Hellenistic and Roman Sparta

318 Pages·2001·10.51 MB·English

by  Paul Cartledge

Hellenistic and Roman Sparta
States and Cities of Ancient Greece
Edited by R F Willetts
Emeritus Professor of Greek, University of Birmingham
Already published
Argos and the Argolid
From the end of the Bronze Age to the Roman occupation
R A Tomlinson
The foundations of palatial Crete
A survey of Crete in the early Bronze Age
K Branigan
Sparta and Lakonia
A regional history 1300–362 BC
P A Cartledge
Mycenaean Greece
J T Hooker
The Dorian Aegean
E M Craik
The Ionians and Hellenism
A study of the cultural achievement of the early Greek inhabitants ofAsia Minor
C J Emlyn-Jones
Thebes in the fifth century
Heracles resurgent
N Demand
Hellenistic and Roman Sparta
A tale of two cities
Second edition
Paul Cartledge
and
Antony Spawforth
London and New York
This book is dedicated to The Ephoria of Arkadia—
Lakonia and The British School at Athens with
affection and gratitude.
First published 1989
First published in 1992
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001
Second edition first published 2002
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 1989, 1992, 2002Paul Cartledge and Antony Spawforth
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers..
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-48218-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-63164-1 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-26277-1 (Print Edition)
Contents
Preface viii
Maps xiii
PART I HELLENISTIC SPARTA (BY PAUL CARTLEDGE)
1 In the shadow of empire: Mantinea to Chaeronea 2
2 Resistance to Macedon: the revolt of Agis III 14
3 The new Hellenism of Areus I 25
4 Reform—or revolution? Agis IV and Cleomenes III 35
5 Sparta between Achaea and Rome: the rule of Nabis 54
6 Sparta from Achaea to Rome (188–146 BC) 73
PART II ROMAN SPARTA (BY ANTONY SPAWFORTH)
7 Sparta between sympolity and municipality 85
8 Sparta in the Greek renaissance 96
9 Pagans and Christians: Sparta in late antiquity 110
10 The Roman city and its territory 117
11 Local government I: machinery and functions 132
12 Local government II: the social and economic base 148
13 High culture and agonistic festivals 163
14 The image of tradition 176
15 Epilogue: Sparta from late antiquity to the Middle Ages 196
APPENDICES 199
I The monuments of Roman Sparta 199
II Catalogues of magistrates 208
vii
III Hereditary tendencies in the Curial Class 212
IV Foreign agōnistai at Sparta 214
Notes 217
Bibliographical appendix 253
Bibliographicals addenda to the second edition 258
Bibliography 262
Abbreviations 284
General index 285
Preface
The aim of this book is to offer an account of Sparta over the eight centuries or
so between her loss of ‘great power’ status in the second quarter of the fourth
century BC and the temporary occupation of the late antique city by the Gothic
chieftain Alaric in AD 396. Books on Sparta are hardly rare. One of the chief
novelties of this one is that it sets out to give full weight to the Roman phase in
Sparta’s story, rather than making of it the usual epilogue or (at best) final
chapter in a study preoccupied with the earlier periods. We thereby hope to
provide a book which will interest, not only students of Sparta tout court, but
also those concerned with the life of Greece and other Greek-speaking
provinces under Roman rule.
Hellenistic Sparta, however, had entered the Roman Empire by no mundane
route. In line with her age-old and deeply-entrenched particularism, and indeed
by revivifying her esoteric traditions of political and socio-economic
organization under the slogan of a return to the ‘constitution of Lycurgus’,
Sparta resisted Roman incorporation right up to the last possible moment. And
before Rome, Macedon and the Achaean League had been treated to a similarly
defiant denial. For although old Greece (‘old’ by comparison with the post-
Alexander Hellenic diaspora) as a whole was de facto subjugated by Macedon in
338 BC, Sparta persisted in ploughing an isolationist and oppositionist furrow,
remaining de jure independent not just of Macedon but also of all Greek multi-
state organizations (not excluding their anti-Macedonian manifestations), until
she was formally and forcibly incorporated in the by then Rome-dominated
Achaean League in 192 BC. This was the culmination, or nadir, of an
extraordinary pentekontaëtia during which a succession of Spartan kings (alias
‘tyrants’ to their articulate enemies) sought with surprising success to maintain
the traditional freedom and self-determination of the Greek polis. This they
achieved in spite or because of the most extreme measures of domestic reform,
measures that some observers then and now would controversially label
‘revolutionary’, notwithstanding the ideological appeal to supposedly ancestral
‘Lycurgan’ precedent and inspiration. Sparta, in short, in the Hellenistic era
retains an interest, an importance and a distinctiveness that merit and demand
historical enquiry no less insistently than her hitherto more illustrious Archaic
and Classical predecessors.
ix
What of the Roman period? The time now seems ripe for taking a fresh look at
Roman Sparta. In the last half-century the Greek world under Roman rule has
become relatively well-mapped territory, not least as a result of the stupendous
scholarship of the late Louis Robert, whose meticulous studies of the post-
Classical polis through its epigraphy and numismatics to a greater or lesser extent
underpin all modern work on the subject, including the Roman section of this
volume. The only major study of Roman Sparta to date, that of Chrimes (1949),
neglected this larger perspective, adopting instead a retrospective stance and
using the evidence for the Roman city merely as ‘the starting point for a fresh
examination of the evidence about the earlier period’. Her approach was partly a
response to that aspect of the Roman city which has most struck modern
observers: its tenacious attachment to ancestral tradition—or, in V. Ehrenberg’s
less flattering formulation, ‘the tragi-comedy of Spartan conservatism’. Part Two
of the present volume offers, in effect, a reappraisal of the approach of Chrimes.
It aims, firstly, to bring Roman Sparta firmly down to earth: to show that the
Roman city resembled other provincial Greek communities in its political,
cultural and socioeconomic organization, displaying the characteristic features
of the age from emperor-worship and benefactor-politicians to colonnaded
streets and hot baths. As we hope to show, some of the changes arising from
Sparta’s enforced transition from ‘city-state to provincial town’ were prefigured
by the domestic reforms of Sparta’s Hellenistic kings, Nabis in particular; to view
Sparta under Roman rule (from 146 BC onwards, that is) without reference to
the immediately preceding period would be to lose an essential historical
perspective.
Part Two then re-examines Spartan archaism in the Roman era, with a view
to showing that this aspect of local civic life likewise had its larger context, that
of the archaeomania which, with Roman encouragement, gripped the Greek-
speaking provinces during the last century BC and the first three AD; in this
period the recreation—or invention—of the past is best viewed as a form of
cultural activity in its own right. The likelihood of real ‘continuity’ is
diminished by this acknowledgement of the extent of Greek antiquarianism
under Roman rule. On the other hand, the overshadowing of Greek culture in
this period by the achievements of the past gave provincial Sparta, home of the
widely admired Spartan myth, the opportunity to acquire a new international
prominence, above all during the cultural flowering in the second and third
centuries sometimes called the Greek renaissance. Part Two aims, finally, to
document for the first time Sparta’s unforeseen evolution during these two
centuries into a touristic, agonistic and even an intellectual centre. Although the
Graeco Roman cultural outlook which permitted this development had its banal
side, the development itself is of some interest. It confirms that rumours of the
death of Sparta, which buzzed around the corridors of power in antiquity from
the late 370s BC onwards and have been too hastily believed in more recent days,
are in fact seriously exaggerated. If we stand further back, we can see it as a
startling manifestation of the cultural cohesiveness which Greek civilization in