School of War - Ep 91: Paul Rahe on Sparta’s Grand Strategy

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Paul Rahe, Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, and author of Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 418-413 BC, joins the show to talk about proxy wars, the strategy of Sparta, and the role of regimes in the shaping of foreign policy. ▪️ Times      •    01:37 Introduction      •    06:43 Donald Kagan     •    08:32 The Spartan point of view     •   11:59 Why change the perspective?     •    17:30 Sparta’s goals     •    24:59 Why does Sparta matter?      •    31:56 “Putin’s completely irrational”     •   33:56 Is Realism dangerous?     •    39:17 Why do the Athenians go to Sicily?     •    44:35 Alcibiades     •    47:06 Could the Athenians have won?     •    49:11 The significance of victory Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Back to ancient history today, but to themes that are 100% relevant, how did Sparta's history and its unique way of life and governance shape its foreign policy and its grand strategy with respect to Persia and especially Athens? What are proxy wars and how do they work? What is the role of individual statesmen in the conduct of war? And in what ways do they matter? What ways are they slaves to circumstance? Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale.

We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Paul Ray, who is Professor of History, the Hillsdale College. He's also the Charles O. Lee and Louise Kaylee Chair in the Western Heritage there. He is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he is the author of many books, recently a series on Spartan Grand Strategy. the most recent volume of which out now is Sparta's Sicilian proxy war, the grand strategy of classical Sparta 418 to 413 BC.

Paul, thank you so much for joining the show. Oh, it's a pleasure. So I want to start by just noting for the record that you have, for the acknowledgments to your books, the series of books on Sparta, by far the most interesting and engaging acknowledgments of any author, I think we've spoken to on School of War. You open with the observation that you started looking into these matters, you know, studying under Don Kagan and as an undergraduate. And then it moves on to Alan Bloom and we keep going.

And eventually you're thinking, Patty Furmer leaps off the page. I mean, it's really kind of an incredible series of, you know, of mentors and teachers and encounters that you cite. Can I ask, how does the Patty Furmer connection come about? There's a nation historian named Peter Green, still alive in his 90s maybe approaching a, And he was a novelist at one stage. He lived in Greece. And I was explaining my interest in Sparta. And I was persuaded that there must have been in the mountains of Messinia, kind of ongoing low-level resistance, runaways. And there's a literature on this, on bandits and so forth. Old Marxist named Eric Hobbesbaum wrote about it. I mentioned this to Peter Green, and he said, oh, you must me, Patty Lee Furmer. He was underground in Crete during World War II, captured the German commander, and so forth. So a couple of years later, I was in Greece traveling through Laconia and Messenia and going into the more obscure parts, just so that I knew the lay of the land.

And I came to Cartamilay, which is one of the towns that Agamememnon. and on tries to give two Achilles if you'll take the girl back. And it's it's down, it's an, along a spur of Mount Taegotos that extends into the Mediterranean. There's sort of three prongs at the bottom of the Peloponnesus, and this is a central prong. Anyway, I'm in the town, and so I try to reach Petty Lee Fermer who lives there. And I discover that he's in England. And I leave a message. I send a postcard or something.

go away and I come back. And when I come back, I call up from the local post office in those days. That's where you went for a phone. And he says, oh, come to lunch. Well, the lunch lasted something like six hours. It was mostly liquid. And by the end of the lunch, Petty was worried that I would not be capable of walking back to the village, which was about a thousand yards. Now, I was not, and they offered me a bed, but just crash. I was not in such bad shape, but we just hit it off. And when I published a book called Republic's Ancient and Modern in 1992, which was my first book, 1,200 pages, huge thing, Patty wrote the first review for the English Spectator as sort of

Christmas books and he did two or three paragraphs on it. That's wonderful. And he was always a sort of encourager of the kinds of things that I was doing. So it was a wonderful friendship. I saw him last in 2006. I was a visiting fellow at All Seoul or had been until the week before at All Souls at Oxford. And I was on my way to the American Academy in Berlin. And there was a gap. So I went to Greece. And Patty was in his 90s then. He died the year after. And he was finishing, putting, well, he was editing the last volume in his trilogy about walking across Europe in 1932 and 1933. Well, that's, we should say for listeners who may not understand our shared enthusiasm and

your amazing experiences with Patty Furmer, but he's, he's famous for many things, one of which are these books chronicling his, his wander across, or I guess an interwar Europe as a young man after he's, is he expelled from school or something like that, kicks it off. Yes. Yeah. And then for an involvement with the local grocer's daughter. Right. Which he plays down somewhat in the books.

I think it was a little more. Patty was a great seducer. And then the Creighton episode where he recaptures the German general, this is made into a Dirk Bogart movie, right? It's a Powell Pressburger movie, Illmet by Moonlight. And there's a, he's played by Dirk Bogart. Right. And he was an advisor on the movie.

It's based on a book called Illmet by Moonlight, written by W. Stanley Moss, who was the other guy who helped capture the German general. Well, let me, just sticking with the with the acknowledgments for a second, but moving us in the direction of our subject, did studying originally with Don Kagan, well, obviously it had an impact on what you are writing about today, but how, I guess, you know, has it shaped your thinking about these subjects? Don Kagan taught his students to think geopolitically about ancient wars and culturally about ancient wars. And I worked with him as an undergraduate shortly before he published the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. And then as a graduate student as he was working on the sequels to that. And we had seminars on it. And the books that I'm writing now cover some of the same ground, but from a completely different angle.

Don looked at things from an Athenian point of view, as Lucidides largely does. I'm looking at things from a Spartan point of view. And my conclusions differ somewhat from his. But this series of books started when he persuaded Yale University Press to hire me to write on this subject. And so he's responsible for the fact that I'm contradicting him. Well, let me ask you this. So this, you know, looking, I mean, even just sticking with the titles before you get into the substance of what you've written over the course of the last decade or so, I mean, there's this experience of uncanniness. You know, you see a book by, by Paul

Ray called the Sparta's First Attic War, Sparta's Second Attic War. And you think to yourself, well, what the heck is that, you know, your first thought is, you know, what is this about? And it takes a second to calculate, oh, we're talking about, you know, in the latter case, the Peloponnesian War, right? And we're talking about things that any student of the classics or of Greek history knows something about from Thucydides or from modern writers like Don Kagan. But my question, I suppose, is why? Why tell it from the Spartan point of view?

What's the value there? Two reasons. One is from a Spartan perspective, it's the Attic War. And in fact, in Thucydides, there is a Spartan, no, an Argyve who refers to it. An Argyve, they live in the Peloponnesus too, as the Attic War. There is no reference in the classical period, classical Greek period, to the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides calls it the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. And it's pretty clear that people in the Peloponnesus call it the Attic War.

So the first time that we have clear-cut evidence of it being called the Peloponnesian War is in the first century BC and a little bit later in writers Deodora Siculus and Strabo. So what I'm trying to do is get away from the Athenian perspective, which Strabo and Deodoris Siculus adopt that this is the Pelopinian War. Well, no, Peloponnesians don't call it the Pelopinian War. They call it the Attic War. So if you're looking at it from Sparta's perspective, it's a series of Attic Wars. Now, Thucydides lumps two of these together, and there's a case to be made for continuity between them. I argue there's a case to be made for continuity between the first Attic War, sometimes called the first Philippinian War and the other two. In other words, there is a kind of wartime situation that goes on for 60 years.

from about 465 down to 404 BC. And, you know, if you were to step back from the 20th century, is there discontinuity between World War I and World War II? Or is it one long struggle? The German war in a certain sense. Yeah. And people who've written about it have sometimes put these things together because it's a period that goes on.

from 1914 to 1945. It's the 30 years war of the 20th century. Well, if I could just press the point a little further, because I want to know what it is that you found a value by, if you like, sort of turning the map around and looking at it from the Spartan perspective, there's something that seems to, you know, citizens in a, I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate here,

but I think your answer will be interesting. To citizens in a liberal democracy who look at ancient Athens and see if not the same kind of polity at least something familiar there's something there's there's there's there are echoes there that on the surface of things remind us of ourselves the spartans meanwhile it's it's a it's a closed society an isolated society a militaristic society these are sort of the again looking on the surface of things what you encounter when you when you first look it seems less like us and more like you know the the soviet union or an autocratic state or something like that there's something that's a

apparently perverse about this flipping of things. You, you obviously, I think, at least in some ways, would differ with that characterization. Why flip it and what have you seen about the 5th century as you've done it? Well, one reason to flip it is the Spartans won the war. So it is worth asking, did they know what they were doing? And Thucydides' question is, why did the Athenians lose the war. His question is not, why did the Spartans win the war? And so part of my argument is the Spartans understood the defects in Athenian society and eventually exploited them to the hilt and that their victory had to do with their understanding of the tensions that were sort of built into the Athenian situation. In other words, they thought things through. They knew what

they were doing. Now, it took them a long time because they were very reluctant to do it. Athens stood between Sparta and Persia, and Athens kept Persia at bay. That served Spartan interests. It was a cheap way of providing for the Spartan defense. But the Athenians then got to be sufficiently powerful that they became a threat themselves to Spartan. So how do they cope with that? And part of the time, they attempt to rein in the Athenians. That doesn't work very well. And when the Athenians proved to be a real threat at the Battle of Mantonea in 418,

a majority of Spartans shift, we have to destroy these people. We have to destroy their empire. We have to take it apart. And then, I mean, I talk about this in the book that's just out. They take advantage of Athens' involvement in Sicily, and they fight a proxy war. Let me say a little something about proxy wars, because this is something I had never thought of before with regard to the struggles between Athens and Sparta. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody else has either. proxy wars take place when you get an enduring strategic rivalry between two political communities,

each of which has trouble delivering a knockout blow to the other. So you get an enduring strategic rivalry because they can't sort of settle the question by one conquering the other. And this happens when you get a sea power against a land. power or can happen. And that's what you've got in the struggle between the Athenians and the Spartans. You've got a sea power versus a land power. How do you do damage to your enemy? And the answer is via a proxy war. Now, we've seen a lot of that in the last hundred years because of nuclear weapons, the United States and the Soviet Union.

Neither one of us was in a position to deliver a knockout blow to the other. Too dangerous. So the Russians fought a proxy war against us in Korea. What did it cost them? A handful of men, surplus weapons from World War II. Nothing. What did it do to us? It bled us.

And it hit us with our morale. They did exactly the same thing. in Vietnam, and we repaid the favor in Afghanistan by supporting the Afghans against the Russians during the Soviet occupation. Arguably, it was our proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan that brought down the Soviet Union because that failure had a tremendous impact on their morale. And look, we're in the middle of a proxy war right now. We are backing Ukraine against the Russians, we are bleeding the Russians, not a single American soldier has died. This is war on the cheap. Right. Okay. What do the Spartans do to help the Syracusans in Sicily defeat the

Athenians? They said one guy. That one guy is enough to put steel into the spines of the Syracusans and to develop a strategy enabling them to defeat the Athenians. And then he helps them pursue the complete destruction of the Athenian army. Well, I want to linger on the subject of this book and on what happens in Sicily here in a moment. But if we could just step back first, talk for a minute, if you would, about the broad scheme of Spartan grand strategy, as it appears. at the start of your overall narrative. Then we have the Persian challenge and then we have the Athenian challenge.

But what is the Spartan vision of survival and thriving before these or as these challenges arrive on the scene? Right. I talk about this in a book called the Spartan regime. And it's just four chapters. It's short. What I lay out in that book, paying attention to geography

and also to Sparta is a going concern, what makes it tick? How do they? live, what does it depend upon? And I argue that because of their geographical situation, dominating two different river valleys on either side of a kind of massif called Mount Talegajos, that's pretty formidable. I mean, you can cross it, but it takes a lot of effort. And you wouldn't cross it with an army single file, you would. That's the only way you could do it. They They conquer, they live in Laconia, they conquer Messinia on the western side of this mountain.

And they subject the population of Bacinia in particular, but an older population in Laconia as well. And these people, they treat as sharecroppers, something along those lines, servile sharecroppers. And they seem to be outnumbered by this hellot population by a ratio of about 70. to one. Furthermore, the hell out population, at least on the Messinian side, is a people in bondage. They intermarry, they have the same gods, they have a memory of being an independent political community. It's easy for them to cooperate with one another. A well-run slave system includes slaves from a great variety of places who can communicate with one or another only through the master's language.

and who have no real connection to one another, other than their condition. Where you get concentrations of people from the same tribe or from the same nation, you get rebellions. And that's what the Spartans face from time to time. So what they do is within the Peloponnesus, they set up a defensive alliance. As far as we know, it's the first standing alliance in human history. First alliance that goes on decade after decade. And it serves two purposes.

For the Spartans, it gives them the manpower to put down Helot rebellions. And for the other people in the alliance, it sustains broad-based oligarchies against revolution from below and against attacks from the outside. And given the posity of Spartans, the large number of hellots, This is all the Spartans want. They practice a kind of isolationism. Now, the Peloponnesus is a peninsula. By land, you can iterate only through the Corinthiad, which is very narrow in places. It's a world to some degree unto itself. And there are no great powers that are a threat to it. There is Assyria, but it doesn't control Anatolia, which is what's close to Greece. There's Babylon, but there's Babylon, but. that's irrelevant. The Egyptians do not feel navies. They're irrelevant too. And then along come the Persians in the last half of the 6th century BC. And they conquer Babylon, they conquer Syria, they conquer Egypt, they conquer Anatolia. They conquer all the way to the Indus Valley

in India. They conquer Afghanistan. And they impinge on the Greek world in be a G. Eventually, they put together a fleet using Phoenician ships that allows them to dominate the islands. Suddenly, there's a threat. And so the books are about how Spartan, Sparta responds to challenges. First, the Persian challenge. And the answer is they try to delay it.

They try to keep the Persians at a distance without crossing them and attracting their attention. and eventually that fails. And they take their Peloponnesian League. They add to it, Agina and the Seronic Gulf and Athens. And Aegina and Athens add ships. And they managed to fight the Persians when they invade. And thanks at sea to the activities of the Athenians and on land to the cleverness of the Spartans, they actually defeat the Persians.

Now, this is the greatest empire in human beings. history. It controls three of the world's great river valleys. There, in terms of relative population, the population of the empire versus the population of the world, that ratio, relative wealth, the wealth of the empire versus the wealth of the world, and of course, military power. There's been nothing like Persia since. And Sparta has a population of maybe 8,000 men. And, and Sparta has a population of maybe 8,000 they managed to organize the defense against these people. It's really remarkable. And in the aftermath, they deal with the Persian challenge by allowing the Athenians, by not interfering when the Athenians decide to continue the war at sea, and to organize the political communities in the Aegean,

and there are 150 of them that the Athenians organize. Spartans sit back, maintain cordial relations with Athens, and watch as the Athenians fend off the Persians. And the Persians can't come back if they don't control the sea because they can't feed an army on the march unless they are able to send foodstuffs by sea as it's marching through Thrace and into Balkans. This works very well. In some sense, the Spartans fight a proxy war against Persia

by supporting Athens against Persia. But the problem comes that the Athenians, become so powerful that they began to impinge upon the Peloponnesian League. And the Spartans make a decision to rein them in. They failed to follow through because there's a hell out revolt. The Athenians get wind of what the Spartans had planned. They build long walls between Athens and the sea, which turns Athens into a kind of de facto island. And you get a strategic rival degree that goes on for 60 years, which the Spartans eventually went. Right.

Can I ask, when we picture life in Sparta throughout this period, should we have in mind the image that we would get from popular culture in America today of a sort of hyper-militarized warrior society of careless of all creature comforts, sort of, well, Spartan, if you will, an austere, you know, such that later authors can use the example of Sparta to criticize soft, you know, bourgeois modern societies, or is it a little bit more complicated than that? And then a sort of related broader question that I'm also interested in is you take a real stand in this series of books that to understand the affairs of the 5th century BC and world affairs in general, you have to engage in a form of political science

called regime analysis. You have to look at the domestic politics of countries. And this is, as as listeners may know, a bit out of fashion in certain quarters of the Academy when it comes to the study of international relations. So talk a bit about life in Sparta and how we should picture it. And then why should it matter? Because I have it on good authority from any number of very distinguished professors today that this kind of thing doesn't matter when you're analyzing international behavior. All right, Sparta. It's best not to think of it as a grim militaristic society. It's military in character.

There's no question about that. Think of it as spring season at a baseball, at a professional baseball camp. These guys work out a lot, and they're constantly practicing the art of war. They're also having a good time. They have dinner together every night. It may not be the best food, but the baseball camp probably doesn't have the best food. But nobody really cares that much about that. The well-to-do among them race horses.

they go hunting. It's a man's world. And it's a man's world that's organized for defense. But here's a crucial thing. You think about it as a militaristic society, but they almost never go to war. They almost never send their soldiers into battle. They try to avoid wars and head them off. So, you know, look at the flip side. The Athenians are always fighting. The Spartans are rare. fighting. They prepare for war so they don't have to fight wars. And so look, it is a world of gentlemen. They don't work with their hands. They don't farm. This is done for them. They spend their time in sports, in dances, military dances, in working out and in a banter over dinner. So everybody else both admires them and envies them.

And their cultural power, their soft power in Greece is very, very great. The reason they lead the coalition against the Persians is no one would have accepted the Athenians. They're nobody's. Who are they? And one of the reasons they win the Peloponnesian wars, the Athenians are deeply resented by the time the 60 years are over. Now, you ask the second question has to do with regime analysis.

Let me put it this way. If we had practiced regime analysis after the Cold War was over, we wouldn't have built up the Russians. We wouldn't have dreamed that Russia could join the world of free commercial nations. We would have recognized that imperialism is built into the society. and that they're not going to turn their back on it anytime soon. If at the end of World War I, we had properly appreciated the Germans, there wouldn't have been a World War II because we would have crippled them. Instead, we built them up. And I mean the United States.

We loaned the money. We loaned the Russians money. Same thing with China. The difficulties that we've gotten ourselves into have had to do with either dream, about a utopian world in which every country is democratic, every country is commercial. Competition takes place in the marketplace. On the one hand, and a kind of realism, which really is surreal, that ignores culture and the importance of culture for the conduct of policy.

Another way of putting it is we've done something really quite stupid. we have projected our own predilections on other peoples who have their own predilections. Okay, to understand what goes on between Athens and Sparta, you've got to understand the Spartan way of life and what it is that will cause them to fight. And you've got to understand they won't fight if you leave them alone. Now, the Athenians, it's just the opposite. the effect of Marathon and Salamis and the further victories against the Persians on the on the on the on the on the Indians just cause them to think big furthermore they develop an economy that is based upon imperial expansion Athens before the Persian wars is an agrarian

community virtually everyone is a farmer or someone who works for farmers by the time you get to the four sixties there's a large cohort of Athenians whose livelihood depends on the Athenian alliance, the Deleon League, which turns into a kind of empire, and on the contributions made by the members of that alliance, contributions that come to be understood as tribute. So, for example, we are told by Aristotle, look, we're told by Herodotus that at the time of the Persian wars there are 30,000 adult male Athenians. were told by Aristotle that at its home and when the Athenian empire is at its heights there are

20,000 people working to manage the empire. So Athens undergoes what one would call a regime change. It's noiseless because it's gradual. There isn't an uprising and a revolution. It's simply that those who show up at the assembly in 460 are a different group of people than those who showed up at the assembly in 495. Their livelihood comes from a different source. They are not risk-averse, whereas farmers are. They've got something to lose. And they are willing to sacrifice the farms.

That's what the building of the Longwalls does. we will hunker down behind those walls and let the farms go, let them be ravaged by the Philippinians. So you've got to understand the development of the Athenian regime and its transformation if you want to understand their foreign policy. Yeah. It probably won't surprise you to hear that John Mearsheimer has a new book coming out in a week or two called How States Think, the title of which sort of suggests at least the beginning of the problems. And I was debating John Meersheimer last Sunday. Oh, were you? Okay, very good.

In a formal context or informal forum? And he made a presentation. And I said, John. Yeah. Yeah, the book makes the case. I mean, it's clearly designed to outrage liberals who are themselves outraged by Putin's behavior. I should be clear, I personally am outraged by Putin's behavior, even if I think the liberals are occasionally often their analysis. And it opens with a fairly reasonable assertion that Putin's invasion of Ukraine was not irrational.

In fact, it was rational, and then it keeps going. Because all states are essentially rational. For the most part, most of the time, states behave rationally in the same way. And Putin's rationality in this case isn't because of his imperial vision. He may have written about that, but that was sort of window dressing. It was just a balance of power calculation. It made perfect sense. John Reads, John Mearsheimer, reads it as rational.

Right. And look, I think Putin's completely irration. There is one country in the world that has claims on Russian territory. There's one country in the world that teaches its students in its grade schools and high schools, that it has been unjustly treated, and that's China. And the Chinese claim is to Siberia. Charles de Gaulle, before he died, said that by the end of the 20th century, the eastern border of Russia would be the Ural Mountains.

Now, that didn't quite happen that way, but Vladimir Putin is doing everything in his power to make that true by focusing on Europe. There's no country in Europe that is a threat to Russia. Are the French going to march on Moscow again? Are the Germans going to march on Moscow again? Are the polls going to march on Moscow? Give me a break. On the European side, there's no threat to Russia. On the Asian side, there's a very great threat. And there are plenty of people in Russia who understand that. But Putin's an old cold warrior, and he looks west. It's, no, I think John is just crazy. I don't mean to drag you into my grudges, though I'm fascinated to hear you were just debating him. But in the acknowledgments to the book, he's co-written with Stephen Rosado.

And in the acknowledgments the book, it says sort of casually and just as an aside, Mearsheimer's research for this book was funded by a small grant from the Valdei Discussion after his book, The Great Delusion won the Book of the Year award from the Valdei Discussion Club, which, of course, this is Vladimir Putin's Halifax Forum, you know, Forum Policy Convening is the Lake Valdei Discussion Club. What I was saying in praise of John is he's very good humor. Okay. And he loves to provoke.

I sure he's a terrific teacher, but I think realism is nuts. and dangerous actually. If John would have had his way, the Russians would have, Poland would not be in NATO. Let the way he let be in Estonia would not be in NATO. Now, think a little bit about this. What do those countries think about the invasion of Ukraine? They think it's a threat to them. And they're not alone.

The Swedes think the same things. And the Finns think the same things. One sign of the stupidity of Vladimir Putin is, can you imagine a Russian leader so stupid as to drive the Swedes and the Finns into NATO? We are digressing here, and I do want to get back to Sicily, but can I ask you suggest that there's something about liberal utopianism that is ultimately unsatisfying as a way of understanding international politics? And you obviously are not a fan of realism either, which puts us in a tough spot, Paul, because those seem to be the two dominant. schools are thinking about these things. So what book is out there for those of us who look at both of these things and realize, conclude that it's just not getting the job done? There are five books, and I wrote all of them. In the Spartist-Cecian proxy war, I have an appendix where I lay out

the argument theoretically. I wrote that before the first book was published, and I wanted to use it as the introduction. And I was told by my editors, this is too academic. I regret the decision. I think it should have gone in the first book. But it's out there now. And as I said, John, I wrote this to attack you. And he said, I'll have to order the book. It's a great discussion of Morgan Thau. And can I, I, I should know the answer to this. And I don't. But they must did Morgan Thoust, must have known each other. Oh, yeah. Strauss must have had Morgenthau on the mind when he's writing the city and man and he's talking about. There's no question there in the same department at Chicago. Yeah, of course. And Morgenthau in politics among nations, thanks Strauss, who read the,

who read the manuscript. I will say this in praise of Morgenthau, whom I attacked directly. The man could write. I mean, that's a beautifully written book. And its influence derives to some degree from the fact that it's just plain fun to read. But to come back to Sparta, they eventually realize that if they don't knock out the Athenians, the Athenians will knock out them. You can't rein in the Athenians. That's just not possible.

And so they send Gallipus to Sicily, which is war on the cheap. And it works. And then they do something almost unthinkable. I've finished Spartan's third attic war. I'm tweaking it right now. They make an alliance with Persia. The Persians had been fishing for an alliance from the moment that the Spartans and the Athenians got crossways with one another.

And the Spartans had always kept their distance from it. But they've learned that the only way they can defeat the Athenians is to defeat them at sea. and the only way they can take to the sea is if they have Persian money to pay for the building of the ships and to pay for the manning of the ships. You've got to feed those rowers. And the ancient Greek triremes got a crew of 200. So if you have 100 triremes, that's 20,000 people you've got to feed. If you have 150, it's 30,000 people you have to feed.

that takes an enormous amount of silver. Now, the Athenians get their silver from their empire. The Spartans are not in a position to do that. They don't even have coinage at home. They do without it. And the only ally they have of any significance as a maritime power is Corinth. Then the Athenians have done such damage to Corinth that they're really not that significant anymore. So if they want to take to the sea and they want to beat Athens,

they've got to swallow their pride, swallow their principles, and make a deal with the Persians, which they do, and they're half-hearted about it. They really don't feel good about this arrangement, but they do it. And that's part of what the next volume's about. Right. If I could ask on Sicily, on the subject of the current volume, In retrospect, knowing what a disaster it is, seems obvious that the Athenians shouldn't have done it. And indeed, they're Athenians saying we shouldn't do it as the expedition is being debated. Why does the other side of the argument went out and why do the Athenians go to Sicily?

Two reasons. One is Sicily's rich and it means more the prospect of more tribute. So there's an economic reason. that influences those people who live from hand to mouth and depend upon the empire. The second reason is a kind of megalomania. The Athenians defeated the Persians at Salamis. That's an astonishing achievement. They defeated them again at Eurymedon.

Another astonishing achievement. They defeated them again at Cypriot-Salemus. Three huge battles. in which the Athenians defeat the greatest power in human history. They think rather well of themselves, and they have very good reason to. So they're not put off by the size and scope of the challenge. They're attracted by it. What I'm trying to do in these books is restore not so much Thucydides' account,

which is Athenocentric, but restore his vision of politics, which is based on regime analysis. And there's a passage in book one of Thucydides in paragraph 70, where the Corinthians explain to the Spartans what the Athenians are like. Anytime anyone in Thucydides' text makes claims, you have to ask, are those claims borne out by the facts? So you follow the narrative to see if the claims are accurate. The Corinthian claims about the Athenians are. are absolutely on the mark. And the claim about the Athenians is they're so restless that they can't stop and enjoy anything.

They want more. They always want more. Pericles, in his funeral oration, urges his compatriots to approach the city, look upon the city with eros, with a kind of erotic longing. Okay. Erotic longing in rationalism don't go very well together. That is to say sexual desire has a way of overcoming reason. Many people have experienced this. So he's pressing them towards a love of the beautiful, a love of the grand, a love of the glorious. And it works. and Thucydides when he is describing the debate on the eve of the Sicilian expedition, debated Athens.

There's one figure, Nicias, who tries to talk the Athenians out of going. And what Nicias says, this place is big. It's going to be difficult. The expedition your thing you're sending is inadequate. You at least have to double it. This is like saying to a guy, that young woman is just too pretty for you. You're not going to dissuade him from the pursuit of the young woman by telling him that. And what Thucydides says is after hearing Nicaeus's speech, and Eros for the expedition fell upon the Athenians.

So it's a kind of erotic longing for the beautiful. And why do they want to do it? They want to do it for the same reason, Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest. Someone asked him why, and he says, because it was there, why did he do it? Because it had never been done before. Because it was so formidable a challenge. You know, athletes understand this. Which football game do they long for?

The one against the rival team most likely to beat them. Because the pleasure lies in doing the impossible. That's what drives them. The Spartans don't feel. that drive because they've got such a threat at home. So the so-called military society doesn't fight wars. The so-called ancient liberal society fights constantly. And Stisle is not the first time the Athenians have done something crazy.

They tried to take Egypt away from Persia. Think of the size of Egypt. And think of the Persian capacity to project power on land. So sanity and arrows don't go together. Alcibiades on the other side of this debate, even plays a decisive part in the debate in encouraging this expedition to Sicily, then is also named the leadership team of the expedition, but then is, of course, relieved.

And we've already raised it once. I raised it again in the city of man, city and man, Strauss plays around with this idea, actually that's that relief of alcibiades that dooms the expedition, that the expedition could have succeeded. But Nicaeus was not the guy in Alcibiades and his sort of intemperateness actually potentially could have been successful. What's your take on the feasibility of this having, of this succeeding in some other, you know, set of details? The Athenians could have defeated Syracuse.

Under Nicaus, they come very close to it. If Gallipus of Sparta had not shown up at the crucial moment, they'd have defeated the Syracusans. can they hold it? No. It's too far away. They don't have the manpower to hold it. And their aim is not just Syracuse, their aim is to dominate all of Sicily.

Sicily is 10,000 square miles. No, excuse me. Yes, 10,000 square miles. That's a lot. And the Athenians don't have the manpower to hold it. Look, the difference between the Greek cities and Rome is that Rome assimilates people. If you're a slave at Rome and you are freed, you become a half citizen.

Your children are citizens. If you're a slave at Athens, you become a medic and you have to leave the city after a certain number of years. You don't become a citizen. So the Athenian citizen population can increase only by procreation. Rome increases by assimilating the people that conquers. So the Romans have the manpower to do wonders. the Athenians can't do that. So you can win the battle. You can seize this city, but you probably can't even hold that city. It has more citizens than you do. And it has neighbors that will want you out of there. So if Alcibiades had been there, he would have been bolder than Nicaus. And at certain crucial moments, had Nicaeus been even slightly bolder, the Athenians would have taken. the city of Syracuse.

So Strauss is partly right, but the grand vision of dominating the Western Mediterranean first Sicily and Carthage, not possible, just not possible. Now, because in some ways this is a confession, a lot of people's knowledge of the Peloponnesian war tends to, such that it exists, tends to end with the end of Thucydides' narration of the war. it's a striking fact that this is not actually the end of the war. And it's not even a, you know, not necessarily a fatal blow to Athens in its competition with Sparta. Well, I guess I should ask you, do you agree with that?

Is the war still salvageable? Is the competition still salvageable from the Athenian point of view? Yes. But the Athenians have to split Sparta from Persia. They either have to make a deal with the Persians and they desperately try. or they have to make a deal with the Spartans. And they have two opportunities. Alcibiades produces an opportunity via the Battle of Sisykus.

And for reasons that are understandable but may not be compelling, the Athenians refuse the Spartan offer of peace. There is a second occasion after the Battle of Arganusai at a time when the Athenians are much better positioned and the Spartans make them the same offer, which is say each side will keep what it's got. Well, the Athenians have a whole lot more at that point. They refused to take it. That was madness.

Absolute madness. But that madness is tied up with this great dream, this sort of erotic dream. But the only way, once their fleet has been destroyed, and they only have a handful of ships, once the Persians have entered the war and are funding the Spartans and once the Athenian allies begin to rebel, there's no way for Athens to bring the war to a successful end unless they can drive a wedge between the Persians and the Spartans. one of the Spartan ambassadors to Athens reportedly said, when we fight a battle, what is at stake for us are the ships, which the Persians will replace.

When you fight a battle, the existence of your city is at stake. So the fact that the Persians lose and the Greeks win the Greco-Persian wars obviously has, I assume you would agree, has immense constant. for the future of human history. Yes. What is the significance of Sparta's ultimate victory in Athens' ultimate defeat in the Spartan-Athenian competition? Well, the long-term consequence of it is that Persia becomes the arbiter of affairs in Greece, because the Spartans cannot fill the boots of the Athenians. They really can't sustain it.

They don't have the manpower. They're down to about 2,000 people. this point. They don't have the staying power. They don't have the charm. They have a tendency to treat foreigners very badly. And they're up against Persia. Now, the Athenians were successful against Persian because they built this alliance, which slides into becoming an empire, that provided them with the economic means for projecting power at sea. And the Persians discovered over and over again that they couldn't overcome that. The only way they could overcome it

is using other Greeks to defeat the Athenians, which is what they do in the third Attic War. And in the aftermath, there's an inevitable conflict between Persia and Sparta, and the Persians basically win it. And then in Greece, any time any power in Greece is beginning to be a bit of a problem for Persia, they send money to the other powers.

and the effect of it is that everyone is begging the Persians for support. Now, this is not like a Persian conquest or grace. If they had conquered Greece, they probably would have taken the people of Greece and done to them what the Syrians did to the 10 lost tribes of Israel, or what the Babylonians did with the Babylonian captivity. That is to say, they would have shifted population. relations around, which was their practice. It was the Babylonian, the Assyrian practice, the Babylonian practice, and the Persian practice. And the Greeks, you know, you can't do this with the Egyptians, there's too many of them, but you can do it with various Greek cities. And they would certainly

have gone after Athens, and quite possibly after Sparta as well, the two principal cities. So what consequence would that have had? Well, we wouldn't have had all of the literature that we get from 5th century Athens. The tragedians, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Herodicus is a kind of honorary Athenian, and he's writing for Athenians. And then the Platonic Dialogues and Aristotle. In other words, that whole world that produced that astonishing intellectual flourishing wouldn't have existed.

Paul Ray, author most recently of Spurgeon, Sparta's Sicilian proxy war. Fascinating conversation. Congratulations on the book and look forward to future installments. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.