Chapter VIII.
§ 1. The Cosmi of Crete. § 2. Changes in their powers. § 3. The Prytanes of Corinth and Rhodes. § 4. The Prytanes of ancient Athens. § 5. The Artynæ of Argos; the Demiurgi in several states of Peloponnesus.
1. The cosmi of Crete are compared by Aristotle, Ephorus and Cicero, with the ephors of Lacedæmon.[568] We are first led to suspect the correctness of this comparison by the fact, that the larger part of the extensive power of the ephoralty did not exist in the ancient constitution of Sparta, and consequently there could not have been any thing corresponding with it in the sister constitution of Crete. This conjecture is still further confirmed when we remember that the cosmi were chosen from particular families, rather according to their rank than their personal merits.[569] For to take away from the office of ephors their election from among the people would be to give up its most essential characteristic. If then we abandon this comparison, it will be necessary, on account of the great similarity between the two constitutions, to find some other analogous office, and it will then appear that the parallel magistrates to the cosmi in the Spartan government were the kings; whom indeed the cosmi appear to have succeeded, like the prytanes, artynæ, &c., in other states, the expiring [pg 134] monarchical dignity having been replaced by an aristocratical magistrate.
This assertion is confirmed by whatever knowledge we have of the powers of the cosmi, which indeed chiefly regards their influence in foreign affairs. They were commanders in war, like the kings of Sparta.[570] They conducted the negotiations with foreign ambassadors (although these last sometimes spoke before the public assembly); and they affixed their official name to the treaties, as well as to all decrees of the state.[571] They provided for the ambassadors during their residence,[572] and prepared for them the necessary documents.[573] They appear to have themselves gone as ambassadors to neighbouring and friendly states.[574] For the internal government and administration of the state they shared the power of the senate, with which body they consulted on important affairs.[575] The decrees passed in this council were then laid before the public assembly for its decision, according to the manner above stated.[576] On an occasion of the connexion of two Cretan cities by ἱσοπολιτεία, the cosmi of the one state, who were resident in the other city, went together into the house of meeting of the cosmi and of the senate (as it appears) and sat among them in the public assembly.[577]
The common routine of business they appear to have conducted with a large executive power;[578] they must, for example, have had a compulsive authority, in order to force a person who had kidnapped citizens of a foreign state, against the right of asylum, to restore them.[579] In judicial matters they performed, in the times at least subsequent to Alexander, certain duties which had a resemblance to the introduction of the lawsuits by the Athenian magistrates.[580] They themselves, however, were not only subject to certain punishments for omission of their duties, but they could also be impeached, apparently during the continuance of their office.[581] Upon the whole, without having equal dignity, they had more power and more extensive duties than the Spartan kings; yet both were limited by the large number of the college of cosmi, for it contained ten members. The college had power to degrade individuals, although the office was limited to a year, each individual being also permitted to tender his resignation within that period.[582] The first of them gave his name to the year; he was called [pg 136] protocosmus,[583] although he had probably no distinct privileges. The senate was chosen from persons who had filled the office of cosmus; it was not, however, so arranged that each cosmus, on the cessation of his office, became a senator (as at Athens, after the time of Solon, every archon, if no complaint was made against him, became a member of the Areopagus), but the senators were selected from among the former cosmi, after a fresh examination. For the number of the senators was, doubtless, limited, and was not sufficiently great to comprehend all the cosmi.
2. In the time of Aristotle the power of the cosmi had acquired a despotic character. The number of the families from which they were chosen had become less numerous; individual families had acquired an immediate influence upon the government, and their disputes had created parties, in which the whole nation took a share. The constitution had been thus converted into a narrow oligarchy; the democratic element, the public assembly, being too feeble to put an end to these dissensions. To this was added, at a time when men had ceased to venerate ancient customs, a want of written laws. When powerful families feared for the issue of a lawsuit, they prevented the election of the cosmi, and an ἀκοσμία, as it was called, arose,[584] in which the chief families and their dependents were opposed to one another as enemies. This state of things had at that time [pg 137] been introduced in several of the chief cities of Crete: at the time, however, when the alliance between the Priansii and Hierapytnii (which is still extant) was agreed to, the government appears to have been better regulated, and the powers of the aristocracy to have been considerably diminished. But before the time of Polybius a complete revolution had taken place, by which the power of the aristocracy was abolished, and the election of all magistrates founded on democratic principles;[585] a revolution which gradually overthrew all the ancient institutions; so that the writer just mentioned cannot discover the least resemblance between the Spartan and Cretan governments, the original similarity of which cannot be doubted. It is worthy of remark that cosmi, as far as we know, were the chief magistrates in all the cities of Crete; and their constitutions were in all essential points the same: a proof that these cities, although originally founded by different tribes, were in their political institutions determined by the governing, that is, the Doric race.[586] In the time of Plato, Cnosus was still, as in the time of Minos, considered the chief seat of ancient Cretan institutions; Ephorus, on the other hand, observes that they had been less preserved in this town than among the Lyctians, Gortynians, and other small cities.[587]
3. With the Cretan cosmi may be compared the magistrates named prytanes, who in Corinth, as well as in other states, succeeded in the place of the kings. The numerous house of the Bacchiadæ were [pg 138] not content that certain individuals of their number should exercise the government as an hereditary right for life, but wished to obtain a larger share in it, and to give the enjoyment of the supreme power to a greater number. The only difference, however, which existed between a prytanis and a king was, that the former was elected, and only held his office for a year, by which he was compelled to administer it according to the will of his house, into the body of which he was soon to return. In this state, doubtless, there was also a gerusia, but perhaps only consisting of Bacchiadæ. As the Bacchiadæ only intermarried with persons of their own house, they formed an aristocratic caste, whose government, which lasted for ninety years, must have been exceedingly oppressive.[588] As Corcyra was founded from Corinth before the commencement of the tyranny of the Cypselidæ, we find that in the latter state annual prytanes, chosen apparently from among the aristocracy, remained the supreme magistrates even in a democratic age.[589]
The power of the prytanis, as has been already mentioned, came next in order in that of king, and hence the ancient Charon of Lampsacus called the Spartan kings prytanes;[590] which was also the proper name of one of them. The early kings of Delphi [pg 139] were also, at least about 360 B.C., called prytanes;[591] in which state there was for a long time an aristocratic government, similar to that which prevailed in the Homeric age.[592] The number of the prytanes was in general only one or two.[593] At Rhodes there were two in a year, each of whom had the precedence for six months;[594] so that sometimes one, sometimes two prytanes are mentioned: they managed the public affairs with great power in the Prytaneum, in which building the archives of the city were preserved, and foreign ambassadors received.[595] Yet their powers cannot have been excessive in the free constitution, which Rhodes, at its most flourishing period, enjoyed. For the senate, which was chosen on purely democratic principles, as we shall see below, shared the management of all public affairs with the prytanes; the people, however, exercised the supreme power in the general assembly, voted by cheirotonia,[596] and does not appear to have been even led in its deliberations by the magistrates alone.[597] Yet the government of Rhodes was never, up to the time of the Roman dominion, a complete democracy;[598] perhaps it approximated at the [pg 140] period of the greatest power of these islanders to the politeia of Aristotle.[599] But the power of the prytanes, who were also the chief magistrates in Ionian, and especially Æolian[600] states, was not everywhere so wisely restrained; in Miletus their authority was nearly despotic.[601] In all places the prytanes inherited from the kings the celebration of public sacrifices, which they generally performed in particular buildings in the market-place, on the common hearth of the state. So the prytanis of Tenedos, to whom Pindar has composed an ode for the sacrifice upon entrance into his office (εἰσιτήριον). In Cos a divination from fire was probably connected with the sacrifices of the prytanis.[602] These sacrifices, the public banquets, together with the reception of foreign ambassadors, belonged at Athens to the fifty prytanes, as was the case at Rhodes and Cos. But the political signification of the name had, under the democratic government of Athens, become entirely different from that which it bore in other more aristocratic constitutions.
4. The striking dissimilarity in the duties of the prytanes in the Athenian and in the early constitutions of Greece, and a conviction that the democracy of Athens, although relatively modern, had so completely brought into oblivion the former institutions, that they can be only recognised in insulated traces [pg 141] and names which had lost their ancient meaning, encourage me to offer some conjectures on the original nature of the office held by the prytanes of Athens. There was at Athens a court of justice in the prytaneum (ἐπὶ πρυτανείῳ), which, in the times of which we have an historical account, only possessed the remnants of a formerly extensive criminal jurisdiction.[603] Now that this had once been the chief court in Athens is proved by the name prytanea, which were fees deposited by the parties before each lawsuit, according to the amount of value in question, and which served for the maintenance of the judges.[604] The name proves that these monies had at one time been the pay of the prytanes, in their judicial capacity, like the gifts in Homer and Hesiod. Furthermore we know that the ancient financial office of the colacretæ at one time, as their name testifies, collected their share of the animals sacrificed (which exactly resembles the perquisites of the kings at Sparta), and that they always continued to manage the banquets in the Prytaneum, and at a later time collected the justice-fees, for example, these very prytanea.[605] From the connexion between these functions, which has not been entirely obliterated, it is manifest that the ancient judicial prytanes formed a company or syssition, dined in public, were fed at the public expense, and, with regard to their revenues, had stept into the rights of the kings, whose share in the sacrifices and justice-fees had formerly been collected by the colacretæ.
Although there appears to be nothing inconsistent in this account, it is nevertheless singular that a whole court of justice bore the name of prytanes, whereas in other states the number of these magistrates was always very small; and hence we are led to conjecture that the prytanes, as in other places, were merely the leaders and presidents of this supreme court. It is, however, certain that in later times the phylobasileis presided in the Prytaneum, four eupatridæ, who were at the head of the four ancient tribes; and doubtless performed other duties than the sacred functions which are ascribed to them;[606] like the phylarchs of Epidamnus, whose extensive duties were in later times transferred to a senate.[607] We must therefore suppose that these phylobasileis, who, in consequence of political changes, had at an early period fallen into oblivion, were once, under the name of prytanes, one of the highest offices of the state. Now these four prytanes, or phylobasileis, were assisted in their court by the ephetæ, who, as I have already remarked,[608] were before the time of Solon identical with the court of the Areopagus, when they had the management of the criminal jurisdiction, and a superintendence over the manners of the citizens in an extended sense of the word. Both these were also duties of the Doric gerusia, to which the kings stood in nearly the same relation as the prytanes of Athens to the areopagites or ephetæ. Their number was fifty-one, which probably includes the basileus: there could not, however, have been fifty previously to the new division of the tribes [pg 143] by Cleisthenes, before which change their number was forty-eight, according to the four tribes, either with or without the phylobasileis.
If this view of the subject is correct, there is a remarkable correspondence, both in their respective numbers and constitutions, between the criminal court and the first administrative office in the ancient state of Athens. These latter were the naucrari. The naucrari, who were also anciently forty-eight in number, and fifty after the new division of the tribes, in early times managed the public revenue, and therefore fitted out armies and fleets.[609] Now Herodotus also mentions prytanes of the naucrari, who in early times directed the government of Athens.[610] Unless we suppose the existence of two kinds of prytanes (which does not appear suitable to the simplicity of ancient institutions), the same persons must have presided over both colleges, and have had an equal share in the jurisdiction and government. The regularity of these institutions would appear surprising, if we were not certain that the same order existed in all the ancient political establishments; at the same time we must leave the relative powers of many officers, such, for example, as those of the archons and prytanes, without any attempt at elucidation.
5. More obscure even than the condition of the cosmi and prytanes are the origin and powers of the artynæ at Argos.[611] They cannot have arisen at a late period, for example, after the abolition of the royalty, since the same office existed in their ancient [pg 144] colony, Epidaurus, whose constitution resembled that of Argos only in the more ancient period. Since it did not originate from the downfall of the royalty, its origin may, perhaps, have been owing to a division of the regal authority, perhaps of the civil and military functions. In Epidaurus the artynæ were presidents of a large council of one hundred and eighty members:[612] in Argos they are mentioned in connexion with a body of eighty persons, and a (democratic) senate, of whose respective powers we are entirely ignorant.[613]
The present is a convenient occasion for mentioning the demiurgi, as several grammarians state that they were in particular a Doric magistracy,[614] perhaps, however, only judging from the form δαμιουργός. These magistrates were, it is true, not uncommon in Peloponnesus,[615] but they do not occur often in the Doric states. They existed among the Eleans and Mantineans,[616] the Hermioneans,[617] in the Achæan league,[618] at Argos also,[619] as well as in Thessaly;[620] officers named epidemiurgi were sent by the Corinthians to manage the government of their colony Potidæa.[621] The statements and interpretations of the grammarians afford little instruction: among the Achæans at least, their [pg 145] chief duty was to transact business with the people; which renders it probable, that at Argos they were identical with the leaders of the people;[622] of whom, as well as of some other public officers, whose functions admit of further explanation, we will speak in the following chapter.