of oliganthropy, the precipitous decline of her citizen population that, in his words, left Sparta “like a dying tree, hollowed out and ready to be cut down by enemies at home and abroad.” Goldsworthy slights the issue of Spartan pederasty, while Bayliss addresses it at length. On the other hand, only Goldsworthy recounts Alcibiades’s fate: burned alive by assassins unknown to this day.

The one area where Goldsworthy really falls short is in his conclusion, which is disappointingly desultory. He glosses over the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, the imposition of the Thirty Tyrants on Athens in 404 BC, and the restoration of her democracy by Thrasybulus in 403. He barely touches on the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, by Bayliss’s lights, “the pivotal moment in Spartan history, if not the whole of Classical Greece,” in which a Boeotian army, led by the Theban general Epaminondas, shattered forever Sparta’s military and political power. In the wake of Leuctra, Epaminondas liberated the main helot population center of Messenia, a blow which unraveled “the entire fabric of Spartan life.”

Bayliss, adopting a more popular tone, rarely cites any secondary literature, whereas Goldsworthy routinely does. Goldsworthy also has a more philosophical orientation, which is one of the most refreshing aspects of his book. He repudiates as “sterile” the contemporary view that Athens wasn’t a true democracy because she denied rights to women. He also affirms the quite old-fashioned (though entirely correct) view that “at its heart the study of history is the study of human beings,” and that our ability to understand the past stems from the fact that people back then “were not fundamentally different from us.”

For all that we think of Athens when we think of classical Greece, Goldsworthy reiterates that it was the Spartans, with their unmatched reputation for military prowess, who were regarded as the preeminent power by their fellow Hellenes. Sparta, Bayliss observes, “was universally recognised as having led the Greeks to victory” over the Persians. Having fashioned the most powerful navy in the Greek world, and an empire to go with it following Persia’s defeat, the Athenians wanted not just to be treated as Sparta’s equal but regarded as such. Hence, in Goldsworthy’s estimation, the Peloponnesian War was due to the “particularly Greek desire to excel, and be seen to excel.”

Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece; By Adrian Goldsworthy; Basic Books; 640 pp.; $40.00

Read together, the two books leave no doubt that Sparta and Athens were “polar opposites in culture and ideology,” as Goldsworthy puts it. Sparta was a closed aristocracy erected atop a massive populace of state-owned slaves who performed all labor as the (ever-shrinking) group of citizens had no pursuit but war. There was no trade, no culture, no art. Athens, on the other hand, was a democracy, free and open. Her citizens had more to do than just prepare for war and go to war.

Sparta won that conflict, but today anyone can visit the Parthenon and many other Athenian sites. Sparta is merely a name, her physical presence buried in dirt and dust millennia ago. “It was probably best for the future of the world that the Spartans overreached themselves,” Bayliss concludes. They cared only for their own freedom, which often meant little more than “the freedom to treat anyone they thought beneath them as they pleased.”

Goldsworthy is no less critical of Athens when necessary. He decries as “pointless savagery” the forced suicide of Socrates and condemns as perhaps Athenian democracy’s “darkest hour” the execution of its generals (including Pericles’s son) for their failure after Athens’s surprise victory in the naval Battle of Arginusae in 406 BC to recover survivors because of a storm, leading many of them to drown. Both these episodes were surely on Publius’s mind when he made his jibe in Federalist 63 about the Athenians’ tendency to decree to the same citizens hemlock one day and statues the next.

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Sparta, Bayliss notes, has risen again in modern popular culture, but it’s just as well that admiration for a society in which the families of the fallen reacted with glee to the news of their loved ones’ demise, while those of survivors skulked around like outcasts, will never be more than a niche infatuation. Athens may have lost the war to Sparta, but she won the future.

“Classical Greece,” states Goldsworthy near the beginning of his book, “has had a profound influence on the history and culture of the Western world, and two cities and one era stand at the heart of this.” Anyone wishing to learn more about those two cities and that era will find in Bayliss and Goldsworthy as congenial a pair of guides as one could hope for.

Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on X @varadmehta.