Mansell & Co.
in a class by itself, calling it a “permanent hereditary generalship.” By his time the office had lost, indeed, much of its political significance, and was notoriously subordinate to the Ephorate. The military leadership was by far the most conspicuous duty attached to the office. This is curious, for political experience commonly shows the opposite case; one of the first duties to be taken from a hereditary office is the military leadership, because of the peculiar need for personal capacity in that department. But Sparta was a singularly conservative and religious, not to say superstitious, city, devoted to ritual, and firmly believing in the general’s luck. Such a people does not feel confidence under the leadership of mere talent; it much prefers to fight under the orders of a descendant of Heracles. And as Spartan warfare was always a very simple business, requiring no strategic skill in its direction, the Spartans were not likely to find out the weakness of a hereditary system in generalship. Beyond the leading of armies, the Spartan kings had few rights or duties. They had ex-officio titles to two of the thirty seats in the Gerousia, they had legal jurisdiction in some unimportant cases connected with religion, and they represented the state in certain festivals and sacrifices.
But the political executive passed over in the fifth and fourth centuries to the five Ephors, who controlled and sometimes even oppressed the kings. The origin of this peculiar and distinctive office is also lost in antiquity. Spartan tradition certainly believed in a time when the Ephorate was not; and on the whole the most probable theory is that the Ephorate was originally created by the kings as a subordinate office. Judging from actual history, it is too much to say that the Ephors were always supreme over the kings in practice; nearly all the great men of Spartan history—Leonidas, Cleomenes, Agesilaus, Agis, Cleombrotus—are its kings, and we scarcely know the name of a single Ephor. It was, in fact, a long fight between kings and Ephors for pre-eminence. As a general rule the board of Ephors no doubt directed the state’s policy, but kings like Agesilaus seem to have had far more than a mere executive duty. What struck all observers was that Ephors sometimes summoned kings before them for trial, sometimes condemned them to death, and in ceremonial remained seated in the presence of the kings. The fact is that at Sparta sovereignty belonged in a very real sense to the warrior body, and the Ephors expressed that sovereignty, as being directly elected by it. Especially in judicial matters they were supreme, and in a state which moved by clockwork under the control of a rigid discipline and fixed customs, though all the laws were unwritten, the heads of the judicial system naturally held the reins of government. The fact that the Ephors held their position by popular election is held to constitute a democratic element in the constitution. This gives rise to the theory, evolved by the successors of Aristotle in political philosophy, that the stability of the Spartan constitution depended on its nice adjustment of the three elements of polity—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Sparta was thus considered to be the type of a Mixed Constitution. From Sparta the Greek historian Polybius applied the same theory to the government of Rome. Thence it was transferred by Montesquieu to the British Constitution, and thus has played, and is playing, an important part in the history of political science. So far as Sparta is concerned, the theory rests upon a false basis. Aristotle was undoubtedly right in terming Sparta an aristocracy, for the Spartiate body itself was a minority and a jealously guarded close corporation. Both the democratic and the monarchical elements in the state were largely an illusion. Moreover, Aristotle did not admit the propriety of applying the term democracy to a state which merely had some choice in the persons by whom it should be governed. “To govern and be governed in turn” was the essence of democracy to Aristotle, and he would certainly have called both the other examples of the Mixed Constitution, ancient Rome and modern England, aristocracies. To him, however, aristocracy was the best kind of rule. Did it not
Plate XXII. VIEW OF MODERN SPARTA, WITH MOUNT TAYGETUS
English Photo Co., Athens
mean etymologically “government by the best”? Besides, there was the practical proof of excellence that Sparta alone was free from the ever endemic Greek disease of “stasis” or civil strife, and that Sparta alone of Greek States had never witnessed a successful revolution.