ABSTRACT
Scholars cannot agree whether Philip’s son Alexander III the Great was the first Hellenistic king or whether the Hellenistic epoch properly so called began rather with the struggles for supremacy of the ‘Successors’ after his premature death in June 323. In a sense the dispute is fruitless, since all periodization of the past is more or less arbitrary (as was noted at the start of the last chapter). In a yet more relevant sense, though, this dispute is also beside the point, as the history of Sparta cannot be slotted conveniently into the conventional ‘Classical’ to ‘Hellenistic’ transition, wherever the point of transition may be fixed. For as she had done since 362, so under Alexander and his immediate successors Sparta continued to cut a lone furrow in soil that was generally thin and stony. This is why the present chapter does not end with either of the two traditional clausulae of the Greek Classical period, Alexander’s death or the defeat of the Greek rebellion of 323-2, but with the decease of the prodigious nonentity Cleomenes II. It focuses, moreover, on Sparta’s self-centred war of resistance against Greece’s new suzerain as a symbol of her continued exclusion from the mainstream of Greek political, economic and cultural life.1
