ABSTRACT
In late summer or autumn 201 the Greek island-polis of Rhodes and the ruler of the Greek kingdom of Pergamum, Attalus I, jointly sent a deputation to Rome. Their request, that the Senate should authorize a second war against Philip V of Macedon, was later echoed by Athens. But it was the two newer eastern Mediterranean powers (the Pergamene kingdom, indeed, had not been carved out of the Seleucid empire until towards the mid-third century) to which Rome’s governing body attached most weight. Moreover, Rome herself, thanks to control of Italy and Sicily and defeat of Carthage in the Second Punic War (218-201), was now the greatest Mediterranean power of all. Here, then, was a sea-change in the wider and ultimately determining international framework of Sparta’s Hellenistic history. It meant that Nabis, unlike his most successful predecessor in the business of restoring somewhat his state’s power and glory (Cleomenes III), had to contend not only with Sparta’s neighbours and enemies of the Achaean League, her ambiguous and volatile friends and allies in Aetolia, and the mainland Greeks’ notional suzerain in Macedon, but also with the coming of Rome. For by the time of his accession in some capacity to what then passed for power in Sparta, the ‘clouds in the west’ famously descried by an Aetolian politician a decade earlier had risen above the political horizons of many Greeks and cast a looming shadow over all Greek interstate relations.1
