4 Prologue
that became available during and after the Peloponnesian War. In the univer-
sal history he wrote concerning the rise and fall of succeeding hegemonic
powers in the period stretching from the Return of the Heraclids to the mid-
fourth century, Ephorus of Cumae paid very close attention to Lacedaemon, to
her history, her peculiarities, her polıteía, and way of life.^14 In his dialogues—
above all, in his Republic and Laws—Plato had frequent occasion to display an
intimate familiarity with Spartan institutions and practices;^15 and Aristotle, no
doubt with the aid of his students, penned a learned treatise on the Lacedae-
monian polıteía and its evolution. In it, if we are to judge by the predilections
on display in The Politics, which has as its focus the fully developed polıteíaı
of his own day,^16 the peripatetic must have devoted close attention not only
to the rules defining citizenship and the magistracies and the procedures for
decision- making put in place at Sparta, but also to the education and moral
formation, the paıdeía, that Lacedaemon gave her young by means of the agōgē ́;
to the relations between women and men; to her practices as they pertained
to war; and to that polity’s property regime and the changes it underwent.
Such is certainly the picture conveyed by the surviving excerpts.^17
Unlike his detailed study of the Athenian regime, which it must have
closely resembled, Aristotle’s Polıteía of the Lacedaemonians is, alas, now
lost. In antiquity, however, this seminal work was widely read and frequently
quoted, and subsequently it served as a basis for the descriptions and analyses
of the Spartan regime articulated by the peripatetic’s own pupils Theophrastus
of Eresus and Dicaearchus of Messana; by his epitomator Heracleides of Lem-
bus, a third-century adherent of the Lyceum; by the Stoic Sphaerus of Borys-
thenes; and by later writers, most notably the renowned biographer Plutarch
of Chaeronea.^18
We need not doubt the overall accuracy of these works. The Lacedaemo-
nians were, in fact, so pleased with the treatise produced by Dicaearchus in or
soon after the 330s that—in all likelihood not long after its appearance—they
passed a law stipulating that once a year, at the administrative office of the
ephors, this particular treatise on the polıteía of the Lacedaemonians be read
aloud in its entirety to those Spartiates then in their prime.^19 If the Spartan
agōgē ́ survived, as a relic of sorts, the demise of Lacedaemon’s ancient political
system and the abolition of the dual kingship; if, after a brief hiatus in the
second century, it was revived in something like its original form; and if it flour-
ished thereafter for more than half a millennium under Roman dominion so
that Cicero and, later, the geographer Pausanias, the biographer Plutarch, and