the other. The mythical Lykourgos is not, like the mythical Solon, a person for whose historical existence we have contemporary documents and of whose constitutional changes we have accounts on the whole adequately attested; but he is one around whom the mists of oral tradition have gathered as they have gathered round Karl the Great and Hruodland, the Roland of Roncesvalles. Solon lives and dies among men, of whom we have at least some historical knowledge. Lykourgos is removed from the period of genuine history by a gulf of centuries, and he belongs to the ages in which Mann, like Prometheus, Hermes, and Phoroneus, bestows on his kinsfolk that boon of fire without which they would never have attained to social order and law.1 We must therefore content ourselves with such knowledge of the early condition of Sparta as may be furnished by statements relating to the working of the Spartan constitution at a time which may be said to mark the dawn of contemporary history. CHAPTER V. THE CONSTITUTION AND EARLY HISTORY OF SPARTA. Gerousía; the Ephors, and the Kings. THE Spartans in relation to the inhabitants of the country generally formed strictly an army of occupation; and their whole The Spartan polity may be said to be founded on the discipline of such an army. In its earlier stages the Spartan constitution, according to the accounts given of it, much resembled the constitution of the Achaians as described in the Iliad. Externally, then, the Spartans occupied a position closely analogous to that of William the Conqueror and his Normans in England; internally they were governed by a close oligarchy. But the Spartan constitution differed from that of the Achaians in its peculiar feature of two co-ordinate kings, both Herakleids, and referred by way of explanation to the twin sons of Aristodemos. The power of the kings, whatever it may have been (and it certainly had been far greater than that which they retained in the time of Herodotos), is said to have received some limitations from Lykourgos to whom the Spartans attributed the establishment of the Gerousia, or senate of twenty-eight old men (the whole number of the assembly being thirty, as the kings sat and voted with them), and also of the periodical popular 1 Myth. Ar. Nat. ii. 191. assemblies which were held in the open air. In these meetings the people were not allowed to discuss any measures, their functions being bounded to the acceptance or the rejection of the previous resolutions of the Gerousia. To this earlier constitution, according to Plutarch, two checks were added a century later in the reigns of the kings Polydoros and Theopompos, the first being the provision that the senate with the kings should have the power of reversing any 'crooked decisions' of the people, and the second the institution of a new executive board of five men called Ephoroi (overseers), who acquired, if they did not at the first receive, powers which in the issue became paramount in the state. By the oath interchanged every month, the kings swore that they would exercise their functions according to the established laws, while the ephors undertook on that condition to maintain their authority. This oath could have been instituted only at a time when the kings still possessed some independent power; it was retained long after the period when their authority became almost nominal as compared with that of the ephors. When we reach the times of contemporary historians, we find the population of the Spartan territories marked off into three classes, the Spartiatai or full citizens, the Perioikoi, The Spar tiatai, the Perioikoi, and the Helots. and the Helots. The distinctions between these classes severally are sufficiently clear; but it seems impossible to attain any certainty as to the mode in which they grew up. In the age of Herodotos no distinction of race existed between the full Spartan citizens and the Perioikoi, while a large proportion of the Helots was also Dorian, if the fact that they were conquered Messenians gave them a claim to that title. We are therefore left to mere guesswork, when we seek for the reason why the Dorians of outlying districts did not share the privileges of the Spartans, and why certain other Dorians, with other inhabitants whose very name of Helots we cannot account for, should have been reduced to the condition of villenage. The Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesos is shrouded in the mists of popular tradition; and when we reach the historical ages, we can but accept facts as we find them. These facts exhibit to us an oligarchical body filling towards the other inhabitants the relation of feudal lords to their dependents, supported, like the Thessalian nobility, entirely from their lands, and regarding all labour, whether agricultural or mechanical, as derogatory to their dignity. In their relations with one another, these lords were the soldiers of an army of occupation and subjected, as such, to a severe military discipline. In fact, they retained their citizenship only on condition of submitting to this discipline and of paying their quota to the Syssitia or public messes, which supplied the place of home life to the Spartans. Failure in either of these duties intailed disfranchisement and it may be readily supposed that the multiplication of families too proud to labour, and even forbidden to labour, had its necessary result in producing a class of men who had lost their franchise merely from inability to contribute to these public messes. These disfranchised citizens came to be known by the name Hypomeiones or Inferiors, and answered closely to the 'mean whites' of the late slave-holding states of the American union. The full citizens were distinguished by the title of Homoioi, or Peers. Gradual improvement in the condition of the Perioikoi and the Helots. Thus while the oligarchic body of governing citizens was perpetually throwing off a number of landless and moneyless men, the condition of the Perioikoi and even that of the Helots was by comparison gradually improving. The former carried on the various trades on which the Spartan looked with profound scorn; the latter, as cultivators of the soil, lost nothing by the increase of their numbers, while they differed altogether from the slaves of Athens or Thebes as being strictly 'adscripti glebæ,' and not liable to be sold out of the country, or perhaps even to be sold at all. The Krypteia. Such a polity was not one to justify any great feeling of security on the part of the rulers. We find accordingly that the Spartan government looked with constant anxiety to the classes which it regarded with an instinctive dread. The ephors could put Perioikoi to death without trial; crowds of Helots sometimes disappeared for ever when their lives seemed to portend danger for the supremacy of the dominant class; and the Krypteia (even if we reject the idea of deliberate annual massacres citizens young of the Helots) was yet a police institution by which were employed to carry out a system of espionage through the whole of Lakonia. But with all its faults the Spartan constitution fairly answered its purpose, and challenged the respect of the Hellenic world. In the belief of Herodotos and Thucydides Sparta, in times ancient even in their day, had been among the most disorderly of states; but since the reforms of Lykourgos none had been better governed or more free from faction. The fixity of their political ideas or sentiments won for them the esteem of their fellow-Hellenes, among whom changes were fast and frequent, while this esteem in its turn fed the pride of the Spartans and inspired them with a temper as self-satisfied as that of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, and even more arrogant and exclusive. The empire of Sparta was extended to the western sea by the result of two wars with the Messenians, the second of which ended in their utter ruin. Of these wars we have some scanty knowledge from the fragments which remain of the elegies of Tyrtaios. This poet who belonged to The Mes- wars. the Attic deme of Aphidnai was for the Spartans in the later war what Solon was to the Athenians in the struggle for Salamis. From him we learn that the two contests were separated by an interval of two generations. The fathers of our fathers, he said, conquered the Messenians; but this first conquest, he tells us, was achieved at the cost of a war which lasted for twenty years and in which the most eminent of the Spartan warriors was the king Theopompos. The second war he describes as not less obstinate and dangerous for Sparta, against which the Messenians were supported by the aid of other states in the Peloponnesos. This is practically all that we learn from Tyrtaios, and it is not much. Of Tyrtaios himself later writers related that he was a lame schoolmaster sent by the Athenians to aid the Spartans who had been commanded by the Delphian priestess to find a leader at Athens. Narratives senian wars. Of these wars we learn nothing from writers preceding the age of Epameinondas; and the inference seems to be that for the wealth of incident and splendour of colouring thrown over the narrative of this long struggle we are in- of the Mesdebted not to traditions of the time but to fictions which grew up after the restoration of Messenia and the founding of the city of Messênê. If either from Herodotos or Thucydides or Xenophon we had heard of the treasure buried by Aristomenes as a pledge of the future resurrection of his country, we might have pointed to the later story of Pausanias as the genuine sequel of an old tradition. As it is, we can but take as we find it the tale which tells us how, when the battle of Leuktra had justified the hopes of Aristomenes, the Argive Epiteles was bidden in a dream to recover the old woman who was well nigh at her last gasp beneath the sods of Ithômê; how his search was rewarded by the discovery of a water jar in which was contained a plate of the finest tin; how on this plate were inscribed the mystic rites for the worship of the great gods, and how the history of the new Messênê was thus linked on with that of the old. The first war. That the first war lasted twenty years and ended in the abandonment of Ithômê by the Messenians, we learn on the authority of Tyrtaios; but the causes and the course of the war are wrapped in the mists which gather round all popular Messenian traditions, if the accounts of these conflicts can be called traditions at all. We can make nothing of stories which speak of disputes at the border temple of Artemis Limnatis, arising, as the Messenians said, from the licence of the Spartan youths, or, as the Spartans retorted, by the insolence and lust of the Messenians. In one of these disputes the Spartan king Teleklos, it is said, was slain; and the war broke out in the reign of Theopompos and Alkamenes on the refusal of the Messenians to surrender D Polychares, who, to avenge himself of wrongs inflicted on him by the Spartan Euaiphnos, had invaded and ravaged Spartan territory. The sequel of the war exhibits a series of battles by which the Messenians are so weakened that they send to ask aid from the god at Delphoi. When the answer came that a virgin of the royal house of Aipytos must die for her country, Aristodemos slew his daughter with his own hand; but for a time the sacrifice seemed vain. Six years had passed when the Spartans advanced against Ithômê, and a drawn battle took place in which the Messenian king was slain. Aristodemos was chosen to fill his place, and in the fifth year of his reign at length won a decisive victory over his enemies. From this point the narrative is lost in a recital of oracular responses, visions, and prodigies. A headache restored the sight of the blind prophet Ophioneus, and the wonder seemed a portent of good. But the statue of Artemis dropped its brazen shield; and as Aristodemos in his panoply approached the altar of sacrifice before going forth to battle, his slaughtered child stood before him in black raiment and pointing to her wounded side stripped him of his armour and, placing on his head a golden crown, arrayed him in a white robe. Aristodemos knew that not for nothing had she thus wrapped him in the garb of the dead, and going forth to her tomb, he slew himself upon it. Why he should thus despair, it is indeed not easy to see. Pausanias who tells the story is obliged to admit that his career had been almost uniformly successful, and winds up with the statement that on his death the Messenians instead of electing a king appointed Damis dictator, that in a battle which Damis was compelled to fight owing to failure of supplies in the stronghold, he, his fellow generals, and the chief men of the Messenians were all slain, and that five months later the garrison abandoned Ithômê.1 So far as we may see, there was no more reason for this than for the death of Aristodemos: but it was necessary to kill them off somehow, and we have here manifestly the lame ending of a fiction framed to glorify the Messenians by representing them as practically victorious throughout the war and ascribing the catastrophe at its close to the direct interference of the gods. The second war. The story of this struggle was told in verse by the Kretan Rhianos and in prose by Myron of Priênê. But the latter, it is said, confined himself to the chronicle of events down to the death of Aristodemos, while Rhianos began with the revolt of the conquered Messenians and carried on his tale to the final destruction of the Messenian state.2 Both however, introduce into their narratives the hero Aristo2 Ib. iv. 6, 1. 1 Paus. iv. |