48 Polıteía
caution is required regarding this matter, for things would have been much
worse had there not been two circumstances working to prevent tyranny—the
power of the ephors and the rivalry between the two kings.
The Overseers
The Spartan ephors were magistrates of no mean importance.^36 On two
different occasions, Cicero compared them with the tribunes of the Roman
plebs, suggesting that they were a check on the kings in much the same sense
that the tribunes were a check on the consuls at Rome. Rousseau fleshed out
the Roman’s description when he denied that the ephorate existed solely to
protect the sovereign people against the government and went on to suggest
that, while the office was a regulator of and restraint on the executive power,
it served also to safeguard the laws and “to maintain the equilibrium” between
the government and the populace.^37 The tribunes represented the plebs only;
the ephors were chosen from the political community as a whole.
No one is known to have been ephor more than once, which suggests that
iteration in office was prohibited; and the board of five held office for only a
year. During that year, however, the ephors exercised by majority vote arbi-
trary, almost unchecked power. It was only at the end of their period in office
that they were called to account for their deeds and subjected by their succes-
sors to a formal, judicial examination [eúthuna] of the sort employed in other
Greek cities to guarantee that magistrates remained responsible to the politi-
cal community.^38
In the period before that day of reckoning, the ephors played a predomi-
nant role in the making and implementing of public policy. They were em-
powered to summon “the little assembly”—which appears to have been con-
stituted by the board of ephors and the city’s gerousía—as well as the “common
assembly” of the Spartiates.^39 They could introduce laws, decrees, and declara-
tions of war and peace to the latter through the gerousía; and when the “com-
mon assembly” met—whether on an extraordinary occasion or at the regular
monthly time—they decided who would present a particular proposal. One of
their number then presided, put the question, and determined whether those
shouting for the measure outnumbered those shouting against. It is an indi-
cation of their central importance that Xenophon—the ancient writer most
intimately familiar with Spartan practice and parlance—thrice ascribes import-
ant decisions to “the ephors and assembly.” It would not be an exaggeration to