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Commence when and how it might, it was an epoch most signal in the records of the ancient world for its results upon a civilization to which as yet human foresight can predict no end. We pass from Byzantium, we are in Sparta. In the Archeion, or office of the Ephoralty, sate five men, all somewhat advanced in years.
Nor did he quite regain his presence of mind until he was once more summoned into the presence of the Ephors. According to Aristotle, Cicero and others, the Ephoralty was founded by Theopompus subsequently to the mythical time of Lycurgus. To Lycurgus itself it is referred by Xenophon and Herodotus.
Müller, in his Dorians, observes that 'the Ephoralty was the moving element, the principle of change, in the Spartan constitution, and, in the end, the cause of its dissolution. Sismondi remarks that the precautions which led to the creation of the Council of Ten 'dénaturaient entièrement la constitution de l'état.
The system again of secret justice, the espionage, and the calculated terrorism, by means of which both the Spartan Ephoralty and the Venetian Council imposed their will upon the citizens, were stifling to the free life of a republic. Venice in the end became demoralized in politics and profligate in private life.
Nor must it be forgotten that the representative system, which is the proper conductor of the democratic action, if not wholly unknown to the Greeks , and if unconsciously practised in the Spartan ephoralty, was at least never existent in the more democratic states. And assemblies of the whole people are compatible only with those small nations of which the city is the country.
Mueller rightly observes, that though the ephoralty was a common Dorian magistrature, "yet, considered as an office, opposed to the king and council, it is not for that reason less peculiar to the Spartans; and in no Doric, nor even in any Grecian state is there any thing which exactly corresponds with it." They rebuked Archidamus for having married too small a wife.
Her narrowing oligarchy watched the national degeneration with approval, knowing that it is easier to control a vitiated populace than to curb a nation habituated to the manly virtues. We might bring the struggles of the Spartan kings with the Ephoralty into comparison with the attempts of the Doges Falieri and Foscari to make themselves the chiefs of the republic in more than name.
The treaty begins from the ephoralty of Pleistolas in Lacedaemon, on the 27th day of the month of Artemisium, and from the archonship, of Alcaeus at Athens, on the 25th day of the month of Elaphebolion.
At first the ephoralty was a tribunal for civil, as the gerusia was for criminal, causes; it exercised a jurisdiction over the Helots and Perioeci, over the public market, and the public revenue. But its character consisted in this: it was strictly a popular body, chosen by the people for the maintenance of their interests.
See Mueller's Dorians, vol. ii. Aristot. Pol., lib. ii., c. 9. Idem. These remarks on the democratic and representative nature of the ephoralty are only to be applied to it in connexion with the Spartan people.
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