In this lecture, Professor Kagan finishes up his description of the Spartan
constitution. He argues that Sparta had a mixed constitution and gained
greatpowerduetoalliancesthattheSpartansmadewiththeirneighbors.
After the discussion of Sparta, Professor Kagan examines Athens and the
development of the Athenian constitution. In addition, he shows how
different these two poleis were. Finally, Professor Kagan discusses the
emergenceofthehopliteclassinAthensandthefailureofCylontomake
himselftyrantofAthens.
We were examining Sparta, the most important, I think, of the early poleis, certainly once you get into the seventh and sixth centuries. And I was describing the formal constitution of the Spartans, having mentioned the kings and the gerousia, the council of elders consisting of twenty-eight elected men over sixty and the two kings to create a body of thirty. Then there is the Spartan Assembly which consists of all the adult male Spartan citizens, and as in most states, it really originated from the idea of having the fighting men participate in decisions and they're the kinds of decisions that undoubtedly were the first decisions the assemblies made. And in the case of Sparta, I would guess almost the only decisions they made were questions of whether to go to war, whether to make peace, whether to make alliances and so forth.
Now, it's worth mentioning that that assembly--you want to distinguish that assembly from what I'll describe shortly about the Athenian Assembly. In this assembly, it is true that all adult male Spartans were participants, and let me also say that they came to the meeting dressed in their military uniform, apparently including their shields, because when a question was put to the Spartans, the way they responded was by shouting and banging on their shields. Whereupon, the presiding official would try to determine which side had the loudest noise. It's like a voice vote in one of our own meetings, only a little bit more colorful. And only, of course, if the presiding official decided that he couldn't tell which side had the most noise, would they resort to a separation like the British Parliament, those in favor over on that side, those opposed on the other side, and he would count and out would come the result.
It looks as though the debates in the assembly were probably infrequent, because as best we can figure it out, we would guess that most issues that came before the assembly--let me back up and say probably not very many issues came before the assembly, but those that did, if there was an agreement on the part of the gerousia and the kings, in other words, the upper groups in society, if they agreed there would be no need to go, there might be some legal need to go to the assembly, but there would be no debate and the matter would simply go forward. However, some scholars go far too far in suggesting that there never was a debate in the assembly. There are debates reported to us in Thucydides, which make it perfectly clear that they did, but it is worth pointing out that so far as our information goes, the only people who spoke at those assemblies were the kings, the gerousia, or a group of people I haven't mentioned to you yet, the ephors, the five ephors. I'll describe their situation for you, but for the moment they are
annually elected officials of the state. In short, the average Spartan did not ever speak in the assembly, it appears. So it's not a democratic assembly, even though every single citizen is there, if he wants to be. So, that's part of the mixed and rather confusing aspect of the assembly.
Let me turn now to the ephors. These, according to Spartan tradition, were invented somewhat late in the development of the Spartan constitution.
The word ephor comes from the word which means to oversee, to oversee what's going on. They were, in a certain sense, the overseers. One of their duties was to keep watch on the kings and to see that the kings didn't do anything improper, illegal, irreligious, or anything of that kind, and some scholars have focused on that and suggested that, at least originally, that was what their main function was: to protect the Spartans from excessive power, excessive behavior by the kings, and that their sort of watching the king's thing was always their chief function. That, I think, is not right.
I think by the time the Spartans appear to us in history, let us say late in the sixth century and fifth century, the ephors don't do that. I mean, they still have the technical constitutional requirement to do that, but that's not what they're up too. When we see them they are usually engaged in dealing with foreign policy. So, if a neighboring state wanted to communicate something to the Spartans, either it might be an offer of an alliance or it might be an order to do something or else war would follow, or a negotiation for peace, any of those things, first they would come to the ephors, of which there were five and the ephors would then decide what should be done.
I would say, in most cases, they would, unless it was very, very serious, they would be able to give some sort of answer to it, but when it involved something fundamental like war and peace or alliances, then they would have to go to the assembly to get their approval. But my guess is that it would have been wildly reckless and therefore never done for the ephors not to go to the gerousia first, because the gerousia was, by far, the most significant council in the state, most able to have the necessary prestige and yet to be small enough truly to discuss what needed to be done. And since the gerousia included the kings, it involved the most important people in the state. So, if the ephors wanted to do something, it would be damn foolish not to clear it with the gerousia first; although if they wished to be reckless, they could do otherwise.
Now, another thing about the ephors is that they're very different.
The people who are elected to the gerousia are old men who have proven themselves, they are truly elected by a process in which their individual qualities are relevant, and so they have tremendous prestige in the Spartan state. This is not true necessarily and typically of the ephors. Aristotle tells us that they in fact were just any Joe Spartan, that they were ordinary people, not distinguished in any way. Although we don't have a clear picture of the way in which they were chosen, it is clear that they were--it looked it was some kind of a combination of election and sortition; there's a strong element of chance involved in selecting who was going to be an ephor. So, you must think of them, not as distinguished people who have some clout in their own person, but ordinary people who only achieve what clout they're going to have by virtue of being chosen as ephors. They're only there for a year.
Now, the kings are there for life and the gerousia is there for life, and I suppose the assembly is there for life, but the ephors are only going to be ephors for a year and only once in their life. These are not politically powerful people. I think the idea was to sort of have a representation of the ordinary Spartan to carry on the functions that I have talked about. On the other hand, they were given the responsibility of seeing that the kings were in line and they had various techniques or various policies and processes which had them make judgments as to whether the kings were doing anything wrong, and if they did, they could make that point. They could go to Delphi and ask the god, if they were right in thinking something was wrong, and if they came back the kings would be put on trial. The ephors would be the accusers, the trial would be held in the gerousia, and don't imagine that that didn't matter. Kings were brought to trial in this way frequently in the history of Sparta and very often they were convicted, and often exiled, and in other ways punished. So, there's nothing just theoretical about this capacity to control them and something rather important about this accidental element in who becomes an ephor.
All right, those are the elements of the Spartan constitution and I think it's self evident that it deserves a title of a mixed constitution. At the same time, you don't want to lose sight of something even more basic than that. Remember that all the Spartiates that there are, whether they are ordinary citizens, all the way up through king, are a small minority of all the people who are under the control of the Spartans. People try to guess from the evidence that we have what percentage of the entire population of the Peloponnesus or of their own part of the Peloponnesus the Spartans were--well, it looks as though the number of Helots may have been something like seven Helots to every Spartan. Then you have to add to that the number of perioikoi who were also not Spartiates.
So, whatever the mixed character of the constitution was, when you look at the whole of Laconia and its possessions, it is very much an oligarchy. The Spartans normally will like to see other states oligarchically governed. They will not like to see either extreme. They won't like democracies and they won't like any form of autocracy which in Greece typically took the form of tyranny. So, the Spartans gain a reputation of being--because they often fight against tyrants--they gain a reputation of being hostile to tyranny, which brings our attention to the subject of foreign policy, very important for Sparta and for the Greek world, because as I think I mentioned before, the Spartans became the first state to be in command, or in control, or to be the leaders of a coalition of states. Not for a specific purpose only, but a permanent coalition of states which the ancient Greeks referred to as the Spartans and their allies, which modern scholars have come to call the Peloponnesian League, and I guess I will use that term and you'll see it all over the place.
It's an imprecise term because some of the members of the--let me say a better term for it would be the Spartan alliance, which is what pretty much the Greeks called it, because not everybody in the Peloponnese was a member of the Peloponnesian League and not every member of the league was in the Peloponnesus, but still we all will know what we're talking about when we speak of the Peloponnesian League. I shall try to remember to speak of the Spartan alliance most of the time.
Well, how did it come to exist? Again, as in most things in Greek history, the beginnings are shrouded in legend and are not absolutely clear, but perhaps the place to start is to say maybe around 570 B.C. The Spartans who had been successful apparently in turning around, to some considerable degree their defeat back in the seventh century in fight with Argos and were expanding their influence and power in the Peloponnesus, suffered a defeat in the region of Arcadia to the north of Laconia--that by the way is mountainous country and poor typically, relatively speaking and it provided some of the toughest warriors in the Greek world. So, it's no miracle that the Spartans had a hard time up there. It looks as though at that point, that somebody in Sparta came up with a bright idea which changed the nature of the Spartan situation, and also introduced something new into the Greek world at the same time.
They defeated the town of Tegea, which is located just to the north of Laconia. It's a very important state for the Spartans, not just because it's the neighbor right to the north of them, but because remember what I told you, if you want to get to Mycenae from Sparta you can't go across those mountains, you got to go up north and then go left, go west into Mycenae.
Tegea is right there where the road turns west. So, its strategic importance is very great. The Spartans got into this war with Tegea and they gained control of Tegea where they claimed to have discovered the bones of the great Homeric hero, Orestes and taken it away from Tegea, the bones I mean, and buried them at Sparta.
Also, there was a legend that maybe they propagated that showed up in some poetry we have, that Agamemnon had moved from his home base in Mycenae to Sparta, an attempt, in other words, to connect these Dorian Spartans with the legends of the great men of the Achaean world described by Homer. Finally, we are told late in the sixth century, King Cleomenes who was one of the aggressive Spartan rulers who expanded the power of Sparta, said on one occasion, "I am no Dorian, I am an Achaean." What's this all about? Well, it looks like as the Spartans begin to extend this league that I will be telling you about in a minute, they want to reduce the amount of resistance that they're going to get into. Dorian's versus Achaeans still seems to have some meaning to the Greeks. Remember the business about what happened in Sicyon when the tyrants of Sicyon made this sharp distinction in favor of Achaeans against Dorians. It suggests that that division among the Greek peoples hadn't died down yet and I think that's what's going on here. Spartans are trying to claim union with the Achaeans not dominance over them.
Anyway, nonetheless, the Spartans start taking on other Greek states trying to establish their domination and are very successful. They defeated the powerful and important state of Argos. And in the process they took away a piece of land that is between the area of Argos and Sparta, the name of it is Cynuria and they took it away, next to their own state. That's interesting, because the Argives never forgave that and never gave up on the idea of getting it back. You find the Argives and the Spartans fighting each other at least once a century and what they're fighting about is gaining control of Cynuria. Its common people referred to Cynuria as the Alsace-Lorraine of the Peloponnesus. Everybody who doesn't have it and wants it back between these two states. Finally, the Spartans also take the island just
off the southeastern edge of the Peloponnesus called Cythera, which gives them a good strategic base there as well, so they are expanding.
Now, what happens--I'll go back to Tegea for a moment because that's the first case we hear and it's the model. When they defeat the Tegeans, instead of simply annexing their territory, subordinating the people, or subjecting the people to Spartan rule, they do something different. They offer the Tegeans an alliance. The character of the alliance, certainly in the full fledged history of the Spartan alliance--we can't be sure whether the words I'm going to speak to you now were all there in the original oath that the Spartans made their allies swear, but it was there by the end of the fifth century anyway. I think something like it, either was in the oath or was understood, and that is: the state that was defeated said, agreed to accept the leadership of Sparta, and the word that's involved here is hegemonia and the leader is called a hegemon and that is something different from being your master here, your despotes. It's a little bit less, or at least you want it to seem that way and to have the same friends and enemies as the Spartans had, and to follow them wherever the Spartans should lead.
A short way of saying it was that they turned their foreign policy over to the Spartans and accepted their leadership in war. What do they get in exchange? One, the Spartans didn't take away their land, destroy their houses, make them slaves or anything like that. Besides that, they also provided them, promised them and provided them protection against attack from somebody else. When the Peloponnesian League is in place, one of its consequences for most of the time, is the end of warfare between the states inside the Peloponnesus, at least that was the theoretical situation. As we shall see, it will be broken from time to time, but still it's generally true. So now, what does this mean? The Spartans have done something that is similar to what the Romans would do centuries later and really an enormous achievement if you can do it.
When you conquer people, one of the problems you have, is every state you conquer is potentially a problem. You have to rule it, and that's going to take more soldiers and you will have to do something with them.
You acquire responsibilities that are greater than they used to be, but the point is, normally you don't gain any fighting men. Spartan way of doing it means you gain more troops for your army. When the Spartans go to their allies, and they want to go war, they tell them send your allotment of troops to the place we tell you, on the day we tell you. That allotment could well be two-thirds of their army. They will go to where the Spartans want to go and the general of the army overall will be a Spartan, and they will be fighting for Spartan purposes, unless the Spartans have chosen to fight for their allies' purposes. But the Spartans now have increased their military strength enormously by the invention of this new thing, the Spartan Alliance.
Now, the debate continues to exist as to just what that alliance was really like. Were the Spartans free to do anything that they liked in foreign
Now, the debate continues to exist as to just what that alliance was really like. Were the Spartans free to do anything that they liked in foreign