Quote:Bad question...but when did Sparta fall? Did it collapse with the Roman empire?
Not at all a bad question, but one that is not so easy to answer. I recently summarized the fate of Sparta on another site, so I'll cut and paste here:
The Thebans put an end to Spartan Hegemony and "free" the helots of
Messenia (those in Laconia remain). Sparta now consists of Laconian
alone, but the governing system is unchanged.
The Spartans decline to join Alexander's merry band. In conjunction
with Persian naval elements, they lead an ill-fated war against the
Macedonian Hegemony while Alexander is somewhere between Issus and
Guagamela. They take over Crete and much of the Peloponnese before
meeting the macedonian governor at the "Battle of mice" and losing.
Sparta is left essentially unchanged, though humbled once again. Had they won we would remember Alexander the pretty good, conqueror of Anatolia.
In the time of the successors Sparta remains one of the more powerful
second-tier states. She loses a battle to Demetrios, but the "besieger" fails to besiege her. Between around 300BC and 250BC she lets her
Agoge system falter, becoming more like the rest of greece. Areus in
this period is the first Spartan king to put his face on coins in
imitation of the other great kings. Sparta is still a source for
great mercenary generals in this century.
A notable figure early in the century is Cleonymus, a Spartiate and mercenary who fights for Pyrrus of Epirus to good effect in macedonia. Later as Pyrrus' fortunes wane, he convinces him to besiege the city of Sparta. The Spartan men are off in Crete fighting, presumably earning money, when the attack comes and the Pyrrus is defeated by the old and young men. The men then show up and they chase follow his retreat to Argos where he is killed in street fighting- by an old woman throwing a roof tile!
The most famous Spartan mercenary general hails from this period,
when Xanthippus leads a losing Carthaginian army to defeat the
invading Romans under Regulus, changing the course of the first Punic
war. Hannibal had as a tutor a Lakedaimonian as well, who wrote a
now lost history of his wars.
The Spartans are interesting in the mid to late 200s BC because a
King, Agis, tries to undo all of their social problems by recreating
the original Lycurgan system. The plan starts off well, but is
sabotaged and Agis is executed. Many disenfranchised greeks in other states looked at this example favorably- their upper classes were not pleased.
In the middle of the 3rd C BC, the Achean league under Aratus throw
out the Macedonians from the Peloponnese. All of Greece was free of a reeling macedon at this time, it was the last, missed, opportunity for autonomy.
In an odd twist of history, the murdered reformer King Agis' wife
married the son of the man who did him in. She or simple political
strategy lead him to attempt the same reforms. He, Cleomenes III, is
very successful but brutal, casting out the other blood-line of kings
and the Ephors and essentially becoming a tyrant (for good, so he
says). His program is very popular with the underclasses in other
cities and he threatens to topple the Achean league, the power that
balances against Sparta. The Aetolians invade and take a huge number of helots as slaves, a weakened and fractious Sparta cannot stop them.
Aratus and the Acheans call in the Macedonians for help at the price
of giving up all the gains they made in kicking them out earlier!
Cleomenes builds a large army with subsidies from Ptolemy against
Antigonas of Macedon and by freeing Helots who can afford to buy
their freedom- many can. They meet at Sellasia on the road to Sparta
and after a truly horrific and close battle, Antigonas wins. He makes
a show of returning Sparta to its ancestral ways- returning the
Ephors after kicking out the tyrant Cleomenes, but Sparta never truly
recovers her ancestral ways.
The next few decades are marked by a series of Tyrants who build up
armies of mercenaries and freed helots, but they all fall. The last,
Nabis, who claims kingship through a tie to the long exiled Damaratus
who accompanied the Persian invasion, makes sweeping "reforms"- exiling many Spartiates and enfranchising rich helots. In the end he is undone by his own Aetolian mercenaries.
Sparta's independant hsitory ends here at the hands of a fellow greek, Philipoemen who "frees" Sparta from tyrrany and this time
force her to become a member of the Achean league after recalling the exiles and kicking out the new helot citizens (selling many into slavery). Eventually the Romans step in, but they confirm Sparta as a member of the Achean league.
Sparta flourishes under the Romans, with a number of senators coming
from her citizens. She also becomes a bit of a farce, a theme park
for rich romans to pretend to enjoy what the ancient Sparta was.
A Spartan admiral, Eurycles, son of a Kytherian pirate, on the side of Octavius chases Cleopatra and Anthony's ship and their treasure ship after Actium. Although Eurycles makes a great show of confronting Anthony across the bows, for Anthony had his pirate father killed, in the end these spartans, unlike their forefathers, opt to take the treasure ship.
Eurycles becomes a roman citizen and de facto leader of Sparta, whose boundaries are altered by Agustus. He seems to have gone on some sort of mission to Judea and intrigued there with Herod. He ends up being exiled for a time due to the protests at rome of no less a family than that of Brasidas, but ends his days in honor. His children hold high positions and his grandson is a made a Roman senator.
Sparta is eventually sacked by the Goths in the 4th c AD, with many
citizens fleeing south to more remote and mountainous regions of
laconia.
The peoponnese is heavily settles by Slavic tribes in the early Byzantine period, at least one of which, the Melingi, keeps its tribal identity into the time of the Latin conquest. Villehardoiun, after the 4th crusade, holds sway over laconia and builds or rebuilds a series of castles to keep out the slavs and unhappy greeks.
The region later becomes Venetian, then Turkish, though it falls to the turks after Constantinople and for a time the Byzantine nobility flees there.
The people of the Mani peninsula in southern Laconia in particular, claim
to be spartans and are addressed as such even by leaders even as late
as Napoleon- who oddly had as a godfather an expatriate Maniate in
Corsica.
The revolt from the Turks starts in the Mani, so it could be claimed
that the "Spartans" once again defeated the Eastern menace to Greek
Independence.
Paul M. Bardunias
MODERATOR: [url:2dqwu8yc]http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=4100[/url]
A Spartan, being asked a question, answered "No." And when the questioner said, "You lie," the Spartan said, "You see, then, that it is stupid of you to ask questions to which you already know the answer!"
hock: 
