An additional democratic element was the Assembly of Spartiates—left unmentioned by Rahe, perhaps because it was not very democratic. This resembles the Homeric assembly, in which the crowd of warriors was presented with a proposal, to which it might give or deny assent by shouting. Thucydides describes the assembly in which the Spartans decided on war with Athens. He records two speeches—a long intricate one by the elderly King Archidamus, arguing for a delay until the Spartans could prepare adequately for such an undertaking, and a real stem-winder by the ephor Sthenelaidas. To ensure that he obtained the majority, he altered the usual procedure of shouting by having those in favor of war move to one side. Thus, anybody thinking of moving to the peace side would know that his fellows would brand him a milquetoast. The war hawks won by a big margin. (So much for Rahe’s belief in the wise and moderate stewardship of the old in Sparta.) The incident reveals, too, the arbitrary power of an ephor who could change a long-standing practice the instant it suited him.

Kings had limited powers, but were sacral figures who reigned for life. Ephors might resemble tyrants, but were elected annually. Elders ruled through their prestige and the deference Spartans paid to the old, their tenure truncated only by death. Rahe finds in the checks and balances of this triad a powerful barrier to stasis; it removes any reason for discord between the few and many. The rights of private property and inheritance are upheld without creating any deep antagonism.

Is it as simple as that? There are good reasons for the widespread impression, in antiquity as well as modernity, that Sparta was in fact an oligarchy. Xenophon, for one, relates that when Lycurgus was formulating the laws for Sparta, he took care to get the assent of the kratistoi, the most powerful and wealthiest men in the city. “These same figures,” he writes, “collaborated in establishing the power of the ephorate. . . . For the more power the office had, the more they thought it would cow the citizens into submission.”

So Xenophon, an eyewitness of Spartan practices and ways, did not think Sparta particularly democratic. What’s more, Herodotus and Thucydides both attest to the primacy of powerful families; the former mentions influential clans by name. Herodotus tells the story of angry Spartans casting two Persian heralds, who had demanded tokens of submission, into a well. Even then, international norms existed in mythical garb, protecting heralds from harm. It was enforced by the “anger of Talthybius, the herald of Agamemnon,” though what form this wrath took is never made clear. After holding numerous assemblies, the Spartans issued a proclamation to ascertain whether any Lacedaemonian was prepared to die in order to appease Talthybius. Two wealthy, aristocratic Spartiates volunteered to travel to Persia. The assemblies were window dressing: the suicide mission resulted from an agreement between families. Thucydides relates that the Spartan authorities were eager to reach an accommodation with Athens to recover the men captured on the island off Pylos, “especially the Spartiates who belonged to the first families and were accordingly related to leading men in Sparta.” It’s common knowledge that Sparta supported oligarchic regimes around the Aegean, just as Athens did democracies. Behind the façade of the mixed regime, at any rate, prominent families exerted decisive influence, as they did in Athens.

RAHE’S MOST ambitious claim is that Sparta had a grand strategy, or, to put it more precisely, two strategies. In The Spartan Regime, Rahe shows how Sparta, through a combination of conquest and alliances, became the hegemonic power of the Peloponnese, stalemating its Argive rival while suppressing the Arcadians. The second strategy served to defeat the Persian invaders in 480 and 470 BC in alliance with the Athenians. Rahe is superb as a military historian. His description of the conquest of the Peloponnese, for example, is fascinating. But how much of what Rahe attributes to design was the outcome of ad hoc decisions? And how exactly was the Spartan regime’s nature reflected in its strategy?

In The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, Rahe usefully refutes received opinion when it comes to Sparta, but it is difficult not to wonder when Sparta’s grand strategy will in fact make an appearance. Was it the quickly abandoned attempt to block the Persian juggernaut in the northern Vale of Tempe? Another candidate might be the attempt to block Xerxes’s forces at the narrow pass of Thermopylae, but the Spartans, of course, did not send the larger force they had promised. While the glorious sacrifice of the three hundred might have been a morale booster for the Greeks—though there is no evidence that it was—strategically it made little sense. Another contender might be the beautiful wall that Herodotus has the Peloponnesians building at the Isthmus of Corinth. But as Herodotus points out, the Persian fleet would easily have outflanked it; in any event, no wall could have stood up to an army the size of Persia’s. Anyway, the Athenians defeated the Persian fleet at Salamis. The strategy, to lure the Persians into the narrow straits where the quality and number of their fleet would actually be a liability, came from the fertile mind of the Athenian Themistocles. As for the Battle of Plataea, in the following year, the truly decisive encounter—for the Persians had to be defeated on land—there the Spartan hoplites under Pausanias certainly proved their mettle. But from Herodotus’s account it is next to impossible to know whether strategic considerations played a part or not. It would appear that the Persians lost because they committed more errors than the Greeks. In his epilogue Rahe maintains that, following the conflict, the Spartans fashioned a strategy of retreating from the war in order to defend their bastion in the Peloponnese. This marks a return to the prewar doctrine of maintaining supremacy in their own neighborhood once the foreign threat had been banished—a strategy, yes, but surely not a grand one. Perhaps Rahe will have more to say about this in the further two volumes on Sparta that he has promised.

The grand strategy that strikes the eye in Rahe’s study is not Greek, but, rather, Persian. This emerges as Rahe skillfully delineates the religious dimensions of Darius’s drive to extend the boundaries of the Persian Empire. “With Darius’ accession we are witnessing in the Near East the triumph of a distinctive strain of Zoroastrianism, which was militant and thoroughly politicized.” Might we be experiencing something similar today in the West?

Gunther Heilbrunn is a retired classicist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.