his advice in government. The Milesian took the messenger through a grain field, striking off the finest and tallest ears as they walked, and sent him back without other answer. The story certainly does stand for what necessarily became, to some degree, the policy of all tyrants toward the nobles. And thus, when the tyrants themselves were overthrown, democracy had a fairer chance of success. In the Ionian cities, the next step was usually a democratic government. In Doric Greece, more commonly there followed a return to a broader aristocracy, but never to quite the older and more objectionable form of oligarchy. The tyrants had done their work effectively.

REFERENCES FOR READING. On the political development: the standard histories, and Coulanges, Fowler, and Greenidge, 12-23. On Oligarchies: Greenidge, 60-73. On Tyrants: Mahaffy, Problems, 78–86, or Survey, 99-101, or Social Life, 84-90; Greenidge, 27-35; Grote, ch. ix. EXERCISE. Contrast the "tyrants" with the Homeric kings as to origin of power, as to limitation by custom and public opinion, as to security in their positions.

VI. THE RISE OF SPARTA.

110. Early Sparta: the Need of Reforms; Subsequent Growth. The invading Dorians founded numerous petty states in the Peloponnesus. For a time one of the weakest of these was Sparta. Her territory - just a few square miles in the rich Eurotas valley did not approach the sea, and it was surrounded by powerful and grasping neighbors. Internally, too, Sparta was torn by faction.

The later Spartans attributed their escape from these threatening conditions to the reforms of a certain Lycurgus. Certainly about the year 900 B.C., whether the reformer's name was Lycurgus or not, the Spartans did adopt peculiar social and political institutions that made them a marked people in later Greek history. Disciplined and hardened by this code, they entered upon a career of conquest. Before 700 B.C. they had subdued all Laconia; before 650, Messenia also; while the

other states of the Peloponnesus, except hostile Argos, had become their allies for war.

111. The Political Constitution. Sparta had two kings. Legend ascribed this to the birth of twin princes. Whatever the occasion, the nobles in this city weakened the royal power by dividing it, and so were less tempted to abolish it. In consequence, Sparta is the one Greek city which had no tyrant in this period. The kings were members of a senate of thirty elders-originally, no doubt, the heads of Sparta's thirty clans. The other twenty-eight senators, however, had become elective, but only from the old noble families. The office was for life. No one under sixty years was eligible. The senate for the greater part of Spartan history was the chief political body in the state. A popular Assembly of all free Spartans chose senators and other officers, and decided important matters laid before it, but it had no right to introduce new measures. Discussion was limited to the chiefs and great officers, and at a later time the senate secured the power, "if the people decide anything crookedly, to put it back.”

So far this was a close survival of the Homeric constitution, except that the two kings checked each other's authority, and that the Assembly elected the council. But about 725 B.C. Sparta took a great stride toward democracy. Elected magistrates, called Ephors, assumed the headship of the state. Five of these were chosen each year by the Assembly, and any Spartan was eligible to the office. The Ephors called the Assembly and presided over it, and acted as judges in all important matters. No appeal from their decision was allowed. One or more of them accompanied the king, even in war, with power to control

1 Aristotle, Politics, ii. 9. Aristotle calls the mode of election "childish." The candidates were led through the assembly in turn, and as each passed, the people shouted. Judges, shut up in a room from which they could not see the candidates, listened to the shouts and gave the vacancy to the one whose appearance had called out the loudest welcome. This method, after all, has an interesting relation to our viva-voce voting, where we decide, in the first instance, by noise.

his movements and to arrest and condemn him. The kings had now become simply priests, judges in certain unimportant matters of family law, generals in war, and members of the senate. Sparta kept the form and dignity of ancient royalty, and she was intensely aristocratic in feeling, but in reality she was a military democracy under the annual dictatorship of an elected committee of Ephors.

To the Greeks, however, such delegation of power, even to officers elected for short terms, seemed undemocratic. They would not have called our government by President, Congress, and Supreme Court a democracy at all. To them democracy meant a government in which each freeman took somewhat the same part that a member of Congress does with us a system such that each citizen voted, not occasionally, to elect representatives, but constantly, on all matters of great state policy, which matters also he might discuss in the ruling assembly of his city-country. By this standard Sparta was aristocratic.

112. Classes in Laconia. Moreover, after the conquest of Laconia, the Spartans as a whole were a ruling oligarchy in the midst of a subject class eight or ten times their number. They were simply a camp of eight or nine thousand conquerors (with their families) living under arms in their unwalled city, and holding the most fertile lands of Laconia. They themselves, wholly given to camp life, could not work, and each man's land was tilled by certain slaves of the state, called Helots.

in war.

The Helots numbered four or five to one Spartan, and so were a standing danger, though they were the indispensable basis for any such system. They furnished light-armed troops A secret police of active Spartan youth busied itself in detecting plots among them and sometimes, it is claimed, carried out secret and widespread massacre of the more intelligent and ambitious slaves. Each year, too, the Ephors declared war against the Helots in the name of the State,

1 A good treatment is found in Grant's Greece, 144-146.

that it might be lawful for any Spartan to kill them without trial, and ancient critics are prone to refer to the mysterious way in which crowds of Helots vanished sometimes, when their numbers threatened Spartan safety. On one occasion, in the great death struggle with Athens in the fifth century, the Spartans had given the Helots heavy armor, but afterward became terrified at the possible consequences. Thucydides

(iv. 80) tells how they met the danger:

"They proclaimed that a selection would be made of those Helots who claimed to have rendered the best service to the Lacedaemonians in the war, and promised them liberty. The announcement was intended to test them; it was thought that those among them who were foremost in asserting their freedom would be most high-spirited and most likely to rise against their masters. So they selected about two thousand, who were crowned with garlands, and went in procession round the temples; they were supposed to have received their liberty, but not long afterwards the Spartans put them all out of the way, and no man knew how any of them came to their end."

The inhabitants of the hundred small subject "cities" of Laconia were called Perioeci. They were free in person. They kept their own customs and a share in the government of their respective cities, under the supervision of Spartan harmosts. They had also their own lands, and they carried on such trades and commerce as existed in Laconia. They were three or four to one Spartan; and the heavy-armed soldiers of the Spartan army came in large measure from them. They had no voice in the supreme state, and the Ephors could put them to death without trial, but they seem, as a rule, to have been well treated and well content.

Thus the inhabitants of Laconia fall into three classes: (1) a small ruling oligarchy, living in one central settlement, itself an elective military dictatorship; (2) a large class of cruelly treated agricultural serfs, to support these aristocratic soldiers; (3) another large class of well-treated city populations, without political rights except for a limited local self-government.

113. Social Institutions. The garrison at Sparta maintained its superiority in Laconia by an unrelaxing vigilance and by a rigid discipline, which is sometimes lauded as "the Spartan training." That training made good soldiers, as was its sole aim; but naturally it was harsh, and in many ways brutalizing. The family, as well as the man, belonged absolutely to the army-state.

At the birth of each child, the Ephors decided whether it should be reared at all or be exposed to die as a weakling. At seven years each boy was taken from his parents, to be trained in a public institution until he was twenty- never again to sleep under his mother's roof. The system of education aimed to harden and strengthen the body and to render the mind self-controlled and obedient to authority. On certain festival days, boys were whipped at the altars to test their endurance; and Plutarch states that they often died under the lash rather than utter a cry. A bare knowledge of reading and a little martial music were the only germs of culture.

From twenty to thirty the youth lived under arms in barracks. He was one of a mess of fifteen, each of whom must provide from his land his part of the barley meal, cheese, and black broth, with meat on holidays. The mess drilled and fought side by side; and this long exclusive devotion to military drill made it possible for the Spartans to adopt a more complex system of tactics than was natural for their neighbors. The other Greeks continued much longer to fight in masses, with a few heralds to shout the orders of the general. The Spartans were trained in small regiments and companies, so as to maneuver readily at the word of command. This made their great superiority in the field; they stood to the other Greeks as disciplined, professional soldiery to a relatively untrained militia.

1 Several features of Spartan life that are ascribed by popular legend to Lycurgus, seem rather to have been survivals of a barbarous period that the Spartans never wholly outgrew; this particular custom, just alluded to in the text, is closely analogous to the savage Sun Dance of the American Indians and belongs properly to that grade of culture.