be permitted to him. Where claims derived from descent were disputed, personal superiority or election would determine which member of the compound head should take the lead. If within each of the component groups the power of its chief was unqualified, there would result from union of such chiefs a close oligarchy; while the closeness of the oligarchy would become less in proportion as recognition of the authority of each chief, given by nearness in blood to the divine or semi-divine ancestor, diminished. And in cases where there came to be incorporated numerous aliens, owing allegiance to the heads of none of the component groups, there would come into play influences tending still more to widen the oligarchy.
Such, we may conclude, were the origins of those compound headships of the Greek states which existed at the beginning of the historic period. In Crete, where there survived the tradition of primitive kingship, but where dispersion and subdivision of clans had brought about a condition in which "different towns carried on open feuds," there were "patrician houses, deriving their rights from the early ages of royal government," who continued "to retain possession of the administration." In Corinth, the line of Herakleid kings "subsides gradually, through a series of empty names, into the oligarchy denominated Bacchiadæ.... The persons so named were all accounted descendants of Herakles, and formed the governing caste in the city." So was it with Megara. According to tradition, this arose by combination of several villages inhabited by kindred tribes, which, originally in antagonism with Corinth, had probably, in the course of this antagonism, become consolidated into an independent state. And at the opening of the historic period the like had happened in Sikyon and other places. Though in Sparta kingship had survived under an anomalous form, yet the joint representatives of the primitive king, still reverenced because the tradition of their divine descent was preserved, had become little more than members of the governing oligarchy, retaining certain prerogatives. And, though it is true that in its earliest historically-known stage, the Spartan oligarchy did not present the form which would spontaneously arise from the union of the heads of clans for coöperation in war—though it had become elective within a limited class of persons—yet the fact that an age of not less than sixty was a qualification, harmonizes with the belief that it at first consisted of the heads of the respective groups, who were always the eldest sons of the eldest; and that these groups with their heads, described as having been in in pre-Lykurgean times "the most lawless of all the Greeks," became united by that continuous militant life which distinguished them.[1]
- ↑ As bearing on historical interpretations at large, and especially on interpretations to be made in this work, let me point out further reasons than those given by Grote and others for rejecting the tradition that the Spartan constitution was the work of Lykurgus. The universal tendency to ascribe an effect to the most conspicuous proximate cause is
