Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/72

62 62 Dr Arnold on the and not the situation of the subject classes, gave to the Lace- daemonian government the name and character of an oligarchy. This is distinctly recognized by Miiller, who " calls the Spar- tan constitution an aristocracy without the least hesitation, on account of its continued and predominant tendency towards governing the community by a few, who were presumed to be the best'' (b. iii. c. 9. ^ 18). The same view is implied in all the numerous passages respecting the Lacedaemonian government above quoted, in which the structure of the Spartan body is alone attended to. So Ainstotle in describ- ing the decline of this constitution says that the Ephors being chosen from the people, and having extensive and almost arbitrary powers, the kings were compelled to court them ; so that the government became a democracy from an aristo- cracy (11. 9) : whereas if the other view were correct, no change in the rights of the Spartans would have made the government democratic without a change in the rights of the Perioeci. Again he says that the women are not suffici- ently restrained by law from luxurious indulgence, and con- sequently that the lawgiver, intending that the whole state should be austere and temperate in their habits, had succeeded only so far as the men are concerned : where the ' whole state' evidently excludes the Perioeci and Helots. The mysterious secrecy which Thucydides ascribes to the Lacedaemonian state could not have existed, if any part of the community had been governed on popular principles (v. 68). Can it indeed be doubted that, if the Athenians had prevailed in the Peloponnesian war, and had sent their Lysander to remodel the constitution of Lacedaemon, they would have set about making a democracy, not with raising the subjects to citizens, a measure which every Athenian would have considered ab- solutely destructive of his own state, but with opening the close constitution of the Spartans, by removing the restric- tions on the popular assembly, by giving the criminal and civil jurisdiction to numerous and popular tribunals, by making all magistrates responsible, by establishing nomina- tion by lot, by abolishing the minute and severe regulations of private life^ and the many other measures which an 3» " That interference with the freedom of private life which characterized the whole Spartan system was as alien to the spirit of democracy as it was congenial to