Soc (2016) 53:657–661 DOI 10.1007/s12115-016-0079-4

REVIEW ESSAY

Classical Regimes at War: Spartan Republicanism vs. Athenian Democracy Bernard J. Dobski 1

Published online: 26 October 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Paul A. Rahe, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge. Yale University, 2015, 424pp, $38.00, ISBN: 978-0300116427 Debra Hamel, The Battle of Arginusae: Victory at Sea and its Tragic Aftermath in the Final Years of the Peloponnesian War. Johns Hopkins, 2015, 152pp, $19.95, ISBN: 9781421416816 BWar is the father of all things.^ - Heraclitus BWar is a violent teacher.^ - Thucydides Two recent books on ancient Greeks confirm the judgments of Heraclitus and Thucydides about the perennially disclosive power of war, even as they refine and expand our understanding of what the Greek experience with warfare has to teach us. The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge is the second book by Paul Rahe in a projected trilogy on classical Sparta (its companion volume, The Spartan Regime, was released this fall). Rahe offers a narrative retelling of the political, diplomatic, economic, religious, and military affairs that issued in the massive, if ultimately disastrous, Persian invasions of Greece in 490 and 480 BCE. But Rahe, who is the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage and professor of history at Hillsdale College, does more than compile a sweeping and coherent account of the Greco-Persian wars. He seeks to correct the

* Bernard J. Dobski [email protected] 1

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prevailing view of this Bcivilizational clash,^ one that elevates Athens’s role, by telling the story Bas it has never before been described - from the perspective of Lacedaemon, the remarkable city around which the victorious coalition formed^ (xii). In his judgment, Bhad it not been for the Spartans, resistance to the Persian juggernaut would have been nonexistent or ineffective. They and they alone possessed the prestige required for instilling confidence in the Hellenes living in and outside the Peloponnesus. They and they alone could take the lead – and this, in magnificent fashion, they did…^ (xiii). In casting Sparta rather than Athens as the hero of Greek freedom, Rahe restores an older taste for Spartan republicanism, one which predates the modern obsession with democracy. While much slimmer than Rahe’s massive project, Debra Hamel’s The Battle of Arginusae: Victory at Sea and its Tragic Aftermath in the Final Years of the Peloponnesian War attempts a similar revision. An independent scholar and author of numerous books on ancient political, cultural, and military history, Hamel here focuses on a single naval battle, one waged between the Athenians and the Spartans off the coast of Asia Minor in 406 BC, and the subsequent trial and execution by the Athenians of their victorious generals. Though the battle was critically important to Athens’s military fortunes, it is the city’s decision to condemn its generals to death that has tarnished Athenian democracy in the eyes of posterity. Hamel’s careful reading of the classical sources on this battle and its aftermath suggests that while democratic Athens may have condemned and executed the generals in error, it did not do so wantonly, rashly, or (most importantly) illegally. Hamel compels us to reconsider the longstanding view of this particular case, one shared and expounded with great rhetorical effect in the American Federalist Papers – namely, that this example proves democracy to be inherently fickle, its political judgments vulnerable to passion, and its institutions in need of republican correction.

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Both of these works are well-written, thoroughly researched, and effectively speak to the academic specialist and the broader, general audience interested in Hellenic political and military history. Experts and novices alike will benefit from the ample use of maps to illustrate discussions of the ancient battlefield and military tactics, and, in the case of Hamel’s book, appendices for further reading on relevant controversies. Insofar as both books force us to face more squarely the limitations of securing freedom and justice in a democratic society, they deserve to be taken seriously. Even so, their invitation to reconsider the strengths and weaknesses of ancient Athens and Sparta leave the reader wondering if they sufficiently appreciate the distinctive contributions of Athenian democracy to our own political patrimony. Grand Strategy indirectly prompts reevaluation of Athenian democracy by elevating the significance of Sparta’s foreign policy to the cause of Greek freedom. Sparta’s Bgrand strategy^ was dictated by the regime’s republican commitment to civic moderation, law-abidingness, piety, and martial courage - a republicanism made both possible and precarious by its dependence on a slave population (helots) that greatly outnumbered the ruling Spartans. To avoid the foreign threats that such vulnerability tempted, the Spartans decided to conquer their neighbors, turning first to the southern Peloponnese, enslaving the indigenous peoples, and then expanding north. There the strength of their rivals (the Argives especially) forced them to alter course; instead of a northern conquest, the Spartans pursued hegemony by exploiting lapses in Argive leadership and defending the cause of Arcadian autonomy. The result: the formation of a regional alliance dominated by the Spartans, an alliance that constrained the Argives, made the Arcadians dependents, and suppressed their helots. Out of a concern with self-preservation, the Spartans became the masters of the Peloponnese. Rahe concludes that Bthe grand strategy of classical Lacedaemon was brilliantly designed for the purpose it was intended to serve. It had, however, one grave defect. It presupposed that for all practical purposes, under Sparta’s hegemony the Peloponnesus was a world unto itself – which of course it was…at the time the strategy was first formulated^ (28). Thus, when the massive Persian empire finally challenged Spartan preeminence, the Spartans would be forced to adapt an imperial calculus that had long since reached its defensive limits. But it was their regime’s commitment to liberty and self-government and the prestige afforded by their consistent domination of the Peloponnese that allowed them to rally their fellow Hellenes to the cause of Greek freedom. This is the core contention around which the rest of the work unfolds. Rahe’s Prologue restates the conclusions about Sparta’s domestic constitution that he argues for in his forthcoming companion volume. Of the work’s ten chapters, this is, strangely, the only one exclusively devoted to Sparta. The subsequent chapters largely follow a narrative order first laid down by

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Herodotus in the last half of his Histories and thus require an extended engagement with affairs well outside Sparta and the Peloponnese. But Rahe’s account is no slavish imitation. He has fascinating chapters on political and military developments in Asia Minor, the growth of the Achaemenid dynasty in Persia, and the Ionian revolt of 494 BCE, covering events and details that go well beyond what Herodotus offers and which played critical roles in Persia’s conflicts with the Greeks. Rahe’s masterful retelling of this history successfully weaves together narratives from many of the most authoritativeGreek and Persian sources. But because theseaccountsdo not always agree with each other, Rahe must weigh them against one another, sifting through the evidence they employ and testing them against military plausibility, forensic science, and the most recent geographic and archaeological discoveries. In doing so Rahe goes well beyond his primary sources, addressing numerous academic debates on such topics as Greek agriculture, Miltiades’ strategy at Marathon, the size of various Persian forces, naval tactics and armaments ofthefifthcentury,weatherpatternsintheMediterranean,and so on –engaging the relevant scholarship on all of them. Despite the scope of his work, which is a tour de force of historiography, he manages all of this with an impressive economy. While the quality of Rahe’s scholarship is to be praised, his political and interpretive judgments should be questioned. Rahe, for instance, is right to note that Spartan prudence and toughness at Plataea served well the cause of republicanism. But this alone does not defend his larger thesis from critical scrutiny about the contribution of Sparta’s Bgrand strategy^ to the cause of Greek freedom. For instance, Rahe dedicates vast stretches of his book to the Persians, Athenians, and the Greeks of Asia Minor, following closely his ancient sources, whose relative silence on Sparta is dictated by Sparta’s own secrecy - as Rahe himself notes on more than one occasion. But such an outsiders’ view makes for strange reading in a book that claims to be the first to offer a defense of the Spartans from their own perspective. Rahe’s silence regarding the Spartans’ own account of their strategy (the subject of the book) is aggravated by his choice to overlook the contrary judgments of his sources. Consider, for instance, Herodotus’ well-known judgment that it was not the Spartans, but the Athenians who were ultimately responsible for defending freedom for the Greeks: I have now reached a point at which I am compelled to declare an opinion that will cause offense to many people, but which nevertheless appears to me to be true, so I shall not restrain myself. If the Athenians had evacuated their land in terror of the danger approaching them, or if they had not left their land but remained and surrendered themselves to Xerxes, no one at all would have tried to oppose the King at sea. And if no one had then opposed

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Xerxes at sea, this is what would have happened on land. The Peloponnesians, even if they had covered over their isthmus with walls, would have been abandoned by their allies, who, seeing their cities conquered one by one by the barbarian fleet, would have been forced to submit against their will. Finally, those thus deserted, now all alone, would have performed great feats and died honorably… So anyone who said that the Athenians proved to be the saviors of Hellas would not have strayed from the truth. For whichever course they chose to follow was certain to tip the scales of war. They chose that Hellas should survive in freedom;. . .they stood fast and had the courage to confront the invader of their land. (VII.139.1–6) Rahe never contests this judgment because he never even addresses it. Given the importance of Herodotus to his project and the equanimity that Rahe displays towards scholars of all stripes and views, his omission here is baffling. Even when he does explicitly attend to his source material, he fails to detect ample evidence (supplied by Herodotus and others) that points to a more critical judgment of Spartan foreign policy and the peculiar brand of republicanism that spawned it. In the Histories, for example, Herodotus’ treatment of the Spartan stand at Thermopylae, traditionally taken to celebrate the courage for which the Spartans were renowned, leaves more than a little room for doubt. To honor their courage, Herodotus claims to have committed to memory the names of the 300 Spartans who fell there. But by naming only seven of them, three of whom distinguished themselves by their failure to fight, Herodotus indirectly calls into question the value of such glory. This Bhonor^ is further diminished by the fact that he names an almost equal number of Persians. Similarly, while Herodotus seems to praise the Spartans for fighting without regard for their own lives (VII.223.4), the Spartans later criticize Aristodemus, one of the disgraced survivors of Thermopylae, for ending his life the exact same way at Plataea (IX.71.4). As for the Spartan decision to sacrifice their lives (and the lives of their many allies present), what Herodotus tells us about Artemisium - a sea battle fought simultaneously with Thermopylae whose narrative parallels the former - is more than enough to question the wisdom of Leonidas’ strategy. The Athenian decision not to stand stubbornly against the full might of the Persian King, but to withdraw from their polis to the island of Salamis saved the Greek navy and made it possible for them to lure the vast Persian navy into narrow straits, offsetting their numerical superiority. The subsequent destruction or capture of hundreds of Persian ships destroyed the logistical support for Xerxes’ massive army and ensured his return to Persia. The same result cannot be said of the glory-loving Bsacrifice^ made by the Spartans at Thermopylae. But if the wisdom and honor of the Spartan stand were (at best) questionable, one might still be tempted

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to praise them for showing up to fight at a time when so many others Greeks refused to do so. Yet, as Herodotus’ narrative makes clear, the Spartan stand itself only occurred due to the cunning of the Spartan Queen Gorgo and the foresight of an exiled traitor, the erstwhile Spartan king Demaratus. For manly and honor-loving Sparta, these are two of the most unconventional Spartan heroes one could imagine. One could multiply these observations with examples from Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and Plutarch. But if so many of Rahe’s sources invite us to question the Spartans’ reputation for virtue, then why does Rahe seek to award Sparta a prominence that our classical authorities do not? Rahe frequently likens the Persian invasion of Greece to a Bcrusade,^ Bholy war,^ and Bjihad^ – analogies rooted in his treatment of the religious beliefs supporting the Achaemenid dynasty. The universal imperial imperatives of Darius and his successors were supported by a Bdistinctive strain of Zoroastrianism, which was militant and thoroughly politicized^ (69), one based on a strict theological dualism anticipating the Muslim division between the House of Submission and the House of War. In Rahe’s retelling of the story, the Persian invasion of Greece becomes a classical version of our own struggle with radical Islamic terrorism. By highlighting such close parallels to our situation, one cannot help but wonder if Rahe’s elevation of Sparta stems from his own contemporary political commitments. Does he privilege Sparta because he thinks our democracy needs her republican Bvirtues^ to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda and preserve the cause of liberty in the West? Is Rahe dissatisfied with the ability of Western democracy to respond to the existential threats posed by Islamic terror and hope to offer as an alternative the morally austere, less democratic Spartan Brepublic^? If such speculations are warranted – and speculations they must remain - then the responsible reader will want to keep in mind not only that Athenian daring and foresight were crucial for the Greek victory over Persia, but that the virtues of the Spartan regime required rigid censorship, a severe moral code, the acquisition and brutal suppression of great numbers of slaves, culturally stunting xenophobia, total dedication to war, and a commitment to law and to piety that frequently defied common sense. Debra Hamel supplies a useful alternative to the thrust of Rahe’s book insofar as she seeks to defend Athenian democracy from its critics. Hamel’s subject is the single battle of Arginusae, the largest sea battle of the Peloponnesian war and a pivotal moment for the Athenians. With their once proud navy severely depleted and citizen rolls decimated by the catastrophic losses of the Sicilian campaign some seven years earlier, a defeat at Arginusae likely would have meant the end of the war for them. Hamel argues that the Athenian trial and execution of six of its ten generals (two were not at the battle, two refused to return to Athens to stand trial) may have been in error and may even have been unjust, but it was not the

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product of a feckless mob carried away by passions that distorted the judgment of the Assembly and recklessly disregarded well-established legal custom. In other words, the Athenians did not execute their victorious generals because they were lawless, or insufficiently republican. The Battle of Arginusae differs from Rahe’s book in another respect as well. Though attentive to scholarly debates, her book’s clear and brief treatments of Spartan and Athenian politics and fifth-century naval technology make it especially well-suited for undergraduate students inexperienced in the political and military history of the Greeks. To understand why the Athenians would execute the generals who orchestrated such an important victory, Hamel follows her opening chapter on fifth-century Greek politics by discussing the dangerous (and dirty) life on an Athenian trireme, the tactics such ships employed (the diekplous and periplous), the challenges of building and manning 150 vessels (with nearly 200 people on board a trireme, the Athenians needed some 30,000 sailors at Arginusae), the brilliant strategy the Athenians used, and the reported storm that prevented the generals from collecting their sailors, both wounded and dead, from the water. Her last two chapters detail the Athenians’ response to this pyrrhic victory and the long sometimes circuitous - procedural path that led the Athenians to the generals’ conviction and execution. Among the many insightful details included in this work, readers will benefit from Hamel’s careful attention to a naval strategy that used the spacing of the Arginusae islands to lengthen the Athenian line of battle, protect their flanks, and prevent enemy ships from attacking them from the rear. This plan made it possible for a rebuilt fleet - manned by inexperienced hoplites, cavalrymen, and (mostly) metics and slaves to inflict enormous damage on a more experienced, if numerically inferior, navy commanded by Spartan admirals. They will also be fascinated by her treatment of the burdensome efforts necessary to collect from choppy seas the thousands of sailors stranded in the water, and then later their corpses, to cremate them and ship their remains back to Athens. Such mundane details are simply not in ancient accounts of the battle and its aftermath. Attention to this kind of detail helps flesh out the picture surrounding this controversy and makes it harder to support the demos’ critical view of their generals here. How then are we to understand Hamel’s view that this incident Bshould not be viewed as a devastating indictment of Athens’ democracy^ (93)? Hamel’s Bdefense^ of Athenian democracy spells out the efforts, made over months, by both the Athenian Assembly and Council to formulate and level formal charges against the generals, and the counter-steps taken by the generals, their captains, and their various defenders to rebut the charges and prevent their trial. Following the accounts of Xenophon and Diodoros Siculus, Hamel shows that the Athenian Assembly not only had the constitutional authority to try and

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convict the generals as they did, but that they arrived at their decision through vigorous debate and attention to longstanding legal custom. Hamel is careful to note that while Athenian passions were aroused (and perhaps deliberately so) during this process, such passions did not lead the Athenians to perform an illegal act. Thus, of the Athenian Assembly she concludes, it Bwas their prerogative to decide the matter of the generals without reference to precedent, and to shout down those who, like Euryptolemus, attempted to thwart that process by appealing to technicalities^ (84). By noting that the Athenians were primarily angered by the failure of the generals to recover from their wrecks those men who had survived the battle, Hamel rightly stresses that the controversy concerned politics more than piety (with respect to burial customs). What she fails to examine sufficiently is why the Athenians were so sensitive to the loss of these sailors that they should execute their victorious generals. After all, the city had endured heavy losses before, but usually suffered in defeat. At Arginusae, the generals had given the Athenians a much needed victory. Nor, as Hamel shows, did the generals or their captains display a callous disregard for their obligation to their dead and wounded; had there been no storm, the rescue operation would have saved thousands. Moreover, the effort by a few citizens to prevent the execution of the generals en masse was reasonable and humane, and within the boundary of legal custom. Why then should the demos react so angrily to such loss and to any such obstacles to its will? While Athens had been a democracy since the overthrow of the Pesistratid tyranny in 508 BCE, the years following the Sicilian campaign witnessed repeated challenges to the democratic regime of the Athenians. Upon hearing of their massive defeat in Sicily in 413, the Athenians empowered a board of select elders to review the Assembly’s decisions, effectively placing the regime on a more conservative footing. Then, in 411, with the Spartan fortification of Decelea, the Athenians voted, in effect, to transform the century-old rule of the Athenian demos into the oligarchic rule of BFour Hundred^ citizens. The oppressive measures of this oligarchy led to popular discontent and paved the way for the more inclusive, mixed regime of BFive Thousand^ in 410, culminating soon after in the full restoration of the democracy. But the return to democratic rule proved precarious. The Athenians still had not entirely recovered from the loss of men in Sicily, losses which had, in previous few years, emboldened their oligarchic rivals to successfully alter the regime. Hamel notes that the shortage of manpower within the citizen body even as late as 406 required the city to entice thousands of non-citizens (metics and slaves) to serve in its fleet with the promise of political rights. When viewed in light of recent threats to democracy, the extension of the franchise to noncitizens was dictated by more than just military necessity; it was a move required to shore up popular power. And this means that when the generals failed to recover the roughly

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5000 ship-wrecked, yet still living Athenians left afloat in the cold waters off Arginusae, they were allowing a crucial new pillar of the city’s democratic strength to sink to the bottom of the Aegean. Is it unreasonable for the demos to suspect that anti-democratic sentiment might have influenced the generals’ decision to abort the rescue operations? Wouldn’t a public accounting of these officers by the Assembly even be patriotic? Hamel briefly notes some of these regime changes near the end of her book but in a very different context and for a different purpose. She doesn’t present them as part of the broader political background required to understand the spiritedness of the Athenian Assembly in this case. Hamel and the reader would be better served by making more effective use of Dustin Gish’s remarkable essay (BDefending Demokratia^, 2012), which she acknowledges only in passing. Gish lays out the various alterations to democratic rule in Athens noted above and argues that they conspired to make the demos exceptionally sensitive to challenges to its rule, even if such challenges were merely technical in nature. While Hamel en-

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tertains doubts about the justice of the demos’ actions, Gish shows that the Athenians’ trial, conviction, and execution of their generals were not only lawful, but motivated by Ban abiding attachment to and spirited defence of the democratic character of the Athenian regime,^ itself more firmly rooted in eros than in thymos. Hamel’s failure to make more use of Gish in her work (or to even acknowledge the many places where his argument preceded hers) does not detract from the overall usefulness of her volume. But it should lead us to question her understanding of the Athenians’ profoundly erotic attachment to democratic freedom, and to seek out other works, like Gish’s, that help us to explore the full scope and character of democratic justice.

Bernard J. Dobski is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Assumption College. He has written on Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Xenophon and Thucydides. He is currently writing a book on Thucydides’ historiography.