Spartan kingship, which probably weakened it from the first, but in the radical difference between the Greek and Italian conception of monarchy. At Sparta, as in the Homeric age, the kings were of divine descent, and the position and power passed from father to son; to break the sacred line of the children of Herakles would be simply to make light of the divine ordering of things. Just as the Greek conceived of his gods as bodily presences rather than as spiritual essences, so it was the personality of his kings, their ancestry and breeding, rather than their constitutional powers, which filled his mind with reverence.[1] There is little trace of this feeling among the more prosaic Romans. They did not think of their gods as beings in human form; nor was it the glory of the person or the family which overawed them. As it was the power of the gods and their use of it which conditioned their religious thoughts and acts, so it was the king's power and his use of it on which they fixed their eyes as citizens. Thus, as will be seen in the next chapter, they could abolish the king, yet retain his imperium; while at Sparta the powers were suffered to decay, the king himself remaining.
At Sparta there were two kingly families, and two kings with equal authority; and however this is to be explained, it will not surprise any one who
- ↑ This is curiously illustrated by Herodotus's account of the funeral ceremonies of the Spartan kings (vi. 58). No absolute monarch could be the subject of more universal lamentation, however formal it might be; yet this was no homage rendered to power.
