Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/80

52 have been wholly an invention, and at any rate the constitution ascribed to him was actually in existence for four or five centuries. The purely political constitution was of the type common in Dorian states. There were two chief magistrates, or kings, a small council, or gerousia of elders—thirty including the kings—and an assembly or apella, which could only answer aye or no to propositions brought before it, and decided elections, it is said, by shouting. A modification of this constitution peculiar to Sparta was the yearly election of five Ephors, or overseers. Their duties, it seems, were originally to oversee the markets and the proper administration of the laws. But either because their powers were not clearly defined, or because the kings and council were weakened by divisions, they eventually obtained practical control of the government. They could reprimand or punish the kings no less than other officers or citizens, and when a king was commanding a military expedition one of their number accompanied him and controlled his actions or secured his recall. It is to them that the external policy of Sparta is in most cases to be ascribed, though the kings were nominally heads of the state, and in dignity and ceremonial observances always occupied the chief place.

In all Greek states it is to be remembered that freedom and democracy mean, after all, the rule of the few over the many; for in all the slaves were more numerous than the free. This was peculiarly true of Sparta. The Dorian conquerors had remained a class apart. The ancient inhabitants