Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/370

 354 HISTORY OF GREECE. were consideied as the great common bond of union between the three component parts of the population of Laconia, Spartans, Periceki, and Helots. Not merely was it required, on this occa- sion, that two members of every house in Sparta should appear in sackcloth and ashes, but the death of the king was formally made known throughout every part of Laconia, and deputies from the townships of the Perioeki, and the villages of the Helots, to the number of several thousand, were summoned to Sparta to take their share in the profuse and public demonstra- tions of sorrow, 1 which lasted for ten days, and which imparted to the funeral obsequies a superhuman solemnity. I T or ought we to forget, in enumerating the privileges of the Spartan king, that he (conjointly with two officers called Pythii, nominated by him,) carried on the communications between the state and the temple of Delphi, and had the custody of oracles and prophecies generally. In most of the Grecian states, such inspired declara- tions were treasured up, and consulted in cases of public emer- gency : but the intercourse of Sparta with the Delphian oracle was peculiarly frequent and intimate, and the responses of the Pythian priestess met with more reverential attention from the Spartans than from any other Greeks. 3 So much the more im- portant were the king's functions, as the medium of this inter- course : the oracle always upheld his dignity, and often even seconded his underhand personal schemes. 3 Sustained by so great a force of traditional reverence, a Spar- tan king, of military talent and individual energy, like Agesilaus, exercised great ascendency ; but such cases were very rare, and we shall find the king throughout the historical period only a secondary force, available on special occasions. For real politi- cal orders, in the greatest cases as well as the least, the Spar- tan looks to the council of ephors, to whom obedience is paid with a degree of precision which nothing short of the Spartan discipline could have brought about, by the most powerful 1 Xenoph. Hcllcn. iii. 3, 1. 'Aytf trv^e crfpvortpac 7; /car' fiv&fuirc* plion, Rcpubl. Laced, c. 15; Plato, Alcib. i. p. 123. Ilcrodot. vi. 66, and Thucyd. v. 16, furnish examples of this.
 * For the privileges of the Spartan kings, see Ilcrodot. vi. 56-57; Xeto