195This book—intended as the prelude to a trilogy dedicated to the study of
Sparta and her conduct of diplomacy and war from the archaic period down to
the second battle of Mantineia—has been a long time in gestation, and I have
incurred many debts along the way. I was first introduced to ancient history
by Donald Kagan when I was a freshman at Cornell University in the spring
of 1968. The following year, I took a seminar he taught on the ancient Greek
city and another seminar on Plato’s Republic with Allan Bloom. After gradu-
ating from Yale University in 1971, I read Litterae Humaniores at Wadham
College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship. It was there that my ancient history
tutor W. G. G. Forrest first piqued my interest in Lacedaemon. The argument
elaborated in the third and fourth chapters of this book concerning the gene-
sis of the Spartan constitution was first broached in a tutorial paper that I
wrote for him at that time.
I returned to Yale University in 1974 for graduate study. There, three years
later, I completed a dissertation under the direction of Donald Kagan entitled
“Lysander and the Spartan Settlement, 407–403 B.C.” In the aftermath, I prof-
ited from the comments and suggestions of Antony Andrewes, who was one
of my readers. It was my intention at that time to turn my thesis into a book
focused on Sparta, Athens, and Persia, and I carved out of it an article on the
selection of ephors at Sparta and penned another, in which I discussed the
makeup of the Achaemenid Persian army at the time of Cunaxa, the tactics
the Persians customarily employed, and the relative strength of Greek hop-
lites faced with such a challenge. But the book I had in mind I did not write.
Instead, with encouragement from Bernard Knox during the year 1980–81,