ATHENS AND SPARTA

Arms and the men.

Athens and Sparta were two of the many city-states that emerged in the seventh through the fifth centuries B.C.E., in the Greek peninsula. Historians have long seen them as the chalk and cheese of ancient polities: Athens, with its participatory democracy, its flourishing public theater, and its maritime ambitions; Sparta, with its hierarchical militarism, its strong men, and its cultivation of the body. Historian and novelist Goldsworthy (Caesar, 2006; Augustus, 2014; Rome and Persia, 2023) presents a far more subtle version of Greek history beyond these simple dualisms. He begins with the beginning, with Crete and Mycenae, with palace powers and then, with Homeric memories of war and heroism. What did it mean to be Greek in the ancient world? How did a group of disparate communities, sharing a language but differing in dialects and social customs, shape what we think of, now, as Greek identity? Rather than making a case primarily on essentials—something about the “Greek Way” or the imagined soul of a people—Goldsworthy writes a history of relations. What made Athens and Sparta were the wars with Persia. The Spartan suicidal defiance at the Battle of Thermopylae or the Athenian defeat of the Persian fleet were defining moments. And then, they fought among themselves. The last third of the book retells the Peloponnesian Wars, with sharply etched portraits of great leaders, such as Pericles and Phormio. There are moments when we may as well be reading of our own time as theirs: “Frightened people can readily turn to savagery.” This may well be the motto for this history—that for all the arts of Athens or the spears of Sparta, fear can wreck society far more than arms.

A propulsive, large-scale history of ancient Greece, written with an authority to rival Thucydides.