ABSTRACT
The cultural sterility of Classical Sparta was notorious in antiquity, as it remains today. Although there is a danger of exaggeration where the decorative arts are concerned, it remains clear that literacy was ‘very thinly spread’ and that the city as a whole played no part in the intellectual revolution of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. By contrast, there is a large amount of evidence, brought together in this chapter for the first time, to show that the ‘normalization’ of Spartan society in the course of the Hellenistic period brought with it the city’s reabsorption into the mainstream of Greek cultural life. Two major aspects of this process are charted here: firstly, the Roman city’s links with contemporary Greek ‘high’ culture, sufficiently developed by the fourth century for Sparta to emerge as a minor centre of higher studies; and, secondly, the foundation at Sparta by the third century of no fewer than three agonistic festivals of international status, as a consequence of which the city acquired a certain prominence on the Roman Empire’s agonistic circuit.1
