This estimable but not easily accessible publication adds to the growing swell of Sparta-related research volumes that have been enhancing the ancient Greek historical field since Anton Powell’s beautifully judged two-volume Wiley-Blackwell A Companion to Sparta (Hoboken 2017–2018). It has been very well edited by two notable Poland-based Spartan scholars. For each chapter there are both bibliographies and a Polish summary, and for the collection as a whole there are – a great boon – indexes both locorum and nominum et rerum.
Space constraints prevents anything more than a listing of the topics of most of the 13 essays: the famed or notorious ‘black broth’, μέλας ζωμός (Maciej Kokoszko); was the transition from Xenophon’s fight for the cheeses to the Hellenistic-Roman contest of endurance a revolution or an evolution? (Jacek Rzepka); Laconian female hunting hounds (Sebastian Rajewicz); intergenerational interactions (Magdalena Myszkowska-Kaszuba); marriage and the family as seen from the viewpoint of wives, mothers, grandmothers and daughters (Anna M. Kruszyńska); Amyklai: rituals, traditions and the origins of the Spartan state (Mait Kõiv); Brasidas, Perdiccas II and Chalcidian poleis in the Thracian campaign of 424–423 BC (Alexander A. Sinitsyn); Agesilaus’ cavalry tactics at Narthacion and Coroneia (394 BC) (Marek Jan Olbrycht); and the Battle of Naxos and Sparta’s Aegean naval campaign of 376 BC (Wojciech Duszyński). Averitable salmagundi or gallimaufry.
That leaves just the four essays singled out for rather more detailed discussion, the guiding theme of three of which is the absolutely fundamental and indispensable first task of all serious Spartan ancient historiography, that of counterposing the proposed myth with the supposed reality. Aleksander Wolicki’s ‘Women and sport in classical Sparta – myth and reality’ tackles a theme already very well handled by Thomas Scanlon in Eros in Greek Athletics (Oxford 2002). But he does so from a different angle, by entering the snake pit of the ongoing debate between those historians who seek to minimize Spartan ‘exceptionalism’ and those who seek to give it credence and substance, the issue between the two sides being precisely how to evaluate François Ollier’s ‘Spartan mirage’ (Le mirage spartiate, 2 vols (Paris 1933–1943)). Wolicki, rightly in the view of this reviewer, points the finger at Athenian propaganda (‘all roads lead to Athens’) and believes there is no smoke without fire: Sparta really was seriously different.
Ryszard Kulesza has a powerful track record in Spartan studies extending back at least to 2002; more recently he has published on Spartan gerontocracy (‘The Spartan Gerontocracy?’ Przegląd Humanistyczny 57 (2013), 25–36). In ‘Leonidas. Myth and reality’, he correctly highlights the possibly literally murderous rivalry both between and within the two royal houses in the first quarter of the fifth century. He is even prepared to give some credence to David Harvey’s bold but ultimately unprovable hypothesis that the usually revered Leonidas may have been a regicide. The chapter’s other strong suit is the attention paid to the somewhat neglected topic of the return from Thermopylae to Sparta of what was purported to be the mortal remains of the Agiad king.
In 334, following his opening major victory at the Granikos river, Alexander – not yet Great – had sent back to his ally Athens a suite of 300 hoplite panoplies as a dedication on behalf of himself and the (other) Greeks ‘except the Lacedaemonians’, so Arrian records. Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy was quick to pour ironic scorn on that ‘except the Lacedaemonians’ (‘In 200 B.C.’); Krzysztof Nawotka in his ‘Alexander the Great, Sparta, and Ps.-Callisthenes’ paints a far broader canvas of relations between the Macedonian king and Sparta, even to the extent of giving credence to the tenuous evidence of the much later Alexander Romance (Ps.-Callisthenes) for an otherwise unrecorded defeat of Sparta on Spartan territory by Philip II and – ex hypothesi – Alexander.
I have left to the end the most substantial and original article of them all, Nicholas Sekunda’s ‘Pausanias and the murder of the Helots (Thuc. 4.80.3–4)’. So key is this passage of Thucydides, a historian who admitted himself baffled and irritated by ‘the secrecy of the state (or constitution)’, τό κρυπτόν τῆς πολιτείας (5.68.2), to our modern understanding of what really made ancient Sparta the way it was that it has been fiercely controverted in respect of its very authenticity and historicity. Did the Spartans really ever carry out such a brutally duplicitous massacre of so many (some 2,000) Helots, and in such a way that no one (apart from the perpetrators) knew how ‘each one of them’ (a chilling phrase fastened upon by Pierre Vidal-Naquet in his Assassins of Memory (New York 1992), from a holocaust- eliminationist perspective) had been killed? And (not a unique Thucydidean problem, this) how should the possibly ambiguous phrase about ‘security’ be translated or read: was it Thucydides’ claim that the entirety of the Spartan polity’s rationale was security against the Helots? Or was it rather that, so far as the state’s attitude to the Helots went, the prime consideration was security?
These are deep waters, and in a way, Prof. Sekunda was wise to steer clear of them. At any rate, for one such as myself, who finds it impossible to believe Thucydides should have allowed himself to be conned into reporting mere fake news, Iam content to adopt Sekunda’s own problematic: not whether, but when, in what historical context, were the Spartans prompted to adopt this surely extremely cruel and unusual measure. Alert readers will already have inferred from the chapter’s very title that Sekunda does not accept what is probably the most widespread view: ‘some time around 425/4’, that is, in reaction to the Pylos affair, which is the context in which Thucydides himself relates it. Rather, it should be seen as part and parcel of ‘the (Regent) Pausanias affair’ of the 460s. That suggestion is at the very least arguable, and Sekunda argues his case very plausibly.
