Sparta in 218 B.C.

Sparta — Spring 218 BC · The Warrior-City in Eclipse.

Lacedaemon — the once-invincible warrior-city of Laconia, now a great power in eclipse. Four years ago, at Sellasia, Antigonus Doson and the Achaean League destroyed the army of the reformer-king Cleomenes III and with it his revolution; Cleomenes fled to Egypt and is newly dead. In 218 BC Sparta has restored its ancient dual kingship — but one king is a child and the other a man with no royal blood who bought the throne with a talent to each ephor. Allied to the Aetolian League against Macedon and the Achaeans, the Spartans raid their neighbours as of old, even as the whole settled order of the homoioi, the agoge and the unwalled city slips into memory.

No state in Greece has fallen so far so fast. A generation ago the kings Agis IV and Cleomenes III tried to remake Sparta — cancelling debts, redistributing the land, enrolling new citizens and reviving the iron discipline of Lycurgus the lawgiver — and for a moment Cleomenes made Sparta the terror of the Peloponnese again. Then at Sellasia in 222 BC the Achaean League called in Antigonus Doson and his Macedonian phalanx, and the experiment died on the field; for the first time in its history Sparta was taken and garrisoned by a foreign king. Cleomenes fled to Alexandria and perished there in 219. Now the ephors have restored the two-king monarchy, made alliance with Aetolia, and gone to war once more with the Achaeans — but the city that fights this war is a shadow of the one that once commanded Greece, and this very year Philip V will lead an army the length of Laconia, to the gates of Sparta itself.