Polıteía 55
actively sought the office and openly canvassed—and scholars rightly suspect
that the factions that tended to grow up around the two royal houses played a
crucial role in promoting the selection of their adherents. There were, to be
sure, limits to what the gérontes could accomplish: except perhaps in a period
of general disarray, the “old men” could not have pushed legislation through
the assembly releasing their fellow aristocrats from the egalitarian restrictions
that so limited their wealth and its use. But, much of the time, albeit within
clear confines, the gerousía was in a position to be the arbiter of events. If great
seriousness was attached to the selection of the gérontes, Isocrates tells us, it
was because this handful of elderly men “presided over the disposition of all
public affairs.”^61
Like the Nocturnal Council described in Plato’s Laws, the gerousía was
the guardian of the constitution. It served a function comparable to that which
Alexander Hamilton would later attribute to Britain’s House of Lords. The
gérontes had a greater stake in stability than any other group at Sparta. As
wealthy aristocrats, they had no pressing need to tamper with the system of
land allotments; as recipients of the city’s highest honor, they should generally
have been satisfied with existing political arrangements; and as old men on the
threshold of death, they had little for which to hope from revolution or re-
form. In short, like England’s peers, they had “nothing to hope for by a change,
and a sufficient interest by means of their property, in being faithful to the
National interest.” In consequence, they formed “a permanent barrier ag[ain]st
every pernicious innovation” and endowed the government with “a permanent
will.” Their very “duration” in office was “the earnest of wisdom and stability.”^62
Though the turnover must sometimes have been rapid as death took its toll,
the fundamental character and bias of the gerousía must have been always the
same. So, at least, one would judge after reading the Rhetoric of Aristotle.
In that great but neglected work, the peripatetic makes much of the fact
that an orator, called upon to address a particular group and eager to achieve
a particular end, must pay careful attention to the character of his listeners
and couch his rhetoric in a fashion that will move them in the way he intends.
There are many differences which distinguish types of men—even within a
particular political regime—and the statesman must pay attention to them all.
Among these differences, Aristotle singles out age. His awareness of its impor-
tance causes the philosopher to dedicate an extended digression to a discus-
sion of the qualities which separate young men in the cities of Greece from
those, like the gérontes of Sparta, who have lived for a long time, observed many