Sparta: ancient Greece’s foremost slave state?

Abstract

I was deeply honoured to be invited to participate by delivering a paper in my dear friend Vincent’s 65th birthday symposium held at the Saxo-Institute, Copenhagen, on 30 November 2015. I first encountered our honorand on the page, as the author of important work on Athenian public finance, taxation and social relations in the Athenian democracy especially of the 4th century BCE, and was delighted to get to know him and his family well in the flesh later on during his tenure of a Visiting Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, 1988-89. Many thanks therefore to Peter Fibiger Bang both for co-organising the birthday symposium and for inviting me to take part in the published proceedings. For various reasons, however, including the publication of my Democracy book (2018), it did not prove possible for me to write up for this volume a version of my symposium talk, ‘Navy and Democracy/Democracy and Navy at Athens: A Democratic Life in Review’. Instead, therefore, by agreement with and indeed at the urging of Peter, I revisit here an old but still very lively scholarly battleground.