The Political Institutions of the Ancient Greeks

by Basil Edward Hammond

But I must pause for a moment: for there is a passage in Herodotus which in giving a rapid enumeration of the Lycurgean institutions counts the Ephors among them and is therefore in conflict with the statements of Plato and Aristotle. Herodotus was writing about 430 B.C., Plato 400-347 B.C., and Aristotle about 330 B.C.: so that Herodotus is the oldest of the three writers and, if other circumstances were equal, ought to be preferred to the others. But in this case other circumstances are not equal: for Plato and Aristotle make their statements deliberately and emphatically: Herodotus does not, but throws in his list of institutions as a sort of parenthesis, while he is thinking about many other things, and paying less attention to his parenthetic remark. These facts lead me to the opinion that Plato and Aristotle give us the true version of the oldest tradition and Herodotus does not: the opinion moreover is strengthened by the fact that Aristotle appeals to a story which must have been current long before his time and was probably older than the days of Herodotus; and it is further supported by the negative evidence of the ῥήτρα, which in defining the Lycurgean constitution says not a word about Ephors.

It is impossible to determine what was the original character of the magistracy of the Ephors: we do not know what were their functions, how they were appointed or elected, nor for what term they held office: but, from the passages which have just been referred to, it is certain that Plato and Aristotle believed that the power acquired by the Ephors diminished the power of the kings and the elders. The name Ephors or Overseers implies that they exercised some kind of supervision over the government or some part of it.

It cannot be doubted that the three important events of the reign of Theopompus were in some way connected with one another. In the midst of a great war for the conquest of Messenia, it might be especially inconvenient that the assembly of the Spartiatæ should initiate proposals of its own: for the men who made up the assembly were the very same who formed the whole of the Spartan army. And again in the settlement of the affairs of Messenia it was not desirable that the kings and the council should be entirely uncontrolled, as they would have been after the assembly had been deprived of the power of initiating measures, if no Ephors had been appointed.

It is stated by Plutarch that the twenty-eight elders who with the kings formed the council were elected by the general assembly of the Spartans[98]: and the method of election which he describes is so extremely primitive that it probably belongs to the original constitution or dates from the times of Theopompus. When a councillor died the best man among those over sixty years of age was to be chosen to take his place. The people came together in assembly: certain selected men were shut up in a neighbouring building whence they could see nothing: the candidates were brought one by one before the assembly, but in an order which was unknown to the men in the building, and each as he entered was greeted with shouting: the men in the building decided that the cheering had been loudest for the man who came first, or the man who came second, or some other in the order: and the man, unknown to themselves, for whom they thus pronounced, was proclaimed as the new member of the council.

The parts then of the Spartan government from the time of Theopompus onwards were the kings, the council of elders, the Ephors, and the assembly of warriors. Until about 500 B.C. the chief power belonged to the kings or to the kings and the council of elders: the kings had the active management and direction of foreign affairs[99].

About that time and soon afterwards we meet with several reigns that might account for a diminution of the kingly power. In one of the regal houses there were Cleomenes I. (519-491 B.C.) and Pleistarchus (480-458 B.C.): in the other Leotychidas (491-461 B.C.). Cleomenes contrived the unfair deposition of Demaratus, was half insane for some time before his death, and slew himself in a fit of madness. Pleistarchus was a little child at the death of his father Leonidas the hero of Thermopylæ: his guardian was Pausanias, who tried to betray Sparta into the power of the Persian king. Leotychidas was brought into royal power, without any sound title, by the intrigues of Cleomenes. Whatever may have been the causes of the decline of the kingly prerogative, it is certain that between 500 B.C. and 467 B.C. the Ephors rose to supreme power at Sparta: they sat in judgement on king Cleomenes I. on an accusation of bribery, they imprisoned the regent Pausanias (about 467 B.C.) on suspicion of treason, and above all, in the year 479 B.C., it was on their own sole responsibility that they despatched the great armament to resist Mardonius in Bœotia[100]. The power which they then possessed they never lost till the decline of Sparta in the third century B.C., except perhaps during the reign of an unusually able king such as Agesilaus (398-361 B.C.).

It has already been remarked that in the period from Theopompus to about 500 B.C. we do not know how the Ephors were appointed or elected: in the time of Aristotle (about 330 B.C.) they were elected from the whole body of Spartan citizens, and no doubt by the whole body of Spartan citizens[101]. They must have been thus elected as early as the time of Cleomenes I.: for if they had been appointed by the kings or the council of elders they could not have gained that independence which they then displayed.

During the period of their greatness (beginning about 480 B.C.) the Ephors were a board of five[102] magistrates elected annually. One of them gave his name to the year[103]: they received ambassadors and sometimes at least gave them an answer[104]: they could, as we have seen, send out an armament to a foreign war and fix what troops should go, and whenever it chanced that the assembly of the Spartiatæ was called together an Ephor presided over it and took the votes[105].

The kings in time of peace were dignitaries without power: at sacrificial feasts and athletic contests they took the seats of honour and after a sacrifice the skins of the victims were their perquisite: the state provided them with regular monthly allowances of food: they superintended religious matters, and settled what Spartan citizens should be the πρόξενοι or befrienders of visitors to Sparta from the various Greek states: and they had jurisdiction about marriages of heiresses, public ways, and adoption of children: but with these exceptions all control of home affairs had passed from the kings to the Ephors[106]. In time of war the kings were commanders of the Spartan armies, and the history of Agesilaus shows that in this capacity they might gain high distinction and influence: but the expeditions of the Spartans were usually accompanied by some of the Ephors[107], who could afterwards report to their colleagues any action of the commander which displeased them.

Until the beginning of the Peloponnesian war in 432 B.C., it seems that the government, whether it was controlled by the kings, the council, or the Ephors, was faithfully conducted for the interests of the whole of the little community of the Spartiatæ. We do not hear of the rulers living in luxury, nor of inequalities or discontents among the Spartiatæ, nor of emancipations of Helots. Twice only in the course of several centuries we read that the Spartans made a new law[108]: in foreign policy they were unenterprising: and they seem to have devoted themselves to the cultivation of the military virtues enjoined by their traditions, and to looking after their interests at home, which consisted largely in keeping down, degrading and humiliating the Messenians and the other Helots.