Sparta’s Splendid Isolationism – Scott Yenor

Sparta pursued a Sparta-first policy throughout most of its history, preserving its unique domestic institutions while giving citizens in distinctive military training. It drew back from pursuing a wider empire, for fear that what it took to build an empire would undermine its unique constitution. Sparta’s politicos put Sparta’s domestic needs first when responding to regional powers in the Peloponnese (the peninsula in western Greece where Sparta was hegemon), the Persian challenge, and, ultimately, the Athenian challenge. Then one day, the Spartans, long landlubbers and homebodies, finally became sailors and grasped for a wider empire, having first exhausted most other possibilities. 

Paul Rahe, professor of history at Hillsdale College, serves as an excellent guide to the subtle, grudging transformation of Sparta in his six-volume set. 

Sparta was a prodigy, as Rahe details in his prequel, The Spartan Regime: Its Character, Origins and Grand Strategy, the shortest of the volumes. Sparta had a strict, supervisory education system, a mixed constitution with two kings, neither of whom had much domestic power but who waged Sparta’s wars abroad, a senate of old men, and popularly-elected ephors who served short terms. The Spartans conquered and enslaved the previous occupants—and slaves vastly outnumbered Spartan citizens. Slaves did the necessary work, so Spartans could focus on war. The city banned commerce and kept out foreign adventurism and influence. Land-locked Sparta needed no navy or dockyard. 

Insularity and isolation did not keep them from arranging things in the Peloponnese to their benefit. Spartans made sure that neighboring cities like Tegea and Mantinea were compliant bulwarks against foreign influences and invasion. Splendid isolation made possible a cautious Sparta-first policy abroad. 

Sparta wasn’t interested in empire, but empires became interested in Sparta. That raised a further question. Would necessity demand the suspension of traditions and constitutional norms? 

First came Persia, as Rahe recounts in The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge. Persia demanded “earth and water” from Greek poleis as tokens of obeisance. Sparta threw Persia’s emissaries into a well, a de facto declaration of war. This created a dilemma. The closer Persia came to Sparta, the more it threatened Sparta’s existence. If the Persians made it to the Peloponnese, Sparta might be doomed from a combination of slave revolts and enemy power. The more Sparta anticipated Persia’s attack, the more it opened itself to foreign adventurism and foreign influence. 

During the 490 BC Persian invasion, Spartans saw themselves as the leaders of Greece, but their strategy prioritized maintaining their own city and regime. Sparta delayed fighting the Persians because, as Rahe writes, “religious custom” and perhaps a slave revolt prevented the Spartans from marching to help the Athenians. The Sparta-first policy seemed vindicated, as the Athenians crushed Persia at Marathon. 

A generation later the Spartans played a more active role as Xerxes marched on Greece. The city first sent its King Leonidas and his famous 300 warriors to stall the Persian advance. As Rahe relates it, Spartans had “no faith in the Hellenic fleet” to defeat the Mede, so they advocated for building a wall with their allies at the Corinthian choke point. Most Greeks agreed, but the Athenian statesman Themistocles used stratagems to bring the conflict to a head in the water outside of Athens. The Persians were defeated at Salamis (480 BC) and began a retreat. The Spartans pursued, with the other Greeks, as far as Plataea (i.e., not far) in 479. They helped defeat the Persians, but left the pursuit mostly to the Athenians.

One Spartan who did chase the Persians provided a cautionary tale in what could happen when seemingly austere Spartans tasted empire. As Rahe recounts, the victor at Plataea, King Pausanias, medized after his victory, adopting Persian manners, clothing, and luxury. Spartan innocents abroad, like Pausanias, “might be corrupted,” as Thucydides writes. The Spartans “did not send out commanders afterwards” since they “wanted to be finished with the Persian war and thought the Athenians were competent to take leadership and were friendly to themselves at the time.” The Spartans of 475 clung tightly to the priority of the domestic—and it worked, so long as the Athenians did the dirty work of protecting Sparta from Persia and posed no threat themselves.

Rahe’s next four volumes detail Sparta’s conflict with Athens, whose threat to the Sparta-first policy ultimately proved fatal to each. The two cities had very different characters. Sparta was a land power. Athens, after the fortification of their walls to the sea in 457 BC, was a sea power. Athens’ power could grow without overly threatening Sparta’s regional hegemony, up to a point. Grow Athens did. The Athenians took the empire from the retreating Persians and made it their own. Sparta recognized the long-term threat posed by Athens, who, under Themistocles, was stirring up trouble in the Peloponnese among Sparta’s allies. In response, Sparta exerted power over Athenian domestic policy (helping to get Themistocles ostracized), tried to extend its system of alliances closer to Athens, and planned to help rebellious members of Athens’ empire, as Rahe describes in Sparta’s First Attic War. The two sides fought one battle, at Tanagra (457 BC), a Spartan victory. Athens imploded with a disastrous invasion of Egypt, which ended in the destruction of Athens’ fleet in 454. Sparta did not have to resolve its strategic dilemma because each went back to their spheres: Sparta got the Peloponnese; Athens everything else. Taking counsel from their hopes and prioritizing domestic needs, Sparta retreated to splendid isolation. 

The fragile peace lasted a generation. What we call the Peloponnesian War broke out in 433. The sides shadow boxed during the war’s early years, as each city stayed in its lane. Athens minded its empire from behind its walls. Sparta ravaged Athens’ lands but built no navy. Athens suffered a devastating plague. Sparta tried to foment revolts in the Athenian empire. Athens tried to foment rebellion in the Peloponnese. 

Eventually, both sides broke through—and sued for peace. First, Athens fortified bases on the Peloponnese. Second, Sparta, in desperate straits, sent out Brasidas, a half-breed Spartan, to foment rebellion in the Athenian empire. Athens took one last stab at defeating Sparta in the Peloponnese when Alcibiades formed an alliance with Argos, Sparta’s neighbor to the north. Rahe’s Second Attic War ends with this Athenian defeat at Mantineia. The Athenian flyer on victory made Sparta feel vulnerable, crushing its illusions of peace and security. It had no way of resolving its strategic dilemma, however, since it needed a navy and money to defeat Athens, but a navy and wealth would change Sparta. Sparta hunkered down and hoped the gods would rescue her. 

The gods seemed to deliver! A hubristic, divided Athens decided to invade Sicily, and Sparta helped rally the Sicilians—and especially the Syracusans—to resist Athens. Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War brilliantly shows how Sparta sought to beat Athens without changing itself internally. Sicilians would do the fighting in a land far away. Sparta, with no money itself, would rely on offering moral support and military advice—and this culminated in Athens’ great defeat. The Sparta-first policy of isolation seemed to hold—and Athens seemed defeated.

Athens’ self-destruction in Sicily was not enough to bring her down. Sparta still faced the same strategic dilemma. Athens still had its walls, its ambition, and its empire. Ultimately, defeating Athens would require tearing down its walls and stopping the shipment of foodstuffs to Athens from the Black Sea. Sparta did not have the money to build a navy and it did not have the sailors to man the ships, so it would need allies and only Persia, its ancient enemy, would do. Or, perhaps, at this time after its disaster in Sicily and after the Athenian plague, Athens was sufficiently weakened so that it no longer posed the kind of challenge to Spartan hegemony of the Peloponnese? 

Rahe’s last volume, Sparta’s Third Attic War, begins with Sparta’s fateful choice to continue the war to the bitter end. In the past, Sparta stopped short of pursuing total victory, accepting less than total victory to save itself from far-flung foreign adventures. Such worries seemed passé after decades of hot and cold wars with Athens, especially as Athens had directly challenged Spartan hegemony in the Peloponnese. After Athens’ implosion, as Rahe relates from Thucydides, the Spartans’ old caution, moderation, and hesitation were gone. “Being hopeful in all respects,” the Spartans “were disposed to take up the war without even a hint of hesitation.” Sparta began raising a navy with the help of its equally enthusiastic allies. Sparta would occupy the Athenian hinterlands continuously, not just ravage them seasonally as they previously did, and King Agis would occupy Decelea. Later, Sparta would ally with the Persians, build a navy, get sufficient monies, and wage continuous war on the Athenian empire with the hope of kicking Athens out of the Bosporus, destroying its navy, razing the walls of Athens, and installing a compliant regime in Athens. They judged, again from Thucydides, that then “they would safely exercise hegemony over Hellas in entirety themselves.”

The Sparta that pursued total victory and greater empire would not be the Sparta of old. The new Sparta would thirst for naval victory, tempt its soldiers with foreign influences, tempt its foreign leaders with broader empire, and stress and suspend its constitutional norms with new offices like navarch. They would risk the Pausanias problem. Lysander, the architect of Sparta’s final naval victory over Athens, embodied this new way. An incorruptible Spartan, he was at home in the Persian court, ruling other peoples politically (not brutally), and on the high seas. Blunt in speech, he learned deception in action. King Agesilaus, also an old-school Spartan, would displace Lysander as the agent of Spartan hegemony and empire soon thereafter. 

Since Thucydides does not recount how Sparta dealt Athens its final blow, much in Rahe’s last book is less well-known, but it is immensely interesting from the perspective of grand strategy. Imagine, for instance, the situation of Athens and Sparta at the end of this long conflict. Athens had been confident and bold while building its empire, but now it was all lost. Rising from such a defeat would prove difficult, and a different stripe of leader would arise in this deflated situation, one who would manage decline. The war transformed Sparta too. As Rahe catalogues, she still had cautious politicos who argued for a return to splendid Spartan isolation. They came from what we Americans, under FDR’s spell, might call the “horse-and-buggy” days. Sparta first was, in effect, dead. 

Like America after World War II, Sparta would not go back to being a regional power. Rahe ends his books before depicting how, within two generations, Sparta lost its empire, its regional hegemony and its constitution. First the Thebans under Epaminondas dealt blows to Sparta’s regional hegemony at Leuctra (371 BC) and finally at Mantinea (362). Then came the Macedonians under Phillip II a generation later. One hopes that Rahe might find the time and energy for one last volume, detailing how Sparta’s King Agesilaus, one of the great men of antiquity, tried first to build a Spartan empire after the war but ultimately oversaw Sparta’s demise. Sparta abandoned splendid, dangerous isolation for foreign adventures, but her adventurism proved at least as dangerous to her future as her isolation. If Rahe does not finish this task, another must pick up the mantle, as Xenophon continued the work of Thucydides.