Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/112

LYCURGUS tion, with, however, the assistance of a council of war. In fact they closely resembled at all points the kings of the heroic age, and the honour and reverence in which they were held was far greater than their actual power, which really was curtailed within such narrow limits that it was not possible for them to establish anything like a tyranny or despotism. One great check on the kings was a board of magistrates, annually elected by the people, termed ephors, a name not confined to Sparta, whence we may fairly infer that this institution also by no means owed its origin to Lycurgus. A comparison has been suggested between the Spartan ephors and the tribunes at Hume. Both were certainly popular magistrates, and as it was at Rome, so too at Sparta, at any rate in her later days, these magistrates made them selves the great power in the state. There was a form of ancient oaths between the king and the ephors, the king swearing that he would respect the established laws, and the ephors swearing that on that condition he should retain his authority and prerogatives. The unanimous view of antiquity was that it was the special business of the ephors " to protect the people and restrain the kings." We gather from passages in Thucydides that they had in his time great political influence, and in the time of Aristotle they had attained such a position that he says they did not choose to conform themselves to the strict discipline prescribed to Spartan citizens. Although the king took the command in war, it was for the ephors to say when war should be made, and on what terms peace should be concluded. Any public magistrate, the kings not excepted, was liable to be called to account by them, while they themselves seem to have been irresponsible. Of course the fact that they were annually elected necessitated a general conformity in their policy to the popular will. But so great and arbitrary were their powers that Plato hints that the Spartan consti tution might be almost described as a tyranny. Indeed they were to Sparta what the House of Commons is to England, "the moving spring," as Arnold says (Thucy., App. II.), of the whole Spartan government. Of the institutions we have described, not one, as we have seen, was peculiar to Sparta, or, it may be inferred, due to Lycurgus. They were indeed all connected by tradition with his name, and we may believe that he did his best to put them on a sound basis, though, as to the ephors, there is reason to think that they formed no part of the original Spartan constitution. One thing is certain that there was a permansnce about Lycurgus s work, what ever it may have been, to which Sparta s long freedom from revolution was unanimously attributed. She owed this no doubt mainly to her peculiar social customs and usages, and it is here that in the opinion of both Grote and Thirl- wall we must specially look for the reforming hand of Lycurgus. It w.is of the first importance that the Spartan should be an efficient soldier. He was a conqueror in the midst of a subject population, to which he stood in the same relation in which the Norman for a time at least stood to the Saxon. This subject population was made up of two classes, the Perioeci (dwellers round the city) and the Helots, the first being freemen and proprietors scattered throughout the townships and villages of Laconia, with some powers of local self-government, but with no voice in the affairs of the state, while the latter were simply serfs, attached to the soil which they cultivated, like the villein of the feudal period, for Spartan proprietors, to whom they paid a rent equivalent, it is said, to half of the entire pro duce. Their condition, though a humble and in some respects a degraded one, was at least free from the worst incidents of slavery, as they lived with their wives and families, and could not be sold out of the country. Thus they must have felt themselves an integral part of the state, which employed them in military service, and rewarded them from time to time with the gift of freedom. Still, as an oppressed class, they often gave uneasiness to Sparta, and on one memorable occasion, recorded by Thucydides (iv. 80), as many as two thousand of them were treacher ously and secretly massacred for reasons of state expediency. There was even a regular and legalized system of thinning their numbers by stealthy assassination, known as the "crypteia," and carried into effect by young Spartans who were annually commissioned to range the country with daggers for this horrible purpose. If under ordinary circumstances the frugal and industrious Helot might exist in tolerable comfort and even hope for freedom, he must have been made to feel that it was exceedingly dangerous to be too aspiring, and the inferiority of his condition was clearly marked by a distinctive dress which he dared not lay aside, any more than he might presume to sing any of the national songs of Sparta. It was by the toil of the Helots that the Spartan was enabled to live, as we should say, the life of a gentleman, devoting himself to hunting and military exercises along with some slight admixture of mental culture, based mainly on music and poetry. It was not, however, a life of easo and enjoyment. His physical training was proverbially severe. From the age of seven he was put under a rigorous state discipline which inured him to the patient endurance of the most extreme hardships. The ideal at which he was specially taught to aim was a calm passive fortitude, which implied that he lived solely for the state. Spartan youths would compete with each other in submitting themselves to the lash before the altar of the goddess Artemis, and would, it is said, sometimes suffer even to death without any visible emotion. The story that they were habitually trained to theft means that they had licence to roam the country and forage for food, which they were expected to carry off without detection. In every way they were trained to feel themselves at home amid peril and hardship. The Spartan woman, whose business it was to be the mother of brave and robust children, was naturally held in great honour, and according to Aristotle had at least in his time great influence on public affairs. The maiden was trained in much the same fashion as the youth, and was exercised in running, wrestling, and boxing, and thus at Sparta there was a much freer intermingling of the sexes than in any other Greek state. In this respect Spartan fashions of life seem to have besn altogether peculiar to Spartans. The effect of such a training on the women would as a matter of course be to give them masculine senti ments and aspirations, and we can well understand what regard would be paid to their praise or censure. The position of women in Sparta takes us back to the old heroic ages, and reminds us of many passages in the poems of Homer. One of the features of Spartan life, in thorough harmony with its general purpose and tenor, was the public mess, the "syssitia," according to the Greek phrase. Every citizen was bound to be a member of the mess, which was arranged in a number of joint tables, each providing from his allot ment of land a prescribed quota of provisions, with wine and game from the public forests, and the guests being distributed into parties of fifteen persons, and chosen by- ballot. Attendance at the mess was strictly enforced, and even the kings were not permitted to excuse themselves. The claims of the state on her citizens, and the duty of obedience to state discipline, were thus kept perpetually present to the Spartan s mind. With trade and industrial occupations, even agriculture, the Spartan had nothing to do, all this being left to the

Feriaaci and Helots. We might have anticipated that such