Megalopolis in 218 B.C.

Megalopolis — Spring 218 BC · The Great City Rebuilds.

Megalopolis — "the Great City" — the deliberate Arcadian metropolis founded after Leuctra to pen Sparta inside Laconia, and now the south-western stronghold of the Achaean League. Raised by the synoecism of forty mountain villages around 368 BC, it commands the upper Alpheios plain astride the roads from Laconia and Messenia into Arcadia. In 223 BC Cleomenes III stormed and gutted it; rather than accept his terms the citizens chose exile at Messene, and only after Sellasia did they return to a half-ruined city. In 218 BC, loyal to the League and to Macedon, they rebuild their walls and guard their borders against the renewed raids of Lycurgus’s Sparta.

Megalopolis exists for one purpose: to hold down Sparta. When Epaminondas broke Lacedaemon at Leuctra he urged the Arcadians to gather their scattered villages into a single great city on the upper Alpheios — a federal capital strong enough to bar the northern roads out of Laconia forever. For a century it did just that, and under Lydiades it brought its weight into the Achaean League. Then in 223 BC Cleomenes III, at the height of his revolution, took the city by surprise and razed much of it. The Megalopolitans, offered their homes back if they would only abandon the League, refused outright and went into exile at Messene rather than break faith. Sellasia avenged them the next year, and they came home to rebuild. In 218 BC the Great City is still scarred and half-empty, but it is whole again in spirit — Achaean to the core, and once more the frontier facing a hostile Sparta.