The history of Lakonia in the late Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods deserves a book to itself. Here I shall give only a chronological sketch of the years from 362 BC to AD 78, in order to indicate how Sparta lost its remaining Helots and Perioikoi, how what we have for convenience labelled ‘Lakonia’ shrank in size correspondingly, and how the Spartans by the first century AD had become exhibits in a museum of their past.
After the losses of manpower and territory in the wake of Leuktra, Sparta next suffered such losses in 338 at the hands of Philip II of Macedon. The Spartans had not fought with the Greeks he defeated at Chaironeia, but neither would they join his League of Corinth. In return, perhaps after a fruitless attempt at negotiation, Philip laid Lakonia waste as far south as Gytheion and formally deprived Sparta of Dentheliatis (and apparently the territory on the Messenian Gulf as far as the Little Pamisos river), Belminatis, the territory of Karyai and the east Parnon foreland (Roebuck 1948, 86-9, 91f.). The principal beneficiaries were respectively Messene, Megalopolis, Tegea and Argos; but the latter at least seems to have been unable to reap the full benefit of Philip’s largesse, since in the early third century Tyros and Zarax were still in Spartan control (Charneux 1958, 9-12).
By the time Agis IV ascended the Eurypontid throne in c.244, the number of Spartiates had further declined from Aristotle’s ‘not even 1,000’ (in the 360s?) to ‘not more than 700’ (Plut. Agis 5.6). Of the latter, Plutarch says, perhaps only 100 possessed a kleros as well as real property. How Plutarch understood the distinction between these two kinds of land is unclear, although I suspect that he wrongly believed the kleros to have been inalienable and somehow publicly owned before the rhetra of Epitadeus (cf. Chapter 10). What is clear, however, is that by the mid-third century the ‘Lykourgan’ system of social organization, with its strict nexus between agoge, kleros, common mess, army and citizenship, had completely broken down. Most of the non-Perioikic land in Lakonia was in the hands of women (Agis’ mother and grandmother were the two richest women in Sparta), while the majority of those who were not either Perioikoi or Helots were
Hypomeiones or what Plutarch describes as ‘an indigent and disenfranchised mob’.
To remedy this drastic situation, Agis proposed to realize the twin revolutionary slogan of all oppressed Greek peasantries, cancellation of debts and redistribution of the land. He, however, was executed in 241, and it was left for the Agiad king Kleomenes III to carry out Agis’ plans in a modified form in 227. The propaganda of Agis and Kleomenes, preserved in Plutarch, and the counter-propaganda of the recently established and hostile Achaian League, preserved in Polybius, have made a sorry mess of the evidence for the original ‘Lykourgan’ regime, as we saw in Chapter 10. We are no more in a position to say whether the programme of Agis and Kleomenes ‘was devised by them for the greater good of the world at large, of Spartans, of Sparta, or of themselves’ (Forrest 1968, 144). Clearly, however, the essence of the programme was an attempt to increase the numbers of the Spartiates, resubmit this enlarged body to the ‘Lykourgan’ regime and so restore Sparta’s military and political status to what it had been before 371. The new Spartiates, making a total of about 4,000, were drawn from the Hypomeiones, Perioikoi and foreigners. The Helots, on the other hand, were to remain the economic basis of Spartan power.
This revolution was certainly a step in the right direction, but it is, I think, an exaggeration to say that ‘now for the first time the Spartan State utilised to the full the resources of the country and its population’ (Toynbee 1913, 274). For a few years, though, Kleomenes did achieve remarkable success both at home and abroad, until his unremitting hostility to the Achaian League served as the occasion for a second Macedonian intervention in Lakonia in 223 or 222. Kleomenes’ new army was hastily reinforced by some 6,000 emancipated Helots, who unlike the 6,000 or more enlisted in 370 were required to purchase their freedom with cash (Plut. Kleom. 23.1). Even so the fewer than 20,000 men on Kleomenes’ side were no match for the 30,000 troops under king Antigonos Doson, who won a crushing victory at Sellasia and then proceeded to take Sparta itself, the first time the site had been occupied by outsiders since the Dorian ‘invasion’ of the tenth century (Chapter 7). Sparta was forcibly enrolled in the Hellenic League and subjected to a Macedonian governor. Moreover, as in 338, Macedonian intervention had unfavourable implications for the size of Lakonia. For Doson either confirmed or renewed the dispensations of Philip II, as far as Dentheliatis and the east Parnon foreland were concerned, and he seems also to have deprived Sparta of (presumably Perioikic) Leukai, which is perhaps to be associated with the Hyperteleaton sanctuary.
The immediate aftermath of Sellasia was fifteen years of political and social chaos in Lakonia, complicated internationally by the intervention of Rome in Greece against Macedon and the Achaian League. By 206 Sparta naturally enough found itself on the Roman side, but in that year the central direction of Spartan affairs was assumed by a third revolutionary leader,
Nabis, allegedly a direct descendant of the deposed Damaratos. His overriding aim (savagely misrepresented of course by our uniformly hostile sources) was no doubt the same as that of Agis and Kleomenes; but his methods were significantly different in two crucial respects. First, whereas Kleomenes had freed Helots purely for military reasons, Nabis emancipated them in order to prop up his rule. Logically, therefore, he made them beneficiaries of his land redistribution and incorporated them in the Spartan citizen body. (It is possible too that under Nabis the state, as in Crete, was made responsible for financing the common messes.) Second, whereas Kleomenes had put all his military eggs into one land-orientated basket, Nabis also built up Sparta’s first-ever navy of any value and used the Perioikoi of the coastal towns of Lakonia as his elite troops (though apparently without giving them citizenship).
For about a decade Nabis (and Sparta) prospered remarkably, but in 197 he made the twofold mistake, in Roman eyes, of accepting Argos from Philip V of Macedon (by then deserted by the Achaian League) and extending his social programme to that city. In 196 Philip was defeated by the Romans, whose representative, T. Quinctius Flamininus, then invaded Lakonia. Nabis was not in fact eradicated, since, as Briscoe (1967, 9) has rightly pointed out, the aim of Flamininus was ‘a balance of power, not upper-class constitutional government, and he preferred to tolerate the continued existence of a revolutionary government in Sparta rather than allow the Achaean League excessive power in the Peloponnese’. The importance of Nabis and Sparta, however, was irretrievably reduced by the liberation of the remaining Perioikic dependencies and their transfer either to the direct control of Argos (in the case of Prasiai to Zarax inclusive) or to the general protection of the Achaian League. Perhaps it was between 195 and the death of Nabis in 192 that the liberated Perioikic towns went over to the Roman side and were formally recognized as the ‘Koinon (League) of the Lakedaimonians’. Sparta, however, retained its ‘Lykourgan’ socio-economic institutions, including the by now severely reduced Helot base, until 188, when all were violently abrogated by the Achaian League (of which Sparta had been a member perforce since 192).
In 146, however, the Achaian League was itself disbanded, greatly to the benefit of Sparta, which had opposed the League’s attempt to shake off the Roman yoke. Under the aegis of Rome Sparta seems to have recovered Belminatis and Aigytis from Megalopolis, but Dentheliatis remained Messenian. It was perhaps now that the few remaining Helots exchanged their anomalous status for another. Thereafter the Spartan propertied class derived its surplus from the exploitation of chattel slaves or tenants.
The struggle for control of the Roman world between Antony and Octavian/Augustus also redounded to the advantage of the Spartans, since they had taken the winning side. According to the Augustan settlement, presumably of 27, Lakonia was divided into two separate political entities,
Sparta (with enlarged territory: below) and the ‘Koinon of the Free Lakonians’ (the Eleutherolakonian League). The League originally comprised twenty-four members, but of these only eighteen remained by c. AD 150, the time of Pausanias (3.21.7): Gytheion, Teuthrone, Las, Pyrrhichos, Kainepolis (the successor to Tainaron, established at modern Kyparissi on the opposite, western, flank of south Mani), Oitylos, Leuktra (in north-west Mani), Thalamai, Alagonia, Gerenia, Asopos, Akriai, Boiai, Zarax, Epidauros Limera, Prasiai, Geronthrai and Marios. The six communities which had left the League or disappeared between 27 BC and c. AD 150 may have been Kotyrta, Hippola, Pharai, Kyphanta, Leukai and Pephnos. The original total of twenty-four corresponds roughly to the thirty or so ‘polichnai’ referred to by the contemporary Strabo (8.4.11, C362), and the decrease from the conventionally 100 (actually perhaps eighty) of the fourth century has been plausibly explained as the result of political amalgamations by the smaller communities after 195. The process of amalgamation may have been furthered by an absolute decline in the former Perioikic population from the mid-second century.
The new, separate Sparta appears to have controlled the Eurotas furrow as far south as Aigiai, together with Skiritis and the territory of Karyai. In addition, Augustus ceded to the Spartans Kardamyle, Thouria and Kythera, the two former giving them respectively an outlet to the sea and a foothold in the south-east Pamisos valley, the latter becoming more or less the personal property of the Spartan C. Julius Eurycles (Bowersock 1961). The chief losers by the Augustan dispensation were of course the Messenians, who had improvidently sided with Antony at Actium. Their southern boundary with the Free Lakonians was fixed at the Choireios Nape (modern Sandava gorge) towards Alagonia and Gerenia, but to the north they lost among other territory the psychologically important Dentheliatis (in dispute since the eighth century).
Under Tiberius, however, in AD 25 the Dentheliatis was returned to the Messenians by the Senate (Tac. Ann. 4.42), and in AD 78 a boundary commission under the auspices of Vespasian confirmed the award. The official record of the AD 78 boundary between Messenian and Spartan territory has been found at ancient Messene (IG V.1.1431), and the discovery of boundary-marks helps us to trace the frontier from the sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis in the south (where the whole trouble may have begun: Chapter 8) to a point not far east of ancient Asea (Chrimes 1949, 60-70; Kahrstedt 1950, 232-42; Giannokopoulos 1953).
It is also with the Flavian period that there commences in earnest the mass of epigraphical material bearing on the Spartan social system. This material was first comprehensively studied by Chrimes (1949, 84-168) and, whatever errors of fact and interpretation she may have committed, her overall conclusion—that in their social organization the Spartans were monumentally conservative—is cogent and indeed unsurprising. It was, however, an empty and fetishistic conservatism. ‘The keeping up of ancient appearances was no more than a colourful stage setting for the benefit of visitors, particularly wealthy Romans, who would come to Sparta as to one of the most famous cities of Greek history’ (Oliva 1971, 318)—partly, we might add, to witness the floggings in the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia (Appendix 5). Perhaps as good an indication as any of Lakonian decadence is conveyed by the suggestion of Rawson (1969, 107f.) that ‘the ordinary Roman_ would seem to have thought, when he heard the word Laconia, primarily of the hunting dogs, fine marble, and purple dye that she exported, and perhaps also of the hot-air chamber in the baths called the “laconicum”.’ Sic transit gloria.
Notes on further reading
For the main outlines of the changes in Sparta’s former dominions I have mostly followed Toynbee 1969, 405-13; other modern work has been cited in the text.
Will 1966 covers thoroughly, and with helpful bibliographical notes, the political history of the Greek world in the last three centuries BC; for Hellenistic Sparta as a whole add now Oliva 1971, 201-318; and for the century prior to the Roman conquest Shimron 1972.
The revolutions of Agis, Kleomenes and Nabis are considered from the standpoint of the treatment of the Helots by Welwei (1974, 161-74). Tarn 1925 remains a stimulating essay on the wider socio-economic situation in Greece in the third century.
World History
