Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/68

58 58 Dr Arnold on the persons have power to pass sentence of banishment '"^^ and death, he A fragment of a work on Law and Justice, written in the Doric dialect, and attributed to Archytas the Pytha- gorean, contains the same doctrine :  Laws and states ought to be compounded of all the forms of government, and to have something of democracy, something of oligarchy, some- thing of royalty and aristocracy : as in Lacedaemon, where the kings are monarchical, the gerons aristocratical, the ephors oligarchicaP the hippagretae and youths ^^ democratical.'' (Stob. xLiii. 134.) A nearly similar view of the Spartan constitution is taken by Polybius, who represents it as com- bining the excellencies and peculiarities of all the different forms of government; and he, as well as the authors just quoted, considers certain institutions as characteristic of the several forms of government, and united in the Spartan state, (vi. S. 8. VI. 10.) It is of course evident that none of these writers could understand the terms monarchy, oligarchy or aristocracy, and democracy, in their strict sense, as signifying governments in which one person alone governs, in which a few persons or the best alone govern, or in which the majority alone govern ; as every state must be governed by some definite number of persons, which must be either one or seve- ral, and if several, either more or less than half the com- munity. In all these passages the application of the terms mo- narchy, royalty, and despotism to the Spartan constitution is sufficiently obvious: but the vacillation between oligarchy and democracy may seem less easy of explanation. If indeed we take the term democracy in its proper sense, as meaning a government in which the sovereignty resides in the greater 23 IV. 9. If this language is precise, Miiller is wrong in supposing that banishment was never a regular punishment at Sparta, see Vol. ii. p. 239. 551. 24 It is curious to observe how authors vary in considering the same institutions or powers as characteristic of different forms of government. Thus Plato calls the Ephors despotic, Aristotle calls them democratic, and this writer makes them oligar- chical. If the Ephors had jointly possessed the entire sovereign power, the Greeks would have called the government a cvvaa-T€ia, i. e. a very narrow oligarchy. 25 KopoL Kal LTT'TrayperaL. The Kopoi here meant are the 300 knights who were commanded by the hippagretae. See Meursius Misc. Lac. ii. 4. p. II7. Miiller Vol. II. p. 257. n. s. Miiller p. 256. says that these Kopoi were chosen on aristocratic principles, i. e. according to merit, but see Xen, Hell, iii, 3. 9.