Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/364

 348 HISTORY OF GREECE. senate had been constituted by Lykurgus ; but the authority of Aristotle, as well as the internal probability of the case, sanctions the belief that they were subsequently added. 1 Taking the political constitution of Sparta ascribed to Lykurgus, it appears not to have differed materially from the rude organiza- tion exhibited in the Homeric poems, where we always find a council of chiefs or old men, and occasional meetings of a listening agora. It is hard to suppose that the Spartan kings can ever have governed without some formalities of this sort ; so that the innovation (if innovation there really was) ascribed to Lykurgus, must have consisted in some new details respecting the senate and the agora, in fixing the number 2 thirty, and the life-tenure of the former, and the special place of meeting of the latter, as well as the extent of privilege which it was to exercise ; conse- crating the whole by the erection of the temples of Zeus Hellanius and Athene Hellania. The view of the subject presented by Plutarch as well as by Plato, 3 as if the senate were an entire novelty, does not consist with the pictures of the old epic. Hence we may more naturally imagine that the Lykurgean political con- stitution, apart from the ephors who were afterwards tacked to it, presents only the old features of the heroic government of Greece, defined and regularized in a particular manner. The presence of two coexistent and coordinate kings, indeed, succeeding in hered- itary descent, and both belonging to the gens of Herakleids, is 1 Herod, i. 65 : compare Plutarch, Lycurg. c. 7 ; Aristotet. Polit. v. 9, 1 (where he gives the answer of king Theopompus). Aristotle tells us that the ephors were chosen, hut not ?tow they were chosen ; only, that it was in some manner excessively puerile, ;raJa/jt<j<5;;f yap iari "kiav (ii. G, 16). M. Barthelemy St. Hilaire, in his note to the passage of Aristotle, pre- sumes that they were of course chosen in the same manner as the senators ; but there seems no sufficient ground in Aristotle to countenance this. Nor is it easy to reconcile the words of Aristotle respecting the election of the senators, where he assimilates it to an alpeoif favaerrevTiia) (Polit. v. 5, 8 ; ii. 6, 18), with the description which Plutarch (Lycurg. 26) gives of that election. probably not peremptorily fixed before the Lykurgean reform (Dissertat. u sup. sect. 13, p. 109).
 * Kopstadt agrees in this supposition, that the r.umber of the senate was
 * Plato, Legg. iii. p. 691 ; Plan Epist. viii. p. 354, B.