Hellenistic and Roman Sparta
Paul Cartledge & Antony Spawforth
312 pages including index
published in 2002
When most people think of Sparta their first thought will probably be about that godawful movie based on that godawful Frank Miller comic 300: This! IS! Sparta! and all that. For all its faults, it does mirror the common view of Sparta as a warrior state, one of the superpowers of classical Greece, indomitable in its resistance to tyrannical Persia, if not quite a democracy itself. But there is more to Sparta’s history. There’s a tendency in pop history to look only at the classic Sparta, to lose interest once it has been overtaken by Thebe and lost its supremacy, just before the rise of Macedon under Philip and Alexander. What happened to the city once it became just another polis doesn’t interest us all that much, it seems.
We should therefore be grateful for books like this: Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: a Tale of Two Cities which does look at Sparta’s history after its fall from grace, first under Macedon rule, then under Rome. It was originally published in the early nineties, but updated for a second edition in 2002. More of a textbook than a pop history book, but I’ve struggled through much drier texts. At the very least it was an effective treatment of a part of Greek history I’m not that familiar with.