SOURCE: Cartledge, Paul, and Antony Spawforth. “The Image of Tradition.” In Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: A Tale of Two Cities, pp. 190-211. London: Routledge, 1989.

In the following excerpt, Cartledge and Spawforth affirm the archaism of Roman Sparta in its memorial observance of social traditions from the classical period.

[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...