102 Politics and Geopolitics
holding on the island of Thera was restricted, as it may well have been in very
early Sparta, to a narrow aristocracy—in this case, one made up of the descen-
dants of the original settlers—and, early on, these settlers may have lorded
it over a servile population, indigenous to the island, whom they called
“helots.”^12
There is this to be said as well for Aristotle’s dating of the reform actually
carried out by Lycurgus. Those who hold an office are nearly always inclined
to promote an increase in its power. Rarely, if ever, do they attempt to restrict
the prerogatives that they themselves wield. It is therefore hard to imagine that
a king such as Theopompus would establish a magistracy for the purpose of
restricting royal power; and yet, as we have seen, this is precisely what the
ephorate found at Sparta in later times was designed to do. In short, like the
gerousía, the ephorate appears to have been instituted at a time when a con-
certed effort was made to rein in the two kings. The year 754 may have been
a turning point in Spartan history.
To this argument, there is one obvious objection. The ephorate at Lace-
daemon described by the ancient sources was a democratic office. One could
apparently hold that office only once in one’s lifetime; and, as we have seen,
it was filled by a mysterious process—akin in its results, Plato tells us, to a
lottery. This resulted in considerable power being lodged in the hands of men
distinguished as nonentities by their ordinariness, whom Aristotle aptly de-
scribed as hoı túchontes: “those who just happened along.”^13 It is hard to be-
lieve that an aristocratic clique intent on restricting the prerogatives of a dual
monarchy would fashion such an office.
Here again, however, the epigraphical evidence may be of use. For it shows
that the boards of ephors established in Sparta’s colonies on Thera and at Taras
were made up of three ephors, not five; that the same was true for the two
communities of períoıkoı—Geronthrae and Taenarum—where we know with
certainty the size of the board; and that this was probably the case at Kardam-
yle as well. It can hardly be an accident that the number of ephors in these
communities corresponds with the number of Dorian tribes, and this in turn
suggests that the institution responsible for oversight, which Sparta’s colonists
brought with them in the eighth century and that the towns of períoıkoı ad-
opted early on, was at that time in their common metropolis tribally based—
just as, we know, Lacedaemon’s army was.^14
In later years, however, as we have seen, there were five ephors at Sparta,
just as there were five lóchoı in the Spartan army and five agathoergoí. More-