Spawforth Antony - Hellenistic and Roman Sparta : a tale of two cities

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 Spartas 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 pentekontatia 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.

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 traditionor, in V. Ehrenbergs 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 Spartas enforced transition from city-state to provincial town were prefigured by the domestic reforms of Spartas 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 recreationor inventionof 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 Spartas 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 its Roman summer drew from the recollection of past glories and which, in turn, contributed to the survival of a unitary Roman state in the east into the Middle Ages in the form of the Byzantine Empire.