This volume offers nine essays that explore Athenian conceptions of Sparta in the fifth and fourth centuries bce and the ways in which those conceptions in turn shaped how Athenians thought about and presented themselves. One of the hallmarks – and most significant contributions – of much of the recent scholarship on Sparta is a high degree of sophistication in dealing with the complicated source criticism issues involved in interpreting the extant textual evidence. In so far as many more of the texts in question were written in Athens than in Sparta, a firm grasp of how the lens of the Athenian imaginary refracted the realities of Sparta is an essential precondition for using Athenian texts to study Sparta. Moreover, Sparta was a looming presence that preoccupied Athenians for decades, and so examination of Athenian responses to Sparta also sheds important light on Athens itself. The significance of Athenian conceptions of Sparta for understanding both Athens and Sparta means that the subject matter, which has been explored in-depth before (see e.g. A. Powell and S. Hodkinson, The Shadow of Sparta [1994]; reviewed in CR 45), continues to reward careful study.
Suitably enough, the first essay, P. Debnar's ‘Sparta in Pericles’ Funeral Oration’, focuses on arguably the single most famous Athenian meditation on Sparta. Debnar argues that, whereas previous analyses of the Funeral Oration have seen contrast as the dominant motif in Pericles’ evaluation of Sparta and Athens as reported by Thucydides, there is also a strong element of appropriation. For Thucydides’ Pericles, Athens is superior to Sparta in part because the Athenians possess in equal or greater measure strengths for which the Spartans were renowned as well as praiseworthy traits that the Spartans lack. Hence Pericles’ assertion of Athenian superiority carries within it a (perhaps grudging) admiration for Sparta along a number of different axes and a corresponding need for Athenians to find in themselves traits that were closely associated with Spartans.
In ‘Athens, Sparta, and the τέχνη of Deliberation’, E. Millender considers the role of speech in Herodotus’ and Thucydides’ characterisation of Athens and Sparta. Millender sees in both authors a tendency to portray Sparta as hostile to ἰσηγορία and παρρησία, both internally and in its dealings with its allies. Herodotus suggests that aversion to open deliberation had negative consequences for those seeking aid from the Spartans, whereas Thucydides articulates a contrast between Spartans who lack interest or skill in speech and Athenians who deftly combine λόγος and ἔργον. Millender thus concludes that Athenians found in Spartan speech habits a means of validating both their democratic constitution, which privileged ἰσηγορία and παρρησία, and their relationship with their allies, with whom Athenians were ostensibly at least willing to engage in meaningful dialogue, to the benefit of everyone involved.
The third essay, ‘Athens as New Sparta? Lakonism and the Athenian Revolution of 404/3 bc’, by A. Powell, picks up an argument made independently by P. Krentz and D. Whitehead in the 1980s to the effect that many of the political changes instituted by the Thirty in 404/3 bce were conscious imitations of Sparta. Although that argument met with considerable scepticism from P. Cartledge and R. Osborne, Powell seeks to reinforce Krentz and Whitehead's views by arguing that Pericles’ Funeral Oration reveals widespread admiration of Sparta among the Athenian populace, that the defeat in the Peloponnesian War had undercut Athenians’ faith in their socio-political system while vindicating the Spartan politeia, that major reforms to the Athenian political system in 404/3 could only have come with the approval of Spartan authorities and that there was a perceived need in Athens to placate the Spartans.
The next essay, M. Scott's ‘Viewing Sparta through Athenian Engagement with Art and Architecture’, is something of an outlier in that, unlike the other essays in the volume, it does not rely primarily on text to explore Athenian conceptions of Sparta. Scott sees Athenian conceptions of Sparta as evolving over time with concomitant variation in art and architecture and focuses on three structures: the Parthenon, the Stoa Poikile and the tomb of the Spartans in the Kerameikos. Scott begins by pointing to the surprising absence of the Parthenon in the Funeral Oration. He suggests that, since Athenians drew a contrast between the Spartans’ reliance on deception and τέχνη and their own natural, unaffected strength and in so far as elaborate art and architecture inherently involved τέχνη, the Parthenon and other structures inevitably and problematically highlighted the role of τέχνη in Athenian life and hence were not something to be mentioned in the Funeral Oration. With the onset of the Peloponnesian War, Athenian attitudes towards Sparta became much more uniformly hostile than before, a shift that Scott sees as reflected in changes made to the decoration of the Stoa Poikile in the 420s that barbarised and feminised the Spartans. Scott finishes by looking at the tomb the Spartans built in the Kerameikos for their soldiers who died in fighting in Athens in 403. The tomb, originally a humiliating reflection of Spartan dominance over Athens, became not only a convenient reference as soon as the rule of the Thirty ended and Athenians sought to portray the Thirty as an aberration imposed by the Spartans, but also a sign of Athenians’ enduring capacity to triumph over their foes.
E. Hall's ‘Euripides, Sparta, and the Self-Definition of Athens’ examines the portrayal of Sparta in ten of Euripides’ plays and in so doing notes the need to be sensitive to moments when Euripides uses established Athenian stereotypes of Sparta, such as the empowered Spartan women, for dramatic purposes that verge on absurdist comedy. A lengthy section of analysis is dedicated to the Trojan Women, which, Hall argues, has been consistently misinterpreted as Euripides’ protest against Athenian imperial policy and especially against the Athenians’ treatment of the Melians in 416/15 bce. Hall traces the persistence of that misinterpretation to the lasting influence of Gilbert Murray and instead argues that in the play blame for the piteous sufferings of Hecuba and the other Trojan women is squarely laid on the Spartans and their aggressive and immoral behaviour.
In ‘Sparta and Spartans in Old Comedy’ R.M. Rosen explores why Aristophanes, although perfectly willing to make Spartans the object of mockery, does not portray them as people who should be detested and in fact occasionally casts them in distinctly sympathetic light. Rosen argues that Aristophanes’ treatment of Spartans in his plays was driven by the conventions of Old Comedy, with its predilection for absurdist fantasy; the difficulty of making comedy out of the painful realities of aggression, enmity and war; and a sense of shared Greek identity.
In ‘Imagined Superpowers: Isocrates’ Opposition of Athens and Sparta’ C. Atack argues that Isocrates repeatedly draws a contrast between Athens and Sparta in which the former is portrayed as superior to the latter. Given Athens’ relative weakness compared to Sparta for much of his lifetime, Isocrates based his claims of Athens’ superiority less on historical events than on mythical stories, especially that pertaining to the succour extended to the Heraclids in Athens. Isocrates also made use of his ruminations on Sparta to cast aspersions on Athenian Lakonophiles and their idealised views of the Spartan politeia and to champion his own approach to education over that pursued at the Platonic Academy.
F.-G. Herrmann, in ‘Spartan Echoes in Plato's Republic’, argues that previous scholarship has underestimated the severity of Plato's critique of Sparta. He makes the case that the Sparta of the Republic is characterised as being just as flawed as any other polis founded on improper principles and hence no better than Athenian democracy. Herrmann suggests that the prominence of Sparta in the Republic is a function of the importance of Sparta in contemporary discourses on ideal politeiai rather than a reflection of a conditional approval of the Spartan system on Plato's part.
In the final essay, ‘Aristotle's Critique of Spartan Imperialism’, M. Schofield argues that in order to understand fully Aristotle's strongly negative views of the Spartan politeia it is necessary to place more emphasis on his discussion of war, conquest and domination found in Books 7–8 of the Politics than on the discussion of the Spartan politeia in Book 2. The former makes it clear that the fatal flaw in the Spartan socio-political system was an overriding focus on war, conquest and domination and the resources thereby made available, with the results that the Spartan state could rule only despotically and therefore badly and that Spartans individually lacked the full complement of virtues necessary to live well and nobly.
The quality of analysis in the volume, which is clearly aimed at a specialist audience, is consistently high. It is noteworthy that the authors (presumably with assistance from the two editors, both eminent scholars who have written numerous, highly influential books and articles on Sparta) escape almost entirely the pitfall of, as Debnar puts it (p. 2), finding a Spartan lurking behind every clause.
Perhaps the only complaint one might lodge is that the volume does not quite live up to its title. Whereas Athenian conceptions of Sparta are explored in depth throughout the volume, consideration of how those conceptions shaped Athenian self-definitions is intermittent and in general less thorough and convincing. As a collection, the essays offer a complex and convincing picture of how Athenian views of Sparta varied over the course of time (in part in response to Sparta's changing fortunes) while also showing that, at any given moment, multiple, competing views of Sparta were circulating in Athens. What may come somewhat as a surprise is that there was (at least at some points in time) considerable admiration of and sympathy for Sparta among the Athenian populace as a whole, while Athenian elites held highly divergent, strongly contested conceptions of Sparta.
There can be no doubt that Athenians’ understandings of Sparta affected their understandings of themselves and that the questions and issues involved are potentially fruitful subjects for research and merit careful examination. However, the variation in Athenian views of Sparta and the inherent complexity and multivalence of identity taken together present formidable interpretative challenges that are not confronted as fully or successfully as they might have been. That is surely in large part a result of the difficulties involved in moving from the relatively firm terrain of the sources’ statements about Sparta to the thornier task of drawing causal connections between those statements and Athenian identity. If the editors and contributors did not fulfil the entirety of their quite ambitious agenda, they are nonetheless to be congratulated for this volume, which represents a significant contribution to the corpus of scholarship on Athens and Sparta.
