xii Introduction
same can be said for one hundred twenty of the two hundred ninety-two men
under his command who were still alive on the island and who surrendered
when he did. They, too, were extraordinary men. At least, they were supposed
to be such. For they were all Spartíataı—we would say, Spartiates or Spartans
—and, according to Thucydides, the news of their surrender left the Hellenic
world dumbfounded and anything but satisfied. “Of all the events that took
place in the course of the [Peloponnesian] war,” he tells us, “this was the one
that was most contrary to the expectation of the Greeks. They thought it in-
conceivable that a shortage of food or any other necessity could induce Lace-
daemonians to hand over their arms. They expected that such men would
fight on for as long as they could and die with their weapons in their hands.
They were incredulous and could not believe that those who had surrendered
were the equals of those who had died.” The Athenians and their allies were
not alone in their astonishment. The Spartans themselves were taken aback,
and they were shaken. In the aftermath, they repeatedly sued for peace; and
when, in time, they got what they wanted and succeeded in persuading the
Athenians to approve a treaty bringing the struggle to an end,^2 they did not
know what to do with the returnees.^3
As this anecdote suggests, Lacedaemon’s allure is nothing new. In their
heyday, the Lacedaemonians and the order of Spartíataı who ruled that com-
plex community were almost universally regarded with awe, just as they are
now. Of course, we may prefer the Athenians, regarding them as more like
ourselves, and we may well be right not only in that judgment but in our moral
and political preferences as well. Our predilections notwithstanding, however,
we name sports teams after the Spartans, and it is about them (and not the
Athenians) that we ordinarily write novels and make films—which says a
great deal about the ancient Lacedaemonians and perhaps also something
about the unsatisfied longings that lurk just below the surface within modern
bourgeois societies.
This volume, the prelude to a projected trilogy on the grand strategy of
ancient Lacedaemon and on the external challenges that polity faced in the
late archaic and classical periods, is an attempt to see the Spartans whole. Its
subject is the Lacedaemonian polıteía. The word—which denotes citizenship
and the form of government, constitution, and regime that makes it meaning-
ful to speak of citizenship—first appears in The Inquiries of Herodotus, who
tellingly employs it on that occasion solely with regard to what the citizens at
Sparta share.^4 The notion was by no means, however, peculiar to him. By the