Sparta’s Third Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 413-404 B.C.
By Paul A. Rahe.
Encounter Books, 2024.
Hardcover, 640 pages, $41.99.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Folks.
In Sparta’s Third Attic War, Paul H. Rahe continues his multi-volume history of fifth-century Sparta and cements his place as one of the foremost, if not the foremost, specialists in the field. Rahe’s scholarship is formidable and, at times, may seem daunting to readers accustomed to a less conscientious approach. Rahe devotes some six hundred pages to the final decades of the Peloponnesian War, the same number of pages that Thucydides devoted to the entire war. Every element of the third Attic war is covered in detail; even seemingly insignificant events are explored and, at times, shown to have had a crucial impact on the outcome. Combined with his five previous volumes focusing on Sparta’s role in the Peloponnesian war, Sparta’s Third Attic War must be viewed as a major contribution to the literature.
In addition to his six-volume history of the Attic wars, Rahe is also author of the Republics Ancient and Modern series and of numerous other books on topics stretching from ancient Greece to American politics and history. Throughout much of what he has written there lies a coherent warning for democracies: the world is full of antagonists, many of them tyrannical, and those who prize democracy need to be informed and remain on guard. The accidents and policy failures that befell Athens over a period of nearly thirty years are thoroughly discussed in Rahe’s account and the author does not hesitate to assign blame where it is deserved. By the end of Sparta’s Third Attic War, the culmination of Professor Rahe’s long period of research into the subject, one’s understanding of the fragility of civilization and the brutality of war is suitably increased.
Rahe’s interest in antagonists to democracy has stretched over at least sixty years, a period that coincides with the aftermath of World War II, the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, the fall of communism, the rise of Islamic jihad, and the Reagan and Trump presidencies. One cannot fail to see the influence of these contemporary events on Rahe’s research into the ancient Greek world, and indeed the parallels are many. Just as in the fifth century B.C., democracies today are under pressure from militaristic dictatorships. As in the Peloponnesian War, alliances have frequently shifted, and support for war on both sides has waxed and waned. As in the past, devastating mistakes have been made placing democracies at risk, and apathetic populations have undermined their resolve.
Above all, Sparta’s Third Attic War relies, as it should, on Thucydides’s account of the Attic wars. The History of the Peloponnesian War is, of course, the most detailed and reliable contemporary account of events covered in Rahe’s book, and, as one would expect, Rahe quotes from it extensively and relies on it at a great many points. At times, Rahe appears to be writing a commentary on Thucydides, as well he might, given the power and immediacy of the Greek historian’s account of events, though not without frequent reliance on Xenophon and other historians.
At one point Rahe notes that Thucydides’s history is far more than an account of events: “It is also an extended philosophical meditation on war and on peace as such.” Much the same could be said for Rahe’s scholarship, which is far more than a narrow tracing of events: Sparta’s Third Attic War and its predecessors are philosophical meditations on such weighty issues as the rise and fall of civilizations and the fundamental motives of major players within these civilizations. It would seem that this scholarship is driven by a ceaseless curiosity and a fascination with the forces that lead to political change, and, as Rahe stresses at the beginning, it is domestic conditions that propel change: “in contemplating foreign affairs and in thinking about diplomacy, intelligence, military strength, and that strength’s economic foundations, one must always acknowledge the primacy of domestic policy.” Certainly, it was domestic weakness, some of it rooted in disastrous policy decisions but some beyond the control of human actors, that led to the gradual weakening of Athens’s defenses and its ultimate fall to the Spartan alliance.
Time and again, Rahe seeks to ground his observations in what he knows to be true and enduring about human nature. Thus his understanding of the failing morale of the Athenians is based on the unchanging truth that government is founded for and must secure “the protection of life and livelihood” lest its population grow restive. Athens’s failure to defend its farming population—indeed, its willingness to sacrifice the interests of that population entirely to its enemies—led to bitterness and demoralization among the large landowners who grew unwilling to defend democracy in Athens. There are countless other examples of greed and vainglory, all of them contributing to the city’s weakness vis-à-vis the Spartans. Of course, the Spartans themselves were hardly immune from the foibles of human nature, and their indecisiveness and self-interested refusal to act in a decisive manner and as a collective power caused the war to continue well beyond what might have been. Among the worst failings on both sides was the tendency during long periods of peace to neglect military defenses that ought to have been maintained, but this failing, too, can be traced to a universal tendency of human nature: the sort of complacency that infects all human affairs and makes it impossible for all but the most gifted leaders to rouse the public to action.
Among the many refreshing aspects of Rahe’s history is the author’s stubborn refusal to inject modern ideology into the account of the past, a past that by modern standards might well be judged racist, sexist, class-bound, and the like. It is a fool’s errand to attempt to twist past attitudes, whether those of some 2,500 years ago or merely a century or two in the case of America, to the latest fashion in academic ideology. Rahe is gifted in his determination to write of the past on its own terms, and in doing so he delves more deeply into that past than any number of others who have been distracted by their obsessions with ideology. Rahe’s histories carry us into the true nature of human beings, not the fancied accounts of modern liberal theorists. The ancient world was unstable, corrupt, and often brutal, but so too has been our own, as anyone who looks unflinchingly at events of the past one hundred years. The rise of modern fascism and communism brought about unprecedented levels of violent death, torture, starvation, and oppression in comparison with which ancient wars were conducted on a lesser scale. Those today who find that woke injustices deserve our highest degree of attention have either not read and considered the past or have chosen to ignore it.
Fortunately, we have historians such as Paul A. Rahe who treat past events with the seriousness they deserve and who treat them on their own terms, not by the counterfeit standards of critical theory and other academic fashions. In Sparta’s Third Attic War Rahe has arrived at the climax of ancient Greek history, and he does justice to this pivotal time with his painstaking consideration of nearly all that is known of that era. Presumably the last of Rahe’s books on the Attic wars, Sparta’s Third Attic War is a deserving culmination to this historian’s long and faithful devotion to the truth of this history. Sparta’s Third Attic War is a remarkable book in several respects, not least among them in the author’s ability to reconstruct a world not so much different from our own but one known to us largely through fragmentary and often unreliable evidence. Rahe’s latest book is a worthy contribution to scholarship and to our understanding of our own relationship to these extraordinary events of the ancient Greek world. Beyond that, it is an intriguing contemplation of civilizational decline and of the consequences of defeat on the one side and short-lived victory on the other. In sum, Sparta’s Third Attic War is the product of a lifetime of dedication to the highest standards of scholarship, and it deserves to be celebrated as one of the finest books on the subject.
In the end, the Spartan victory in 404 B.C. was short-lived. Difficult relations with Persia, which had underwritten Sparta in the war, unrest among Athens’s former allies in the Aegean, and other issues soon arose that would undermine Sparta’s dominant position. “In any case,” Rahe writes, “no one supposed that perpetual peace was in the offing and that history had come to an end. Such delusions are peculiar to the age in which we now live.” This is an apt summation, and again a reflection of the author’s depth of learning and wise understanding of the history of war, ancient and modern.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
