Hellenistic and Roman Sparta

A Regional History 1300-362 BC

Paul Cartledge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134503896
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In this new edition, Paul Cartledge and Antony Spawforth have taken account of recent finds and scholarship to revise and update their authoritative overview of later Spartan history, and of the social, political, economic and cultural changes in the Spartan community.
This original and compelling account is especially significant in challenging the conventional misperception of Spartan 'decline' after the loss of her status as a great power on the battlefield in 371 BC.
The book's focus on a frequently overlooked period makes it important not only for those interested specifically in Sparta, but also for all those concerned with Hellenistic Greece, and with the life of Greece and other Greek-speaking provinces under non-Roman rule.

II
Roman Sparta

Chapter seven
Sparta between sympolity and municipality

Conforming to their larger neglect of the period since Roman domination, writers of Greek history in the Imperial age by and large ceased to interest themselves in events at Sparta after (at the latest) 146 BC, looking instead for stirring historical narrative to the reassurances of the more distant Greek past. Even so, it took the passage of two centuries after 146 BC before we can readily recognize in Sparta Marrou’s ‘small and peaceful municipality in the unarmed province of Achaia’. In the intervening period local history—for such Sparta’s had now become—was anything but tranquil. The Late Republic saw the Spartans drawn willy-nilly, like the rest of Greece, into the drama of the Roman civil wars. The aftermath of Actium then witnessed the unexpected establishment at Sparta of a Roman client-dynasty, that of Eurycles and his descendants, under whose stormy three-generation régime the Spartans experienced for the last time something of the glamour of Hellenistic monarchy¹.

Between 146 BC and the outbreak of the First Mithradatic War in 88 BC, a period during which Greece as a whole enjoyed peace and prosperity, Spartan affairs are largely a blank. As a friendly noncombatant on the side-lines of the Achaean War the city was treated favourably by Mummius and the Roman commissioners. Although the ager Dentheliatis remained Messenian, it was probably now that Sparta recovered the Belminatis region on her north-western frontier with Megalopolis (chapter 10). Much more significantly for Sparta’s subsequent history, Rome now permitted the restoration of the ancestral Spartan polity, ‘as far as was possible after so many misfortunes and such degradations’ (Plut. Philop.16.9); as a result, the decades after 146 BC were probably a time of intense antiquarian activity at Sparta, concentrated above all on the recreation—after a fashion—of the ‘Lycurgan’ agōgē (chapter 14). The Mummian settlement left the defeated members of the old Achaean League and their allies hovering uncertainly between surveillance by the proconsuls of Macedonia and full provincialization (a Roman governor of Greece is not attested until 46 BC). As a free city, however, Sparta retained full local autonomy and, as a scatter of epigraphic evidence shows, continued to engage in the familiar routines of Hellenistic inter-city diplomacy until well into the first century BC: Spartan dikastai were honoured at Delphi c.100 BC, (chapter 14); in 81 BC the city was one of the long list of Greek communities recognizing the asylum-rights of the sanctuary of Hecate at Carian Lagina; and Spartan notables continued to cultivate overseas contacts with cities such as Thera—with which Sparta shared a tie of kinship—and Tralles.²

The period after 146 BC was also one of intensifying routine contact with Rome, reflected in the construction at Sparta of a special lodging for visiting Roman officials, which, as Kennell saw, must be later than the period of Achaean sympolity, since federal cities were not supposed to conduct independent diplomacy with Rome. The Late Republic was also a time in which Rome’s subject-communities in the east became increasingly enmeshed in ties of patronage with the great families of the Roman aristocracy, a development echoes of which can be clearly heard at Sparta. A passage in Suetonius reveals that by 40 BC the Spartans were clients of the powerful patrician clan of the Claudii (below); this tie was at least as old as c.100 BC, when the Spartan philosopher Demetrius dedicated a work to a Claudius Nero (chapter 13), and perhaps should be traced back to Ap. Claudius Pulcher (cos. 185 BC), a zealous supporter of the Spartans in their dealings with the Achaean League. Looking ahead somewhat, the importance to Sparta of such patronal ties emerges in the case of Cicero, whose letter of 46 BC recommending the city to the first governor of Greece, Ser. Sulpicius Rufus, still survives. Cicero twice alludes here to his indebtedness to the Spartans, a reference which has baffled commentators; presumably it relates to the trial at Rome in 59 BC of L.Valerius Flaccus, a former governor of Asia, when the Spartans obliged Cicero by sending character-witnesses to appear on his client’s behalf. The city’s ties with the eminent orator can be traced back to 79–7 BC, when the young Cicero paid a tourist’s visit to Sparta in the course of a period of study abroad. The letter reveals that his Spartan ties—conforming to a familiar pattern in this period—were dependent on a personal friendship with an otherwise unknown but no doubt eminent Spartan, one Philippus, at whose request he had undertaken to write the letter and in whose house at Sparta he perhaps had once stayed as a guest.³

From 88 BC until 31 BC Sparta found herself the reluctant participant in a succession of Roman wars using Greece as their theatre, the ensuing cost in Spartan lives and resources sounding a sombre note in local history during the last half-century of the Roman Republic. In this period the security of the Eurotas valley once more came under threat; not surprisingly, we now find evidence for repairs to the city’s mud-brick fortification wall (App. I, 9). Warfare returned to Greece in 88 BC, when Pontic fleets appeared in Greek waters seeking allies for the ambitious Mithradates VI of Pontus in his offensive against Rome’s eastern ascendancy. Spartan behaviour during the First Mithradatic War is obscure. If the Pontic local historian Memnon can be trusted, Pontic and Spartan troops clashed in battle—presumably following a sea-borne invasion of Laconia—and the Spartans suffered a defeat, after which the city ‘came over’ to Mithradates. Since there is no suggestion (in the admittedly sparse evidence) of internal stasis at Sparta at this juncture of the kind which Mithradates took advantage of at Athens, Deininger’s assumption of a formal treaty between Sparta and the king in 88 BC seems unlikely: Sparta did her best to remain loyal to Rome, as is suggested by the fact that the sources give no hint of meaningful Spartan support for Pontus after the city’s reverse, although military aid from the Laconian towns is well-documented.⁴

In 49 BC Greece was the chief theatre of war in the struggle between Caesar and Pompey. As with the Greeks generally, for whom Caesar at this time was still an unknown quantity, the Spartans had little choice but to support Pompey, the conqueror of the east, obeying a request for military aid by sending a contingent to Pharsalus in 48 BC. In a curious statement the second-century historian Appian claimed that these Spartan troops fought under the command of ‘their own basileis’. If this evidence has any weight presumably it means simply that the Spartan contingent was permitted its own commanders: Weil’s notion, that Sparta at the time was monarchically governed, is now firmly disproved by the Spartan coinage recently redated to the forties and thirties BC, its legends signifying ‘republican’ forms of government at this time.⁵

When another round of civil war broke out in 42 BC between Caesar’s assassins and the members of the Second Triumvirate, the Spartans showed a spark of their old independence, as they would do again in the Actium campaign, by giving their open support to the triumvirs Octavian and Antony. The decision was a courageous, even a foolhardy, one, taken at a time when Greece was under the authority of M. Brutus, the tyrannicide, whose harsh reaction was to promise Sparta to his soldiery as plunder in the event of victory; in so doing, Brutus revealed the limits of a Roman general’s sentimental laconism, which had earlier led him to name parts of his Italian estates after famous Spartan sights. The city’s decision was also a costly one: a Spartan contingent of 2,000 foot-soldiers was annihilated at the battle of Philippi—Sparta’s worst military disaster since Sellasia in 222 BC (chapter 4). It brought signal benefits for the Spartans, however; as a reward for their support, the triumvirs now took the unusual step of reversing an earlier Roman decision and returned the ager Dentheliatis to Sparta (chapter 10). In hindsight, moreover, we can see Philippi as marking the beginning of a warm relationship between Sparta and Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, one given further momentum in 38 BC by Octavian’s marriage to Livia: by both birth and her first marriage to Tib. Claudius Nero a member of the patrician Claudii, patrons of Sparta (above), Livia was personally indebted to the city for having given her a temporary asylum in 40 BC in the aftermath of the Perusine War. When civil war broke out nine years later, although Greece had meanwhile fallen to Antony’s sphere, Sparta once more made a display of independence by actively backing Octavian—the only city in Greece, along with her old Arcadian ally, Mantinea, to do so. As a result, the Spartans and their leading citizen, Eurycles, were uniquely placed in Greece to benefit from the favour of the victor of Actium, now the first Roman emperor.⁶

Before turning to Sparta’s fortunes in the aftermath of Actium, some estimate is required of the cost to local resources of a half-century of Roman warfare. Sparta’s exposure to the exploitative practices of Roman imperialism in this period may otherwise have been relatively slight: although the burdensome presence of Roman businessmen on the Laconian coast is well attested, they have left few traces at inland Sparta. The city’s heritage of artworks (see chapter 14) did not escape Roman attentions: we hear of a pair of Roman aediles (probably in 56 BC) ‘borrowing’ a Spartan painting to adorn their games at Rome. But the evidence chiefly concerns Roman demands for war-contributions in the form not only of men but also of supplies and cash—the ‘friendly liturgies’, as Strabo called them, from which Sparta’s free status did not exempt her (chapter 11). The city is unlikely to have escaped the obligation to supply the campaigns of M.Antonius against the pirates in 73–1 BC, when neighbouring Gytheum served as a hard-pressed Roman base, or to have been left unscathed by the demands imposed on Greece during its inclusion in the Balkan provincia of L.Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (58–5 BC), or those of Pompey in 49 BC, specifically said to have included the ‘free peoples’ of Greece, or those of the Republican admiral L.Staius Murcus, who in 42 BC ‘collected as much booty as he could come upon from the Peloponnese’. Coins and an inscription add some precision to this picture. A fragmentary decree of Late Republican date preserves an urgent appeal to the wealthy by Spartan magistrates for help in meeting a series of demands—presumably Roman—for cash. Grunauer-von Hoerschelmann’s study of Sparta’s coinage has shown that the twenty-nine issues previously dated to the period from 146 to 30 BC all belong to its last two decades, with almost half of them clustering in the thirties. These last included coins which closely resemble in weight the bronze denominations minted by Antony and his subordinates in this period for military purposes. It looks as if the revival of the Spartan mint after the mid-century was largely a response to Roman requests for cash, one of which can be firmly identified: the issue of 39–7 BC bears the portrait of L.Sempronius Atratinus, one of Antony’s legates.⁷

Because Sparta by now relied, like other Greek cities, on a system of euergetism to fund extraordinary expenditure (chapter 11), the immediate burden of these demands fell on the well-to-do, in the form either of civic requests for voluntary contributions, as in the decree noted above, or through the generosity of magistrates, as we learn from those Spartan coin-issues of the triumviral age inscribed with the titles of leading boards of civic officials (ephors, gerontes and nomophulakes) and presumably funded by them collectively. The immediate effect of these Roman demands will have been to divert the resources of the rich away from more routine civic needs, so that—for instance—civic cults would be celebrated on a reduced scale and public buildings might fall into disrepair, as seems to have happened at neighbouring Messene, where a wide-ranging programme of building-restoration was launched under Augustus. But the long-term impact of Roman levies on Greece in this period has perhaps been exaggerated: in Crawford’s view, ‘their effect on an economy whose basis was subsistence agriculture…would have been negligible’ (Crawford 1977). In Sparta’s case, the resilience of the upper classes (who no doubt managed to pass on most of the burden to their inferiors) is suggested by the case of the future family of the Voluseni: although a triumviral member, Aristocrates, son of Damares, was a generous contributor in his city’s time of need, funding more than one emission of bronze coinage, his great-grandchildren were to be found among Claudian Sparta’s ‘first families’.⁸

* * * * *

The remainder of this chapter is devoted to the most absorbing episode in the history of Sparta’s first two centuries under Roman domination: the rise—and fall—of the house of Eurycles. Members of this Spartan family are first attested in the triumviral age, a time of unsettled conditions in which provincial protégés of powerful Romans could acquire local prominence in the service of their patrons. Lachares, the father of Eurycles, seems to have been a Caesarian partisan: prominent enough to be courted by the Athenians, who placed his statue on their hallowed Acropolis, he was executed by Antony on a charge of ‘piracy’. As Chrimes saw, behind this episode perhaps lay his harassment of Antony’s supply-ships from Egypt as they rounded the Peloponnese on the eve of Actium. Eurycles first appears in history as the commander of a warship on Octavian’s side at Actium itself. How did a family from land-locked Sparta come to command ships in the triumviral age? The simplest explanation is that Antony’s charge against Lachares had some foundation in fact. Laconian waters were notorious for piracy, which saw something of a revival in the eastern Mediterranean during the triumviral age; as Bowersock observed, Lachares and his son perhaps were based on Cythera, the island which Eurycles later was given by Augustus as a gift (see below).⁹

As we might expect of a privateer, the family origins of Eurycles and his father are veiled in a certain mystery. Like the bluest-blooded of Roman Sparta’s ‘first families’, a Hadrianic descendant—the Spartan senator Eurycles Herculanus —grandly claimed the Dioscuri and (it seems) Heracles as ancestors (chapter 8). Eurycles himself, however, asserted a (by local standards) more recherché pedigree, naming a son after the demigod Rhadamanthys, whose mythical connections were with Crete, not Laconia: the impression given is of a social parvenu, a Spartan with aristocratic pretensions who did not quite dare, however, to claim one of the lineages deriving from figures of local myth and history with which the Roman city’s old aristocracy bristled (chapter 12). Eurycles was an adventurer, for whom the habits of the buccaneer died hard: at Actium, although claiming to be present to avenge his father’s execution, he was more interested in capturing one of Antony’s treasure-ships.¹⁰

For Eurycles the reward for his own and his father’s loyalty to Caesar was the gift of a personal dunasteia over the Spartans, the evidence for which was forcefully restated by Bowersock in 1961. This remarkable development is attested by Spartan coins bearing the legend ‘(issued) under Eurycles’ and by the Augustan geographer Strabo, who referred to his ‘rule’ (epistasia) over the Spartans and his position as their ‘leader’ (hēgemōn). This change from ‘republican’ to (effectively) monarchical government had occurred by 21 BC, when Eurycles celebrated the visit of Augustus (as Octavian had styled himself since 27 BC) and Livia with coin-issues portraying the Imperial couple; it makes best sense if seen as occurring soon after Actium, when the memory of the Spartan’s war-services was fresh in the victor’s mind. It is not easy to discern any ‘constitutional’ basis for the dunasteia of Eurycles. As far as is known he bore no official title; and the survival of the outward forms of local ‘republican’ government is suggested by the fact that in 21 BC Augustus dined in the company of the city’s magistrates (chapter 14). Like his Imperial patron, Eurycles seems to have exercised more or less arbitrary power behind a screen of constitutionalism. In doing so he was helped by prominent Spartan collaborators, among whom can be identified the priestly family which presided over the ancient civic cult of the Dioscuri at Phoebaeum and (perhaps) the mysterious Lysixenidas, named on one of his coin-issues. He also used his vast wealth (see below) to curry popular support with a programme of building (notably the theatre: see chapter 10) and shows (chapter 13). The ultimate sanction against any local opposition, however, was his friendship with the emperor, who heaped him with additional gifts: a grant of Roman citizenship, whereafter he became ‘C.Iulius Eurycles’, and the gift of Cythera—secured, it seems, through the intervention of Livia, whose powerful advocacy of her provincial clientela is well attested (could she have been the guest of Lachares during her Spartan visit in 40 BC?). In return, Eurycles made an assiduous display of his loyalty to the Imperial house. He was the founder and (almost certainly) the first priest of Sparta’s Imperial cult, the high-priesthood of which was later held by Eurycles Herculanus ‘by inheritance’. He also paid court to M.Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus, issuing coins in his honour when he visited Sparta in 16 BC during his tour of the east and (probably) instigating a Spartan association of ‘Agrippiastae’, of which his kinsman, C.Iulius Deximachus, is found as president.¹¹

To the obeisance of Eurycles to Rome can perhaps be attributed the local echoes, detectable in the inscriptions, of the Augustan programme of religious restoration. A revival under Eurycles of the outward forms of civic cult is suggested by three series of inscribed catalogues, all of them commencing early in the reign of Augustus. One series recorded the names of the three annual hierothutai and the personnel associated with them. These magistrates with priestly functions presided over the city’s ‘common hearth’ and—probably—the building in which it was housed; to judge from their title (literally ‘sacrificers’), along with their association with a seer and a ritual ‘cook-cum-butcher’ (mageiros), they were also responsible for performing sacrifices in Sparta’s name —a former royal prerogative which had evidently been transferred to civic magistrates after—at the latest—the fall of Nabis. The two other series of lists catalogue annual participants in the sacred banquets of two civic cults, those of the Dioscuri at Phoebaeum (chapter 14) and of Taenarian Poseidon, whose Spartan cult was a ‘branch’ of the famous sanctuary on Cape Taenarum, once itself under Spartan control. The activities which these catalogues reflect presuppose sizeable outlays on cerem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Preface to the second edition
• Maps
• I: Hellenistic Sparta
• II: Roman Sparta
• Appendix I: The monuments of Roman Sparta
• Appendix II: Catalogues of magistrates
• Appendix III: Hereditary tendencies in the Curial Class
• Appendix IV: Foreign agōnistai at Sparta
• Notes
• Bibliographical appendix to the second edition
• Bibliographical addenda to the second edition
• Bibliography
• Abbreviations