196 Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
in which I was a Junior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, I got side-
tracked. I wrote one 1,200-page work entitled Republics Ancient and Modern:
Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution; then, three shorter
monographs—one on Machiavelli and English republicanism, another on the
political philosophy of Montesquieu, and a third on modern republicanism
in the thought of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. In the intervening
years, however, I ordinarily taught a lecture course on ancient Greek history
in the fall and a seminar on some aspect of that subject in the spring, and I
frequently gave thought to Lacedaemon, and to the work I had once done with
George Forrest and Don Kagan.
This book and the volume that follows on Sparta and Persia constitute a
belated acknowledgment of what I owe them both. The first two chapters of
this volume had their origin in my dissertation and were published in a more
elaborated form in the first part of Republics Ancient and Modern. I am grate-
ful to the University of North Carolina Press for giving me permission to re-
print this material in revised form here.
In the interim since the appearance of that study, there has been a dra-
matic upsurge of interest in Spartan mores, manners, and institutions and a
torrent of new scholarship, much of it revisionist, some of it ingenious and
highly speculative. In recasting my two chapters, I have sought to exploit what
I think especially valuable in the new scholarship and to respond (mainly in
the notes) to that scholarship where, as is often the case, I think it in error. In
assessing both the old and the new scholarly arguments advanced concerning
the multitude of questions in dispute, I have embraced the explanatory par-
simony championed by William of Ockham—which is to say, I have consis-
tently preferred the most economic account consistent with the evidence. This
I have done not on the naive assumption that the most economic account is
always true (which it is not), but on the more plausible presumption that it is
less likely to be false than accounts that are complex, convoluted, and far-
fetched. In short, although I may admire the ingenuity of Claudius Ptolemy
and his successors, it is the elegance and simplicity of Copernicus, Galileo,
and Newton that I prefer.
I am indebted to Victor Davis Hanson, whose books The Western Way of
Wa r and The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western
Civilization clarified, as never before, the nature of hoplite warfare, its rela-
tionship with the family farm understood in an unorthodox Marxist sense as
a mode of production, and the manner in which this nexus shaped the emer-