ABSTRACT
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.
