A little-known fact about Athens & Sparta is that their rivalry continued well after the Peloponnesian War and the Classical era. A century after Alexander’s death, the two cities still harbored dreams of grandeur, and their strife only made it easier for Rome to dominate Greece.

Unwilling to compromise, young leaders in both poleis tried to restore old political arrangements (democracy in Athens, the Lycurgan constitution in Sparta) to rekindle old glories, and clashed against entrenched oligarchic interests and demographic realities in a Hellenic world in which neither city was large enough to matter much anymore.

The subsequent conflicts were particularly dire for Athens, as they reinforced a local oligarchy happy to serve as proxy rulers for Macedonia’s Antigonid kings, and left the Piraeus port under Macedonian control, which contributed to the city’s economic decline. One year before the end of the war, the death of Philemon, a popular playwright of Alexander the Great’s generation who was almost one hundred years old at the time, was seen by many as an omen marking the end of a golden era in Athens.

The historian Philochorus, strongly anti-Macedonian, was executed soon after the Macedonians entered Athens, at the age of 79. Sparta went on fighting, against itself and others: in 244 BC, King Agis IV launched a series of reforms to boost the number of citizens – then at the ridiculous number of just 700 – through land handouts as part of a Lycurgan revival; and he was chased out of the city by oligarchs unhappy at the idea of giving land to foreigners and landless peasants.

Agis took sanctuary in the city’s temple of Athena. Tricked into leaving the sanctuary under false promises, he was murdered with his mother and grandmother. Parts of his revolution were eventually implemented two decades later1 by Cleomenes III, who married Agis IV’s rich widow and launched a final push to restore Sparta’s dominant position in southern Greece – a valiant but hopeless effort that only invited further interference by Macedon.

Cleomenes III’s reforms and campaigns are evidence of the persistence in continental Greece of old political arrangements, as the diminished poleis played one Hellenistic kingdom off against another. He put all landed property into a common pool, debts were cancelled, and the land was divided into 4,000 Spartan lots. The Spartan citizen body was made up to perhaps 5,000 by giving full rights to formerly second-class residents like metics and perioikoi; the traditional Spartan agoge, with military training, age-groups for boys and common messes for adults, was now re-introduced.

Just like in olden times, this restored Sparta was opposed by oligarchies dominating nearby poleis, whether under straightforward oligarchic regimes or Pericles-style democracies, since it represented a truly radical challenge to the established order; and, just like in olden times, Cleomenes’ Sparta was supported by landless peasants.