Politics and Geopolitics 99
appears to have governed the operations of the Spartan assembly and which is
sometimes represented as an oracle from Delphi, is attributed to Lycurgus by
some and to Theopompus and Polydorus by others.^4
In what remains of his Polıteía of the Lacedaemonians, Aristotle indicates
his sensitivity to the fact that something was amiss with the oral traditions
concerning the origins of the Spartan regime; and, with a measure of circum-
spection, he may have addressed this puzzle in that largely lost work. In the
fragments of the treatise that we do possess and in his Politics, the peripatetic
is more often than not strikingly noncommittal concerning the actual achieve-
ments of Lacedaemon’s celebrated lawgiver. Sometimes, to be sure, in the lat-
ter work—where his principal aim is an analysis of the Spartan regime in its
maturity, as it existed in his own time—he resorts to a species of shorthand
consistent with the oral tradition, and he attributes to Lycurgus responsibility
for the Lacedaemonian polıteía as a whole. Occasionally, therein, he is quite
specific and he celebrates achievements that, he evidently suspects, really were
the work of an historical figure who lived long before and bore that celebrated
name. More frequently, however, in what we have of both works, Aristotle
prudently dodges the question of attribution, and he speaks in guarded tones
either of what “they say” Lycurgus did or of what “is said” to have been done
by Lycurgus; and sometimes, in The Politics, he pointedly evades the question
of attribution altogether and describes institutions and practices for which the
unnamed, generic “lawgiver” of Lacedaemon can be held responsible.^5
Aristotle was not alone in exhibiting caution. The confusion to which the
oral tradition gave rise was so great that, in fury and frustration, the fourth-
century historian Timaeus of Tauromenium was driven to suggest that Spar-
tan institutions might have been the work of two lawgivers working at differ-
ent times—each named Lycurgus.^6
For Timaeus’ suggestion, there is this to be said. It is hard to imagine that
the elaborate system of balances and checks fundamental to the operations of
Sparta’s government was the work of a single moment and man. Like the con-
stitution of England, so much admired by Montesquieu, it was almost cer-
tainly the product of a series of compromises and adjustments; and, just as the
English in early modern times were apt to defend change as a salutary return
to practices employed time out of mind, so the Spartans were accustomed to
attribute the accretions of the ages to the genius of a single legislator.^7