ABSTRACT
In her book on Sparta Chrimes claimed ‘general evidence of continuity’ between the ‘constitution’ of the Roman city and that of earlier times. In doing so she echoed, unwittingly or not, an important facet of the Spartan myth in later antiquity, one which stressed the longevity of Spartan institutions. In 60 BC, for instance, Cicero could claim of the Spartans in a Roman court that ‘alone in the whole world they have now lived for more than 700 years with the same customs and unchanged laws’. However opposed the reality, the citizens of Roman Sparta had an interest in maintaining an archaizing veneer to the conduct of their affairs, since the Romans-at least in the Late Republic-were well-known admirers of the pristine Spartan polity, to the extent that the gerousia and other alleged institutions of Lycurgus were even claimed as political influences on the early kings of Rome. A cursory glance at the evidence does indeed suggest a certain absence of change: ephors and gerontes survived; local government still operated through rhētrai’, and linguistic archaism lent an antique air to procedural language. The reality, it is argued below, was somewhat different: the reforms of Cleomenes III and Nabis, the abolition of the dual kingship, the legacy of a half-century of sumpoliteia with the Achaean League and the indirect but increasingly pervasive influence of Rome, all ensured that institutional continuity was more apparent than real.1
