The 'Great City' of Arcadia, founded as a federal bulwark against Sparta and birthplace of Polybius, the historian who explained to the Greeks how Rome came to rule the world.
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Megalopolis through the eras
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Classical Age
Megalopolis was a city built on purpose. After the Theban general Epaminondas shattered Sparta's power at Leuctra in 371 BCE, he helped the Arcadians fuse dozens of villages around 368 BCE into one great city—an anchor for a new Arcadian League and a wall to pen Sparta into the southern Peloponnese. Laid out on a grand scale astride the Helisson river, it was less an organic polis than a strategic counterweight, and it spent its early decades fending off Spartan attempts to undo it.
Hellenistic Age
It was now that Megalopolis mattered most to the history of ideas, as a leading member of the Achaean League and home to its greatest figures. Here Philopoemen, the 'last of the Greeks,' rose to command the League's armies, and here around 200 BCE was born Polybius, son of the statesman Lycortas. Taken to Rome as a political hostage after the Roman victory at Pydna in 168 BCE, Polybius befriended Scipio Aemilianus and wrote his Histories to explain how Rome had subjugated the Mediterranean in barely fifty years—pioneering 'pragmatic' history and the theory of the mixed constitution.