ABSTRACT
We begin, however, by returning to the reigns of Severus and Caracalla, when the city still displayed signs of the prosperity which it enjoyed in the first half of the second century. After a lull in the 170s and 180s, catalogues of magistrates were once more being inscribed, albeit in nothing like the same numbers as under Trajan and Pius (App.IIA, Table). The city’s festivals in this period continued to be celebrated and these and other cultural activities still attracted foreign visitors (chapters 13-14). But indications exist too of disturbing social developments. An increasing cleavage between the uppermost and lower ranks of the curial class is suggested by the appearance in Severan inscriptions of a new range of honorific epithets and titles, borne for the most part by members of a small number of leading families: ‘the most worthy’, ‘the all-first’, ‘the best and from the best’, and so on. A dominant interrelated clique of these families can be identified, centred on the descendants of Tib. Claudius Brasidas, a Spartan senator under Marcus Aurelius, and the old family of the Memmii, together with houses of more recent prominence such as the Pomponii and the Aelii. As some of them had done for generations, these families continued to produce civic benefactors, as with C.Pomponius Panthales Diogenes Aristeas, whose unstinting term as agoranomos in the early 220s earned him no fewer than twelve honorific statues, or his father-in-law P. Memmius Pratolaus qui et Aristocles, lavishly honoured a few years earlier for outstanding service in connection with the patronomate. In this period, however, reluctance to hold
office among Spartans of curial rank is also increasingly in evidence; the claim of the ex-patronomos Sex. Pompeius Spatalus to have undertaken his second term as gymnasiarch ‘voluntarily’ implies that compulsion was now in use to propel reluctant candidates into tenure of civic magistracies and liturgies. More remarkable as a pointer to the changing atmosphere of local politics are the repeated patronomates of the god Lycurgus. Having held the patronomate three times between about 140 and 221, this Spartan deity did so no fewer than eight times between 221 and about 240. These ‘divine’ patronomates were a financial stratagem, enabling the city to fund the expenses of the office in question from the revenues of the cult (chapter 14).1
