ABSTRACT
The Euryclid dunasteia lasted intermittently for almost a century, a period during which the evidence for internal conditions at Sparta is slight. In the later first century, however, the number of surviving inscriptions rises steeply (e.g. App. IIA, Table), illuminating the Roman city with some clarity for the first time. This epigraphic abundance partly reflects the re-establishment at Sparta of ‘republican’ government: the practice of inscribing catalogues of civic magistrates in the theatre begins under the Flavians, and to Trajan’s reign dates the earliest of the inscribed careers of municipal notables (chapter 11). Since inscriptions required skilled labour and a supply of suitable types of stone, fluctuations in the local attachment to the ‘epigraphic habit’ also have an economic significance. By the mid-first century, when ‘the marks of war and depression [in Achaia] had probably been largely effaced’ (Jones 1971b), parts of the province, Sparta included, were enjoying a modest prosperity. Indeed, under the Flavians and Trajan civic life at Sparta displays a distinct vitality, which to some extent was encouraged by the increasing paternalism in the provinces of the central government. Vespasian is attested as the donor of funds for building activity at Sparta’s theatre-one of the occasions, perhaps, when he responded to requests for aid from provincial cities damaged by earthquake; and benefaction of some kind by Trajan is suggested by the honorific title of ‘saviour’ (sōtēr) which he received from the Spartans. The Flavian and Trajanic age also saw an increase in the beneficent activities of local notables, whom the suppression of the Euryclid dunasteia now left free to acquire prominence as patrons of their community. Their competitive ‘love of honour’, essential if civic life and institutions were to receive adequate funding, received new encouragement under Trajan with the institution of the so-called contest for best citizen (chapter 11); mostly it took the routine form of discharging the city’s liturgical offices in a generous fashion, as with the Flavian gymnasiarch Tib. Claudius Harmonicus, praised by one of the Roman city’s tribes, the Cynosureis, for his ‘incomparable magnanimity’ towards them.1
