In the third volume of his ongoing history of classical Sparta's grand strategy, Paul A. Rahe gives us a thought-provoking counterpoint to many of the trends in classical scholarship of the last several decades.
In describing the build-up to and first thirteen years of what we normally call the Peloponnesian War (renamed here from the Spartan perspective), Rahe seeks to reorient our understanding of this conflict. It is for Rahe the war of Athenian aggression, waged with a strategy of degrading their enemies’ will to fight, in addition to their means to do so (70–74), with the goal of destroying Sparta's way of life (99). In this reassessment, Rahe is committed to treating our primary source on the war, Thucydides, as completely accurate and trustworthy, to the extent possible (50; cf. 350n31). This commitment guides much of the book, and provides an important contrast with the all-too-common scholarly treatment of Thucydides as an unreliable source in need of correction.
Rahe frames his project as an “invitation to reenvisage Greek history from a Spartan perspective” (xiv), but the book also provides a general history of the war from all perspectives in faithfully following Thucydides's account. In stressing Sparta's distinctive “civic ethos” (5) and “way of life” (279), Rahe is not limiting our perspective but seeking to broaden it by emphasizing the importance of domestic politics and local culture to strategic calculations. No strategy is complete that does not understand the basis of an enemy's will to fight in addition to their means to do so (xv).
Grand strategy, for Rahe, is best discovered by a close analysis of key “statesmen,” who understand the value of such a “broad perspective” (xiv–xvi). Rahe believes that a better understanding of leaders’ intentions can help explain “the consistency and coherence of these polities’ conduct” (xvi), even though such leaders may not always be present and countries may fail to recognize their own interests or act in accordance with their grand strategy most of the time. The Athenians in particular are criticized for their consistent “strategic incomprehension” when they lack visionary statesmen to lead them (290). Rahe judges their failures by the standard of what an intelligent leader with a grand strategic vision would have done if he were present (168, 181, 229). Grand strategy is not, for Rahe, a way of explaining what happened, so much as a way of explaining what should have happened.
Key to Rahe's approach is his belief that grand strategists may never express their true strategies, but that we can derive them nonetheless from the logic of their actions. For example, Pericles's real strategy was not his openly stated one of attrition and strategic restraint. Instead, Rahe believes that Pericles (70, 229, 236), Alcibiades (267), and Thucydides himself (68) shared the strategic vision of Themistocles from decades earlier: that the Spartans could be defeated in the Peloponnese if isolated from their regional allies (101) and attacked decisively with speed and strength, permanently destroying them as a threat (100). Pericles's series of relatively minor military engagements before his death should be understood as “calculated with an eye to enraging the Corinthians,” crushing their morale, and breaking them off from Sparta in preparation for a decisive land invasion (70). This is an intriguing reading of a period of the war that on first inspection may seem like a series of trivial engagements. Looking to the possibility that a strategy is primarily directed towards affecting morale, over and against purely military or material outcomes, provides a fascinating, if difficult, standard by which to judge leaders and their actions.
Rahe's interpretation of Pericles as a strategist who is paving the way for decisive land engagement with Sparta may seem to run directly counter to Thucydides's assessment: Thucydides praises Pericles precisely for his strategy of avoiding risk, and Pericles explicitly commits to a strategy of avoiding a land war with the Peloponnesians. Rahe insists, however, that his Themistoclean understanding of Pericles's strategy is not in tension with Thucydides, but rather emerges from a close reading of Thucydides's text. The reason that it is not explicit anywhere in Thucydides, Rahe argues, is that Pericles could not publicly divulge a strategy of divisive diplomacy oriented towards long-term domination (79), and he therefore engaged in dissimulation in his speeches (87). Thucydides himself was silent on Pericles's true intentions because he “saw himself as a political scientist . . . and as an educator of use to prospective statesmen,” whose method of teaching was to provoke thought in his readers rather than spoon-feed them answers (54; cf. 272). However, Rahe combines his provocative reading of an eloquently silent Thucydides with an acknowledgment that the text is unfinished, and he appeals to the likelihood of intended revisions to resolve problems in Thucydides's account (172, 237). The combination of these interpretive commitments is ambitious, yet Rahe executes it with aplomb.
Despite covering familiar events and figures, Rahe develops a number of fresh readings. Among these, the Corinthian-Corcyrean conflict, which precipitated the broader conflict and is easily read as the result of “mere pique” (306n34), is convincingly reassessed as a reasonably preemptive response to the Athenian threat based on the lessons learned through Athens's military success in the previous war (46–47, 55–56). Perhaps most intriguingly, the battle of Mantineia, which is generally taken to have had little lasting significance, in that it did not alter the balance of power meaningfully, is powerfully argued to have been a turning point in the conflict by solidifying Sparta's control of the Peloponnese and effectively ending Athens's chance at complete victory (293). Each of the arguments is compelling and supported by a clear line of reasoning. Readers are likely to be persuaded by Rahe's strategic insights. Whether one can conclusively assign such insights to Thucydides, as Rahe does, is perhaps beside the point for a reader interested in better understanding what was at stake in the campaigns and battles that Rahe recreates for us.
Rahe displays an admirable commitment to alerting his readers to controversies in the scholarship and the reasons why he takes his positions. He judiciously reserves these observations for the copious notes, which show an easy familiarity with a wide range of scholarship. Unfortunately, this volume's use of endnotes and lack of bibliography might frustrate the specialist; conversely, Rahe's frequent use of transliterated but untranslated Greek may daunt the general reader. But this book should nonetheless have wide appeal. It deserves a place on the shelf of anyone curious either about this war in particular or the causes of war at any time or place.
