The Ancient Greeks won the Cold War.
Parallels were irresistible: the parallels between the rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union and classical Greece’s three great struggles—the triumph over the Persians, the long Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, and the Greeks’ defeat by the drab, muddy Macedonia of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. These were contests of freedom against tyranny, of naval against land power, and of the cheerful confusion of democracy against glum authoritarianism. Some found resonance even in the irony that imperial Athens was governed democratically within its borders but ruled its far-flung subjects with a mix of indifference and panic-driven cruelty. Nor did it hurt that the historian Thucydides could justly be claimed as the progenitor of realism, the leading Cold War theory of international relations.
The quarter-century since the end of the Cold War has found less use for the Greek paradigm. If anyone, it is to the Romans we should now look for clues to America’s international perplexities; but we can’t, for that would be to admit responsibility for the order of the world and to hear in the wind the whisper of the forbidden word “empire.” At the same time the fad for “cultural history”—the mass intellectual history of those too humble or stupid to possess, or act on, actual ideas—sloshed into Classics from history departments.
Until 1990, most Greek historians studied the fifth century b.c., the era of Herodotus and Thucydides, the Persian wars and the Peloponnesian War. Now they visit, instead, the freak show of the sixth century b.c. (weird practices dimly seen woven together with fragments from mad poets: perfect fodder for cultural history); or they settle themselves plumply in the fourth century b.c. From that era, a sheaf of boring Athenian speeches survives, written for law court or popular assembly, which can all too easily entice a scholar discontented with today’s America to formulate his own private theory of democracy. And private his theory is apt to remain.
So to announce a trilogy of books recounting the rise and fall of classical Sparta (this is the first of them, about the Persian wars)—a trilogy to be accompanied by a fourth volume on Spartan ways and institutions—seems the act of a scholar who has been suspended for 35 years in aspic. And such indeed, or close to it, has been the fate of the conservative thinker Paul Rahe. He earned his Ph.D. in ancient history at Yale in the school of the great Donald Kagan, but political philosophy long trapped him, like Odysseus on Calypso’s isle: He toiled over Machiavelli and Montesquieu, as well as his Republics Ancient and Modern—which, at more than 1,200 pages of astonishing erudition, might easily be mistaken for the summa contra mundum with which a scholar closed his career, rather than the book that began it. Paul Rahe, finally returning to Greek history after so many years, has been far too busy to notice that the interests and methods of 1977, when he finished his dissertation, are no longer those of the cool kids at Cambridge and Stanford.
And that is no bad thing. For lo! it turns out that, in Rahe’s hands, the grand narrative of Greek history is a key that still fits the puzzle-box of today’s much-changed world. In recent years, when no historian of Greece was looking, students of the Near East have come to understand the Zoroastrianism of the Achaemenid Persians as a militant and aggressive creed. With justice does Rahe liken Persia’s moves west to a jihad. And Rahe’s Sparta is far more aware of the Persian threat—and aware earlier, and systematic in opposition—than earlier scholars had grasped. In Rahe’s book, for the first time, the badly reported treaties and wars between 520 and 480 b.c. in Greece and the Greek cities across the Aegean actually make sense. Only now, in Rahe, do these events have an explicable pattern: As the Persians strive to increase their power and influence, the Spartans contrive to thwart them.
We think of Sparta as exercising an easy mastery over southern Greece, but the power of a nation—however consistently successful in battle close to home—cannot easily be exerted across even a narrow and island-speckled sea if it refuses to commit its own troops. So the story of Spartan strategy on the eastern coast of the Aegean is one of unsatisfactory alliances, weak coalitions, divided leadership, and repeated betrayal, as cities saw their wisest policy as being the first to defect to the enemy.
There is much here for today’s statesmen to ponder, and The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta is written in a style accessible even to statesmen, to say nothing of the wider public.
As the book marches towards the climactic war between Xerxes and the Greeks (480–479 b.c.), it necessarily becomes a more conventional narrative, a historical story, and can properly be judged on the quality of the storytelling. Rahe is a clear writer, not incapable of the occasional elegant epigram, and he builds up a fine head of suspense. But he faces stern competition: not only from Herodotus, the first teller of these events and a master of prose, but more recently from Peter Green, one of the best pens in Classics today, who took on this tale in a book where hardly a paragraph fails to give pleasure (Xerxes at Salamis, 1970, lightly updated as The Greco-Persian Wars, 1996). And alas, despite his sound prose, Paul Rahe has no ear for poetry, and what with oracles in verse and Aeschylus’ tragedy The Persians as evidence, there is necessarily quite a lot of poetry in any study of the Persian wars.
With elegant concision, Peter Green, himself a poet, borrows an old, handsome translation of the famous epigram of Simonides about the 300 Spartans who fell at Thermopylae:
Rahe, by contrast, makes Simonides sound as if he were paid by the word and desperate to cram in as many as possible:
Peter Green’s book is sadly out of date, so the reader seeking the best historical account of the Persian wars in English should now read Paul Rahe. But that reader will do so with much greater pleasure if he spends five minutes beforehand taping the translations of poetry from Green’s Greco-Persian Wars over those in Rahe’s Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta. With historical acumen and poetic sensibility thus combined, the story becomes a modern masterwork.
