| This dissertation provides the first examination in depth of the uses to which political and ethical philosophers of the late Republic and early Principate, both Greek and Roman, put the concept of Sparta: its origins, history, educational system, and way of life. I devote principal attention to the philosophical works of Cicero (especially the De Officiis and Tusculan Disputations); the prose corpus of Seneca the Younger; the Moralia and Parallel Lives of Plutarch; the extant lectures of Musonius Rufus; the discourses of Epictetus; and the orations of Dio Chrysostom. The historical accuracy of the views these thinkers held of Sparta are of only secondary importance; instead, I explore the intellectual construct of Sparta, a product of both historical contingencies and competing ideologies, as it was put to use by various philosophical sects to illustrate, bolster, or nuance their ethical teachings.;Chapter I, "Remaking Sparta for a Roman World", draws upon both textual and material evidence to reconstruct the city of Sparta as it existed - in reality and in popular perception - after the Greek world had been firmly subordinated to Rome. It emerges that, for most of the thinkers with whom we are concerned, autopsy took second place to a complex and highly filtered image of the city, derived from literature, popular imagery, and oral tradition, which portrayed little of the reality of Sparta's historical evolution; and it is this image, much more so than contemporary realities, that governed the use of Sparta in their political and ethical writings. Chapter II, "A Brief History of Philosophical Engagement with Sparta in the Late Classical and Hellenistic Periods, from Plato to Panaitios", reconstructs evolving philosophical attitudes toward Sparta, beginning with their origins in the "Socratic triad" of Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, and progressing to the scarce fragments of the ethical-political writings of their heirs in the Academy, Peripatos, and, above all, the Early and Middle Stoa. Chapter III, "Lycurgus, the Polis Philosophousa, and Lawgiving for an Imperial Age", examines the figure of the lawgiver Lycurgus as he appears in the Empire, both in literature - not only the Life by Plutarch, but in Platonist, Stoic and Cynic philosophical treatises as well - and in popular culture. I demonstrate that, when Lycurgus is praised as a philosopher-statesman, that praise rests upon an atemporal concept of Sparta as harmonious, frugal, virtuous, and above all unchanging, a concept which is rooted in a combination of nostalgia for Greece's glory days and awareness of the importance of civic concord. Chapter IV, "To Suffer and to Toil: Ponos, Labor, Dolor, and the Spartan Agoge", considers the attitude of Stoics, Cynics, and Platonists to the famously rigorous educational system for Spartan citizen males, the agoge. I identify an energetic debate between a Stoic-Cynic attitude that physical toil, ponos or labor, is firmly subordinate to the cultivation of reason and a Platonist-Aristotelian viewpoint that regards toil as useful for shaping the irrational element of the soul. This debate is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it keeps interest in Sparta alive within the Socratic tradition; on the other, it prevents the Stoics from accepting without qualification the idealizing picture of Sparta that dominated popular culture in the Principate. Chapter V, "The Freest of the Free? Sparta as Ambiguous Champion of Eleutheria and Libertas", takes as its starting point the common association between Sparta and the always slippery notion of freedom (Greek eleutheria, Latin libertas) in antiquity. Under the Empire, it was widely held that the Spartans' ability to resist external political domination was a direct product of their self-mastery, which had liberated them from the pernicious influence of vice. In accordance with this line of thinking, I analyze Sparta's place in Imperial freedom-discourse under three headings: political freedom, both internal (the rights and obligations for Spartan citizens in domestic affairs) and external (foreign policy, autonomy, and imperialism); freedom from vice; and freedom from fortune, the essence of which was held to be Spartan adeia, fearlessness. Ultimately, I conclude that, while all the authors whom I treat display admiration (with varying degrees of qualification) for the achievements of the "Lycurgan" Sparta that is itself a creation of their own time, each thinker's more nuanced attitude toward Sparta is ultimately determined, not by any sweeping orthodoxy, but by his own philosophical preoccupations and external circumstances. |
