Tough Guys

...A relatively tiny city-state in the southern Peloponnese saw its population rise beyond its resources...

...Despite the success of his most recent books on strategy and military preparedness, Donald Kagan is still best known for his monumental four-volume history of the Pelopon-nesian War...

...Indeed, an Archidamian War (431-421 b.c...

...Instead, through accident, a trick of fate, or the mythical "Lycurgus," this city-state chose a different and improbable outlet...

...This is particularly so in their deep reverence for philology in an age when postmodernism and deductive theory have undermined much of what is published about the ancient world...

...Only by m simultaneously taking on Sparta, the Peloponnesians, Thebes, Sicily, and Persia did it forfeit its empire...

...As Cartledge demonstrated in a long series of demographic, topographical, and social investigations of the Lacedaemonians, something strange, even awful, transpired in the eighth century b.c...

...A police state, underpopulation, and an endemic paranoia followed—as well as a magnificent hoplite army that finally discovered in the early fifth century that its shock troops, like the similarly frightening Waffen SS, fought outsiders every bit as well as internal enemies...

...Judicious reading of Greek texts leads to certain "facts" whose reliability can be checked—and argued about—through common sense and comparison with inscriptions, archaeological evidence, and coins, all leading to a coherent idea of what likely happened in the past...

...Monarchy was not uncommon in Thessaly...

...the rule of the few pitted against democracy...

...Still, while these two are perhaps the best known ancient Greek historians now at work, they could not be less alike in outlook and method—differences that transcend Cartledge's Oxbridge orientation and Kagan's long sojourn at Yale...

...It makes no sense for Athenians to recall Alcibi-ades after turning over 20,000 men to his command—unless one remembers how obnoxious, electrifying, and downright successful he could be, and the inevitable wages of envy that followed him...

...Yet Hitler, Tojo, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden could have all learned from a careful reading of Thucydides that democracies such as Athens, when aroused, make war like no other societies...

...It was the Spartan king Leonidas and his royal guard "The Three Hundred" who perished holding the pass at Thermopylae, spearheading a last stand that gave the Greeks to the south a few precious days to regroup at Salamis...

...Constant surveillance and control of the helot population left Spartan citizens (the "Similars") little time for anything but military preparation...

...The helots—"the single most important human fact about ancient Sparta," as Cartledge notes—tilled Messenia and Laconia for their outnumbered overlords, who in turn needed to be freed from farm work simply to patrol them...

...he freed the helots and put an end to this odious subjugation of other Greeks...

...While much of the complexity of the original scholarship is by needs lost in this condensed version—especially missed are discussions of the views of the great German historians Busolt, Beloch, and Meyer—Kagan's main theses remain unchanged and wear well: Men, not inanimate forces, caused the war...

...I have a suspicion that many in Washington who have led us so well in these last two perilous years were more acquainted with Thucydides, ancient Greece, and the Peloponnesian War than with Marx, Freud, and Foucault...

...No ancient conflict—not Xerxes' massive invasion of Greece, the destruction of the Persian empire by Alexander the Great, or the madcap invasions of Italy by Pyrrhus and Hannibal—is more Manichean than the three decades of intramural fighting between Athens and Sparta...

...They and others wrongly concluded that material wealth and equality inevitably lead to personal license and civic ennui, undermining martial virtue and civic patriotism...

...The fruits of that complex research—illuminating the reality behind the legend—are now presented in a short, well-illustrated review of some seven centuries of Spartan history and the fascination its mystique has held on two millennia of subsequent Western culture...

...Kagan is reverential, but not unquestioning of his chief source, the complex warrior-historian Thucydides...

...For a purported conservative, Kagan is more than fair to the most radical figures on both sides of the conflict—the odious Cleon and Alcibiades of Athens and the brilliant pair of mavericks at Sparta, Brasidas and Lysander...

...led to a failed "Peace" of Nicias (421418) that was followed by a disastrous Sicilian Campaign (415-13), leading on to a final murderous Ionian War fought at sea (413-404...

...It is no surprise, then, that after chronicling the brutality of this apartheid state, the first in the West, Cartledge succumbs to the allure of these strange and cruel patriots—and so ends his book with the exclamatory "Leonidas lives...

...Osama bin Laden's pan-Islamic jihad had about as legitimate a gripe against us as Athens did against Sicily...

...He reveals his own ambivalence about Spartan society, which has lent his earlier books a tragic rather than strident tone...

...Both these condensed and abridged studies of Cartledge and Kagan are the dividends of decades of patient classical scholarship, characteristic of a nineteenth-century tradition of academic rigor coupled with a desire to use such erudition to educate a new generation of English readers...

...Beware of wishes granted...

...In his retelling of the war, the how and why of military practice is often not guided by reason, but rather is captive to emotion, pure and simple...

...Less than ten thousand of its hoplites annexed over one thousand square miles of land surrounding Laconia and then audaciously marched over Mt...

...Sparta, after all, did no better with its own hegemony in the next forty years...

...As he demonstrates, for all their character flaws and occasional brutality, they alone understood that the old way of doing business—the Athenian navy patrolling an Aegean empty of Spartan ships, while the Spartan army tramped around Attica looking for an enemy army who would not come out—was a recipe for attrition, stalemate, and quagmire...

...Athens could have won had it adopted better strategies and sought to fight Sparta rather than the entire Aegean world at once...

...The result was an exhausted culture ripe for harvest by Philip II at Chaeronea (338 b.c...

...It is again the ignorance and timidity of real people who are responsible for breakdowns in the peace—a condition attainable if far-sighted statesmen maintain deterrence and are ready to use military force to thwart aggression in its infancy...

...Kagan presents a seamless chronological narrative of the war drawing on Thucydides, Xenophon, Diodorus, and Plutarch, punctuated by his own lifelong interest in the primacy of politics and these very human emotions like envy, fear, honor, and self-interest that really drive statesmen even as they profess ideals of a higher sort...

...The war ended only when the Athenian fleet was sunk, the empire dismantled, Lysander's Spartan triremes were in the Piraeus and his hoplites on the acropolis...

...Thus there was no longer a question of Athens determining the affairs of Greece outside Attica...

...If these well-recorded fights of the classical Greeks are any guide, we should be reminded that conflict ultimately ends only when one side wins and the other loses—and thus the conditions that brought the two sides to fighting are resolved for good or evil...

...Thirty-four years after the initial volume—The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War—appeared, Kagan has now written a compendium, about a fourth in size of the original work, replete with maps and titled subsections, but without the scholarly notes or discussions of specialized controversies of the earlier books...

...It is to the plight of these strange helots ("those taken") that the classicist Cartledge has chosen to devote most of his life in a series of landmark scholarly studies that finally have given us full appreciation of how Sparta really worked...

...Kagan is an unapologetic military and political historian who seeks to remind us that hardball politics and self-interest are not modern democratic traits, but were at the root of the city-states' often unfathomable foreign policies...

...Traditionally, city-states sent excess people as colonists throughout the Aegean and Italy or turned to freeholding, intensive farming, and the homesteading of once marginal land to get more food...

...A year later the Spartans' "Dorian spear" won the battle of Plataea and sent the Persians fleeing Greece for good...

...Without the bravery of such grim, oily-haired stalwarts in their bizarre red cloaks, Darth Vader-like helmets, and polished breastplates, the Athens of Themisto-cles might well have been stillborn...

...In contrast, Cartledge is a social chronicler who tries to illuminate the more nebulous world of class and status—an almost impossible task given the fragmentary nature of our sources and the predilections and biases of ancient observers...

...The defeat of Athens had a powerful effect on observers from Plato and Xenophon to the German philosophers Hegel and Spengler...

...Sparta ended its days as a curiosity for Roman sightseers (what Cartledge calls "sado-tourists"), who detoured to Laconia to see "real" Spartans of fame and legend, then little more than reservation warriors being whipped to the delight of a bored elite...

...We know little now about Epaminondas the The-ban—Plutarch's life of the great liberator is lost—except that he was the most hated man at Sparta, and elsewhere the "first man of Greece," precisely because in 369 b.c...

...Under the inept leadership of a series of blinkered Spartan kings, the city-states stayed mired in internecine wars for decades...

...or and the checks and balances of its tripartite constitution were the envy of Athenian Utopian philosophers...

...After reading Kagan's account, readers might naturally think of the six Mideast "wars" between 1947 and the present intifada that were punctuated by typically faux-peaces...

...It seems natural to equate a society's cultural worth and influence with its military prowess, but as in the Peloponnesian War, the connection can be misleading...

...Nicias ruins the Athenian armada not because he is all that tactically stupid or strategically ill-informed, but rather because his own instincts for political survival back home and superstitions about a lunar eclipse lead to paralysis of action...

...The deleterious effects of the war are not to be counted in wasted lives and treasure alone, but rather in the end of the very idea of an ascendant democracy as the transforming experience in the lives of thousands outside Athens...

...The Spartan saga itself is inexplicable without careful study of its bizarre class system and especially the serfs around whom so much of the structure was built...

...Hypocrites like Plato and Aristotle thrived in the liberality of a tumultuous Athens even as they praised at a safe distance the order and stability produced by the life of the barracks one hundred and fifty miles to the south...

...and a garrison state championing the cause of Greek autonomy even as a liberal democracy sought to force the unwilling to join its noble experiment in democracy, Athens did not lose, it e self-destructed...

...the rigor of the Dorians contrasted with Ionian elegance...

...With him Sparta does too...

...As in the case of Cartledge's The Spartans, the present volume is designed for a different sort of general reader who enjoys a riveting story and seeks a coherent guide to the general chaos of the present in some abstract and timeless wisdom of the past—however uncomfortable it may be in our present therapeutic age...

...His Ripples of Battle will appear from Doubleday in September...

...indeed Athenians may have owned one hundred thousand of them in Attica...

...Although Cartledge began his career as one sympathetic to the overriding role of class struggle (his Oxford adviser was the brilliant though erratic Marxist ancient historian Geoffrey de Ste...

...The enlightened empire of Athens was replaced by gruff harmosts ("fixers") who had nothing to offer allies, subjects, and neutrals—other than the fact of their past opposition to Athens...

...In either case, the aggressors could not be reasoned with, understood, or bought off—but only defeated...

...a rural hamlet without walls marching against the great stones of Pericles...

...In addition, they also share a kindred public spiritedness in believing that there is still a didactic role for Classics in the modern world—if the message gets out in a manner that is both professional and presented with verve...

...Taygetus and swallowed the even-larger state of Messenia in southwest Peloponnese...

...Some hard-bitten realists still refuse to absorb this lesson of the Peloponnesian War, thus equating consensual government and freedom with spiritual and moral decline...

...But what are we to make of it all when the calculus of serfdom, kings, and privilege somehow computed to personal courage, asceticism, political stability, and hyper-patriotism never quite reached anywhere else in Greece...

...Despite their obvious political differences, Paul Cartledge would appreciate having the public reading Donald Kagan's story of his favorite Spartans at war...

...Cartledge aims his latest survey at the general reader—no footnotes, chapters arranged around famous Spartans from Lycurgus to Agesilaus, none of them requiring mastery of the literary, epigraphical, and archaeological sources...

...We all marvel at the glorious last stand at Thermopylae but sometimes forget that Leonidas' lads were basically a SWAT team whose prime directive and training were to hunt down and assassinate rebellious helots...

...Croix), and Kagan has written a number of broader books that apply a Thucydidean conservatism to contemporary strategic thinking, they are, in fact, birds of a feather...

...inculcated dearth set against pride in surfeit...

...There surely is a large readership eager for accessible books about Greece and Rome and the insights they offer into contemporary problems...

...and by the same token Kagan could only applaud the imagination and erudition of Cartledge's Spartans— men who ended the achievement of his much admired Pericles...

...What are we to make of its rise and fall...

...After twenty-seven years of fighting, the Spartans brought to an end the much-celebrated Athenian fifth century—and with it the majesty and brutality of Pericles' empire...

...The need to occupy and police as many as a quarter-million Laconian and Messenian helots led to an unsolvable paradox of great state power achieved at a price of abject vulnerability...

...Think of the collision: a land versus a maritime power...

...True, other Greeks held chattel slaves...

...While Thucydides often comes across as a determinist—he thought the Peloponnesian War was unavoidable because of the Spartan "fear" of the inevitable growth of Athenian power—Kagan reminds us that the evidence of his own history suggests otherwise...

...Spartan boys underwent years of a brutal military regimen, beginning at age seven, while their fathers declared war annually on an entire subjugated people...

...His contribution is not merely to piece together a coherent story from sources that are incomplete and often at odds, but in addition to explain rationally why Athens did so many supposedly stupid things like trying to annex Boeotia, conquer Sicily, or expand its overseas empire while it was engaged in a war to the death with the greatest army in Greece...

...Much of what we think about Sparta also derives from its mirror image of Athens and the great war that Spartans fought to destroy Athenian interference in the lives of hundreds of autonomous city-states...

...Reading Kagan's account of near endless fighting over three decades reminds us that aggressive states are just as likely to go to war for reasons of honor and pride as they are to fight over economic exploitation, lost homelands, or past social injustices...

...For all his brilliance, Thucydides was after all human, and his history often reveals his prejudices as both a conservative and an aristocrat who was unfairly exiled by the mercurial Athenian assembly...

...These contradictions lead us, as Car-tledge notes, to the unsettling conclusion that Sparta's plethora of unfree and unequal residents may have made her own small cadre of full citizens themselves the most free, equal, and civic-minded of all Greeks...

...As Paul Cartledge shows in his valuable new introductory survey of Spartan culture, for much of the fifth and fourth centuries b.c., Sparta's social rigVictor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University...

...Oligarchy was a Peloponnesian, and not just a Spartan, phenomenon...