The late Southern writer Florence King once lamented that “a cornerstone of Western thought that has vanished without a trace is admiration for ancient Sparta.” There are good reasons why this should be so. Yet in the three decades since she penned those words, there has been a resurgence of “laconomania” at the popular and academic levels. Both books under consideration here — Andrew Bayliss’s Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower and Adrian Goldsworthy’s Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece — are fruit of this renewed interest. While they overlap considerably, it is the divergences between them that make them valuable, especially when read in tandem.Both concentrate on the period from the last couple of decades of the sixth century BC to the first few of the fourth — what Goldsworthy calls “a long fifth-century BC.” Yet the two authors begin their respective tales several centuries in the past, at the origins of what would become the two greatest powers of classical Greece. For Bayliss, who aims to relate how “Sparta grew from a collection of five villages in a remote corner of southern Greece into a world superpower,” one whose ultimate collapse was as dramatic as its rise, this is something of a problem: We know “frustratingly little” about Sparta prior to 700 BC. Moreover, there are “no contemporary Spartan sources to tell the true story.” Those we have are almost exclusively by outsiders, some written long after the events they describe. The one thing that stands out about the Lacedaemonians, when we finally do get records about them, is “the ruthlessness with which they conquered and enslaved their fellow Greeks” to guarantee themselves “a captive, self-reproducing human workforce.”Goldsworthy, too, discusses Sparta’s helots and their masters, but doesn’t get to them until over a hundred pages in. He begins at the beginning, with Homer, then follows with chapters on the Cretan and Mycenaean civilizations and the roots of Greek culture and language, the emergence of the Greek city-states, the great lawgivers Solon and Lycurgus, and the advent of the Pisistratid tyranny and its replacement by Athens’s democracy.