Introduction xv
affairs quite ineptly and have allowed things to drift so that fortune comes to
function as a lawgiver [nomothétēs] in arranging that distribution and dispo-
sition of the polity’s offices and honors which, more than anything else, deter-
mines the paıdeía that makes them a political community. What counts most
from the vantage point assumed by Plato, Aristotle, and their successors is the
fact that circumstance need not be absolutely predominant. Thus, if ancient
political science stresses the limits of human mastery, it nonetheless presup-
poses the possibility of statesmanship.^17
My aim here is to resurrect this largely forgotten political science and
demonstrate its power. My immediate purpose is to apply its insights to an
analysis of ancient Lacedaemon. To this end, in the first chapter, I describe
the Spartan way of life, dwelling on the practices and institutions that distin-
guished the ancient Lacedaemonians from their fellow Hellenes. To this end,
in the second, I analyze their form of government—the first in human history
known to have embodied an elaborate system of balances and checks—and I
attempt to show not only how it cohered with and supported their peculiar
way of life, but also how it helped make of the Lacedaemonian polıteía what
the ancients called a kósmos: a beautiful, exquisitely well-ordered whole.^18 To
this end, in both chapters, I also try to make sense of the claim—first advanced
by Tyrtaeus, then restated by Alcman, and later reasserted by Pindar, Herodo-
tus, and Thucydides—that Lacedaemon’s peculiar polıteía gave rise in that city
to what the Greeks called eunomía: the lawfulness and good order that Homer
singled out for praise; that Hesiod personified both as the sister of Peace
[Eırē ́nē] and Justice [Díkē] and as the daughter of Zeus and Divinely Sanc-
tioned Custom and Law [Thémıs]; and that Alcman would later depict as the
daughter of Foresight [Promathē ́a] and sister of Persuasion [Peıthō ́].^19 Finally,
in the third and fourth chapters, I explore the genesis of the Spartan regimen
and regime, and I trace the Spartans’ gradual articulation of an ingenious grand
strategy designed to provide for the defense of Lacedaemon and the peculiar
way of life fostered by that regimen and regime.
It is only, I believe, when one has seen Sparta whole that one can make
sense of her conduct within Hellas in the archaic and classical periods. It is
only when one has seen this polity whole that one can begin to understand
why Lacedaemon, for all of her defects, nonetheless inspired great admiration
and awe and why, even today, she retains a certain allure and elicits from all
but her most resolute detractors a profound, if grudging, respect.