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1. The Problem of Spartan Local History
In the Hippias Maior, Socrates asks the eponymous sophist about his lecture tour in Sparta: just what do the Spartans enjoy hearing so much about? Not about astrology, Hippias famously responds, nor about geometry or arithmetic, but rather about "the families of heroes and men and about settlements, how cities originally were established, and, in short, about every sort of ..." (Pl. Hp.Mai. 285d).1 Spartan interest in the past and particularly in the two branches that here make up what Hippias calls "archaeology," namely genealogy and ktiseis, is confirmed by the Spartan traditions about early Sparta recorded by Herodotus:2 the lineage of two kings (7.204; 8.131.2), for example, and the return of the Herakleidai (8.43, 114.1). Yet, despite this apparent historical awareness, it is a commonplace that there was in Sparta no local historiography, that no Spartan ever composed a self-contained and systematic account of his city's past,3 at least not until the later Hellenistic period,4 where we tend to locate the shadowy Molpis (FGrHist 590), Aristokrates (FGrHist 591), and Hippasos (FGrHist 589), as well as the better-known Sosibios (FGrHist 595), whom Paul Cartledge has called Sparta's "first home-grown antiquary and local historian."5 That Sparta of the early-fourth century BCE did not produce any counterpart to e. g. the Atthides of Athens was due, according to Jacoby, to Sparta's stance against cultural and economic developments from the outside world. Such a frozen state was not in a position, Jacoby argued, to write its own history; nor did it even want to.6 Terence Boring in his 1979 monograph on Spartan literacy elaborates: "it might be possible to go one step further and suggest that they [the Spartans] were not capable even of wishing to do so [i. e. write their own history]; they could not wish for what they did not know."7 The problem of Spartan local historiography, or lack thereof, has been tackled more recently by Lukas Thommen, who concludes that, unlike Athens after the Cleisthenic reforms, classical Sparta experienced no fundamental political or social changes that led to a reorientation of historical memory and to the consequent proliferation of local history.8
Yet this apparent absence of local historiography in Sparta...