Few historians of the ancient world put it quite this way, but the Peloponnesian War was won off the bench.
It was an unusually powerful bench, even by modern-day Springbok standards, containing as it did the vast financial weight of the Persian Empire, but that’s what happens when the glittering prizes are up for grabs.
“The strong do what they can,” says Thucydides in his account of Sparta’s victory over Athens, “and the weak suffer what they must.”

All of which leads us, in an unashamedly far-fetched fashion, to the current international rugby scene, a little under two years shy of the...