ABSTRACT
Among the free population of Sparta, until the Antonine constitution of 212 or 213 the chief formal status-division remained the one between citizen and noncitizen. Given the largely honorific function of Roman Sparta’s ‘epigraphic habit’, the citizens (or Lakedaimonioi, as they were officially called) about whom we know most are those whose office-holding is so copiously documented in local inscriptions. That these Spartans formed an economically privileged group within the civic community is implied by the liturgical character of local politics, which, as we have seen (chapter 11), favoured men of property as candidates for office. As well as its pronounced aristocratic element (below), this same group was probably socially privileged in a broader sense, since it is now known from the letter of M.Aurelius to the Athenians that Greek cities in the second century, to guard against infiltration by persons of freedman descent, not uncommonly required proof of three generations of free birth (trigonia) from candidates for major magistracies (although at Sparta no less than at Athens, as we shall see, ambitious and well-connected persons of freedman stock were able to evade such restrictions). Under Roman influence Sparta’s chief magistrates and their families also came to constitute a legally privileged group. From the reign of Hadrian, Roman law recognized as a status-group with special rights the so-called honestiores or ‘more honourable’, who included not only the Roman aristocracy but also the councillors (decuriones in the Latin west, bouleutai in the Greek east) of the provincial cities, together with their families. As was seen in chapter 11, the equivalent of a municipal boulē at Roman Sparta was the composite council of the gerontes, ephors, and nomophulakes. Like decurions elsewhere these magistrates enjoyed a special status locally. Under the principate, they possessed the privilege of sitēsis or meals at public expense (chapter 14). They also had special seats at civic festivals. That this was so in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, where the annual ephebic contests were held (chapter 14), is suggested by the marble bench dedicated in the late first century BC by two Spartans, one of them a former gerōn, the other almost certainly an ex-magistrate too: as Dawkins saw, this was an ‘official seat’, ‘a less less ostentatious predecessor of the magisterial tribune’ built probably on the same spot during the tetrarchic remodelling of the sanctuary. Secondly, excavations in the theatre produced an inscribed stēlē (not in situ) with the one word ‘boulēs’ or
‘belonging to the council’; although the text is not firmly dated, its letter-forms would best suit a date no earlier than the second century. Woodward made the attractive suggestion that this stēlē served to demarcate a zone of seating within the cavea set aside for ‘councillors’—to be identified, in that case, with the gerontes, ephors and nomophulakes’, if Woodward is right, it is likely that seating arrangements in the cavea as a whole were organised so as to mirror the local status-hierarchy, as in Graeco-Roman theatres elsewhere. In conclusion, given that Sparta’s composite council was already marked in the first half of the second century by a strong hereditary element, it seems justified to refer, from this period onwards if no earlier, to a Spartan curial or bouleutic class, comprising the pool of families which provided the city with its ephors, nomophulakes and gerontes, together with its chief liturgists.1
