The Policy of Sparta

Extract

In two papers published within the last year, one in the Classical Quarterly of October, 1911, and the other in the last number of this Journal, Mr. Dickins has put forward certain views with regard to the main lines of the policy of Sparta in the latter half of the sixth and in the fifth century B.C.

Inasmuch as his two articles aim at refuting certain views put forward by myself and others in this Journal and elsewhere, I should like to reply to his arguments.

In the first place Mr. Dickins, who has had and has used special opportunities for acquiring information with regard to the antiquities of Sparta, adduces a large number of new facts. For this part of his work every student of Greek History must be grateful to him. It is in the conclusions which he draws from the new evidence, and the scant courtesy with which he treats some of the old, that the main defects of his arguments lie. He uses some of the evidence of Herodotus, and ignores the rest. That of Thucydides he treats in the same way. As for that of Aristotle, he appears to regard it as wholly misleading, with regard to both Sparta in early times and Sparta in the fifth century. It seems to me that it is not unreasonable to assume that Aristotle in the fourth century before Christ had access to better evidence in support of his statements with regard to the Spartan state of the fifth century than we in the twentieth century after Christ either possess or are ever likely to possess.