Polıteía 51
only three—Leonidas, his son Pleistarchus, and Archidamus—are not known
ever to have been tried for a capital crime, and even this statistic may be mis-
leading. Leonidas and Pleistarchus bore the full weight of royal responsibility
for periods so brief that their escape could not be deemed significant. And
neither of their reigns nor that of Archidamus is sufficiently well attested to
justify our being certain from the silence of the sources that none of them was
ever in danger.^48 The only reasonably safe conclusion is that none of them
was ever convicted of a capital crime.
The fact that Sparta’s kings were so often tried and so often convicted
should not be taken as evidence of congenital criminality. Sometimes, of
course, there was wrongdoing, but even here the motive for prosecution was
more often than not political. Theophrastus stresses that even at Sparta “the
lust for victory [phılonıkía]” played a substantial role in trials,^49 and this is
precisely what we would expect when the kings were involved. There is no
evidence that the Spartans distinguished between the judicial and the political
functions of their magistrates, and the removal of a king was a matter of enor-
mous political consequence.
It is a measure of the ephors’ importance that the kings had to court them.
It would no doubt be an exaggeration to say that the Spartan kings lived in
terror of the ephors, but they cannot have been unaware of their vulnerabil-
ity. Polybius claims that the kings obeyed the ephors as children, their par-
ents. This may be hyperbole—but Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle are surely
not far from the truth when they compare the powers of the ephors to those
of tyrants.^50
It might seem that the kings were virtual prisoners of the ephors. Two sets
of circumstances precluded this. In the first place, the kings were kings for life,
while the ephors held office but for a year and apparently could never again
serve. Equally important, the kingships were hereditary, while the ephorate—
which was a democratic office for which every Spartiate who was a presbúteros
over the age of forty-five was eligible—came, Plato tell us, “near to being an
allotted power” and seems to have been filled either by lot from a large elected
pool or by some other similar procedure, in which election played a part, that
was no less subject to the vagaries of chance. Given the extraordinary power
concentrated in the office, if the ephors had been directly elected—as many
scholars think they were—there would have been intense competition and
canvassing; chance would have played next to no role in determining the out-
come; and the electoral process would frequently have turned into a plebiscite