100 Politics and Geopolitics
A Tale of Two Revolutions
There is no way that we can bring full order to the confusion that this
propensity introduced. Such a task was beyond the capacities of Aristotle, who
knew much that has not been vouchsafed to us. We can, however, attempt
to follow in the footsteps of the peripatetic and perhaps progress a few steps
beyond the place where he stopped, for there is also evidence available to us
that may not have been available to him, and it should enable us in some par-
ticulars to sort out fiction from fact.
It is, for example, highly unlikely that any great reform was carried out in
the age of Leobatas. We first hear of Sparta acting as a political community
and acquiring territory in the time of his great-grandson Archelaus,^8 whose
reign overlapped with that of the Charillos whom Simonides and Aristotle
identify as the nephew of Lycurgus. Moreover, what we know of the archaeol-
ogy of Laconia would suggest that it was not until about this time that condi-
tions were ripe for a warrior chieftainship based on custom, force of person-
ality, and prowess to give way to a political community grounded in law.
We also possess one important clue. In antiquity, it was the practice both
at Sparta and elsewhere to specify years by the name of one of the magistrates
annually selected; and in later times, at least, there was a list of ephors epony-
mous comparable to the list of the archons eponymous that existed at Athens.
This list reportedly went back to the year 754—when Charillos, grandfather
of the Theopompus who brought the First Messenian War to a successful con-
clusion some decades thereafter, is likely to have been near the end of his
reign. Whether the early entries on such lists are reliable is, of course, an open
question. Some scholars even dismiss the Spartan list itself as a late invention.
But there is other evidence strongly suggesting that the ephorate existed in
eighth-century Lacedaemon, for there are inscriptions showing that the in-
stitution later existed at two colonies—Thera in the Aegean and Taras on the
boot in Italy—that, as we have already had occasion to note, Sparta is said to
have sent out in this period. It is, of course, conceivable that these disparate,
distant, and fiercely independent communities slavishly adopted Spartan in-
stitutions long after their foundations, as some scholars hypothesize.^9 But for
this unlikely possibility, there is not a single shred of evidence.
That the ephorate was established in the mid-eighth century is, moreover,
perfectly plausible. In the pertinent decades, Greece appears to have under-
gone a political transformation. If tradition is to be believed, it was in the 750s