This work serves as a companion volume to R.’s previous book, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: the Persian Challenge (2015), which highlights the role of Sparta in formulating and executing a strategy to defeat Persia. The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta includes a prologue in which R., drawing on an analytical approach that he traces back to authors such as Plato and Xenophon, argues that different types of politeiai encode specific moral imperatives. Those moral imperatives play a fundamental role in shaping domestic policy, which in turn has a profound impact on foreign policy. Hence, for R., it is impossible to understand Spartan foreign policy without considering the moral imperatives embedded in the Spartan politeia. As a result, the prologue to The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta discusses, in brief compass, the nature of the Spartan politeia and the relationship between that politeia and Spartan military strategy. In The Spartan Regime R. explores those same issues, but in much greater depth.
After a brief introduction, R. begins with a prologue that treats the interpretative challenges involved in dealing with the ancient textual sources for Sparta. Much of the scholarship on Sparta produced in the past three decades (particularly the volumes generated by the International Sparta Seminar under the leadership of S. Hodkinson and A. Powell) has centred around the application of sophisticated source criticism to deal with distortions introduced by what F. Ollier called le mirage spartiate. Over the course of time a consensus has emerged that a tendency to idealise Sparta, already evident in the fifth century bc, became stronger in the fourth century and that the propaganda generated to support the reform programmes of Agis IV and Cleomenes III in the third century was accepted as reliable information about the realities of early Sparta by many later authors, including, most notably, Plutarch.
The prologue to The Spartan Regime leaves no doubt that R. is aware of the aforementioned consensus and that he is not persuaded by it. He argues instead that ancient authors had access to significant amounts of accurate information about Archaic and Classical Sparta and that their accounts, though perhaps not reliable in every detail, are on the whole trustworthy. Particularly noteworthy is R.’s willingness to rely on Plutarch, whom R. takes to have shown ‘discernment and caution’ (p. 6) in discussing the origins and nature of the Spartan politeia. This faith in Plutarch is based in large measure on the idea that Plutarch made thorough use of the Aristotelian Lakedaimonion Politeia.
In Chapter 1 R. makes the case that ‘giving absolute primacy to the common good’ was the overriding moral imperative embedded in the Spartan politeia (p. 7). The importance of that moral imperative among Spartiates is attributed to the existence and fear of enemies, both internal and external. R. discusses a range of practices and institutions that reinforced dedication to the common good, including a mandatory educational programme, regular participation in choral dancing, iterated recitations of poetry praising devotion to the community and daily participation in a syssition. In a marked departure from recent scholarship, R. believes that for much of the Archaic and Classical periods every Spartiate received an allotment of public land. (The relevant sources and their interpretation are discussed in detail by R. in an appendix.)
In Chapter 2 R. turns his attention to the Spartan government, which he sees as the first known example of a political system provided with an elaborate system of checks and balances. That system created restraint necessitated by the existence of powerful magistrates such as the two kings and passionate disagreements over how to best pursue the common good.
R. then moves on to consider, in Chapters 3 and 4, the origins and development of the Spartan politeia in the tenth to the sixth centuries bc and of what he sees as a grand strategy that Spartiates gradually developed for the defence of their territory. One of the ironies of the sources for Spartan history is that the most detailed accounts of its earliest periods are found in some of the latest relevant texts, particularly Plutarch and Pausanias. Whereas most other scholars currently working on Sparta are dubious about the use of Roman-era texts as sources for the early history of Sparta, R. makes thorough and enthusiastic use of those texts to construct a highly detailed narrative that provides a precise chronology of events.
In a brief conclusion, R. argues that the grand strategy of the Spartan state went back to the eighth century, if not earlier, at which point in time Spartiates were dedicated to conquest and subjugation. Change came in the mid-sixth century with a defeat at Tegea and the ascendancy of the ephor Chilon. After that time, Sparta's grand strategy relied on a web of alliances that ensured support in the event of a helot revolt, minimised the number of enemies in the Peloponnese and isolated those enemies that remained.
The starting point for any assessment of this volume must be the recognition that R. brings to his work on Sparta both an encyclopedic knowledge of the relevant ancient sources and a relatively uncritical approach to their interpretation. As a result, the book reads more like the scholarship on Sparta produced in the 1960s and 1970s than that published since the 1990s. That is in no small part due to the fact that, as R. notes in his acknowledgments, ‘This book … has been a long time in gestation’. The first two chapters (which, in longer form, first appeared in 1994, as part of R.’s Republics Ancient and Modern) draw directly on the Ph.D. dissertation that R. completed in 1977. R.’s views on the origins of the Spartan politeia were first developed in a tutorial paper that R. wrote during his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the early 1970s (pp. 195–6).
The volume is thus, as R. is unapologetically aware, out of synch in some fundamental ways with most current scholarship on Sparta. That gives R.’s work value in that it presents a narrative of Spartan history that is, in effect, because of its atypical methodology, strongly revisionist. Although R.’s narrative is largely based on the textual sources, he effectively employs G. Pikoulas's research to explore how topography created constraints and possibilities in the Spartiates' dealings with their neighbours, and he makes sparing but judicious use of the results of W. Cavanagh's Laconia survey. In addition, R.’s insistence on the importance of a holistic approach (p. xv) offers a refreshing contrast to much recent scholarship, which has tended to eschew large-scale synthesis in favour of detailed studies of smaller topics.
That said, R.’s reading of the sources frequently feels, at least to this reviewer, excessively credulous. For instance, R.’s willingness to believe that there was a complete and accurate list of Spartan ephors that began in 754 (p. 100) runs contrary to everything we know about registers of magistrates in the Archaic period. The absence of sophisticated source criticism has the unfortunate effect of vitiating much of R.’s analysis and historical narrative. To give but one example, R. echoes Plutarch in presenting the Spartiates as sharing a largely untroubled homonoia (pp. 7–35), whereas the accounts of Herodotus, Xenophon and Aristotle, among others, offer glimpses of strong and enduring tensions.
There is, in addition, some difficulty in identifying the intended audience. The volume is not a typical scholarly monograph in that many issues, such as the effect of hoplite warfare on the Spartan politeia, are treated in ways that presume the reader has no prior knowledge of the subject. On the other hand, R., depending on one's perspective, either bathes or drowns the reader in sometimes quite arcane detail, and some names and issues appear without any framing. It is not, therefore, obvious that the work would appeal to undergraduate students or a general audience.
Thus, this book defies straightforward characterisation. It is an interesting work that includes intermittent flashes of real insight about the nature and operation of the Spartan politeia as well as substantial flaws that primarily flow from R.’s conscious credulity in dealing with the ancient textual sources. The volume is, in the final analysis, like ancient Sparta itself, something of an enigma.
