Hey all, so i’m just finishing up Godfrey Hutchinson’s excellent Sparta: Unfit for Empire, which chronicles Sparta’s attempts to maintain its ill-fated hegemony in between Aigospotami and the destruction of the Athenian Fleet and their own loss at Leuktra.
What I was hoping for is a good read on the Third Sacred War — I find Phokis’ plundering of the Delphic treasures and creating a vast mercenary army out of nowhere to be fascinating, but I only ever see it covered as a backdrop to the rise of Philip of Macedon.
Does anyone have any good recommendations on this specific subject? I didn’t see any on the booklist.
From what I can tell, Hutchinson's work on Sparta is pretty traditional, and may not be sufficiently critical of its source material. It is largely built on some classic works on Sparta published in the 1980s, prior to the complete overhaul of scholarly views on this particular Greek society. I'm more familiar with Hutchinson's other two books, which suggest he is not a particularly incisive scholar, though one who is clearly very passionate about his subject. It would be best to take his work with a grain of salt, and to weigh it against some more up-to-date works (like Kennell's Spartans: A New History and Rusch's Sparta at War).
As for the Third Sacred War, there hasn't been much dedicated but accessible work on this conflict, since the source base is so thin. We're working with a bare-bones narrative in Diodoros 16 (starting at 16.23) plus scraps of other material. Your basic works in English will be John Buckler's Philip II and the Sacred War (1989) and Jeremy McInerney's The Folds of Parnassos: Land and Ethnicity in Ancient Phokis (1999).