ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have attempted to show how the profound political, social, and economic changes undergone by Sparta in the last three centuries BC had the effect of levelling much of the city’s old distinctiveness. In the Roman Empire’s heyday, under the Antonines and the Severi, Sparta emerges as in many ways a typical provincial Greek city, with its comfortable urban amenities, its up-to-date entertainments and its society dominated by a wealthy educated élite but not impervious to one of the characteristic figures of the Imperial age, the successful parvenu of freedman stock. On first sight this picture seems at odds with perhaps the best known aspect of Roman Sparta today: the maintenance, until as late as the fourth century, of an archaizing ‘Lycurgan’ facade to civic life. In fact, the ‘Lycurgan customs’ of Classical Sparta (as they were remembered or reconstructed in the Roman age) formed only one element in a set of local traditions informing and shaping a wide range of civic activities. Moreover, modern perceptions of archaism at Roman Sparta have been distorted by a tendency to see it in isolation, without reference to its links with the political and cultural preoccupations of the larger Roman world in which Sparta was now embedded. In Rome’s Greek-speaking provinces, where ‘ancient tradition was the touchstone of civic life’, archaism of one sort or another was a widespread civic phenomenon, above all in the age of the Greek renaissance, when it was encouraged by the Greek policies of Roman emperors such as Hadrian (chapter 8). From this larger provincial perspective Sparta is chiefly interesting because-for reasons to which we shall return-the dialogue between past and present was louder and more persistent there than in many other cities. This chapter explores three ‘themes’ in this dialogue, two major and one minor: the rôle of Sparta in the Persian wars on the one hand, on the other ancestral religion and the Lycurgan customs. An attempt will then be made to analyse, in Sparta’s particular case, the dynamics of local archaism.1
