“In history, as in life critically considered, truth rests not on possibility nor on plausibility but on probability.” Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (3rd edn, 1977: 133) / This essay weeps at the intellectual motion this volume exemplifies: the triumph of what now masquerades as “Roman historiography,” the academic study of the ancient Roman historians as a discipline sundered from Roman history, the study of what happened in ancient Rome and why. Its narrower target is the species of scholarship about the Latin historians arising in T. P. Wiseman's Clio's Cosmetics of 1979 and A. J.Woodman's Rhetoric in Classical Historiography of 1988. This writing, grown considerable in the late 1990s and the current decade as the founders' stars attracted satellites, studies the Latin historians as literature. In the hunt for the historian's artistry or ideas, his concern with historical material - that body of “what happened in the past” that the historian was trying to convey - is either argued away or passed over. The Latin historian is constrained to become - depending on modern whimsy - a rhetorician, a dramatist, a novelist, or, in the late-summer bloom of academic narcissism, a postmodern literary critic. What the Latin historian is not allowed to be is what he thought he chiefly was: a teller of true tales about the past.

Introduction

It was three days' walk from the borders of Attica to the crest of the vale of Laconia, from Athens, the city wreathed in violet, to Lacedaemon, clad in mountains and in bronze. The wayfarer from Athens left behind him the pandemonium of lucre, naval empire, and democracy, and entered the hushed streets of Sparta, where by an ancient law no coin might be found, where boys were schooled to silence and men to speak rarely and shortly, in the Laconic way. So close in miles but so contrary in manners, in the time of the Athenian statesman Pericles Athens and Sparta came to fight a great war together, the war we call the Peloponnesian War.

Two features of Sparta are especially important for understanding her relations with the Athens of Pericles. The first is the warlike quality of Spartan society. The toiling of Sparta's helots in the fields of Laconia and Messenia gave Spartans the leisure to devote themselves to hunting, athletics, and martial exercise. And the harsh Spartan upbringing, the whipping contests and starvation, and Spartan military training - no other state in fifth-century Greece trained all her citizen soldiers - left the Spartans supreme on the field of battle. This military dominance enabled the Spartans to forge an alliance of defeated, timid, or hopeful states, the Peloponnesian League (so we call it). Its members were wards against the rising of the helots, and allies against other enemies, especially against proud Argos, Sparta's old foe in the Peloponnese. But together Sparta’s league was as strong as its mistress: Sparta could bully one town or a few, but not all and not the greatest, such as Corinth.