Polıteía 61
defined pool and endowed with broad probouleutic and judicial powers sug-
gests oligarchy or even aristocracy. It is no wonder that the ancient writers
were perplexed and found it necessary to jettison the familiar terminology.
To speak of Sparta as a kingdom, an aristocracy, an oligarchy, or even a de-
mocracy would be to take the part for the whole.
Lacedaemon was, in fact, all and none of the above. Hers was, as the an-
cient writers ultimately concluded, a mixed regime—an uneasy compromise,
hard to sustain, between competing principles that managed to prevent or at
least retard the emergence of partial societies by somehow admitting and
somehow denying the claims of every constituent group. As a mixed regime,
the polity attempted (with considerable success for an extended period) to
protect each element within the community against the others and to elicit
loyalty and devotion from all. The prerogatives conferred on the basıleús and
the influence that went with those prerogatives bolstered kingship and satisfied
in some measure the ancient Heraclid claim to rule; the sharing of those pre-
rogatives and that influence between two rival houses and the subjection of
both kings to the oversight of the ephors prevented one-man domination. By
its very existence, the gerousía guaranteed that noble birth would be honored,
and the responsibilities reserved for that council prevented not just the whole-
sale redistribution of the land inherited by the traditional aristocracy but the
public discussion of any such measure as well. At the same time, the ephorate
and assembly safeguarded the property, the political rights, and the other
privileges of the common people. While it all lasted, each element had its
rights and dignity reinforced, and that fact goes a long way toward explaining
the stability of the constitution and its capacity safely to concentrate in the
hands of the magistrates the extraordinary power that was required for the
enforcement of the Spartan regimen.
Eventually, of course, that regimen—and, with it, the Spartan constitution
—collapsed. Tacitus came reasonably close to the truth when he claimed that
“all nations and cities are ruled either by the people, or by the leading men, or
by individuals” and then added with regard to the mixed regime: “The form
of commonwealth that is selected and composed from these [three] types, it
is easier to praise than to achieve, and, if achieved, it will hardly last for long.”
But, here again, Lacedaemon’s real failure is less striking than her remarkable
success, and Rome’s greatest historian admitted as much when he conferred
on Sparta a distinction he resolutely denied the Roman republic: inclusion
among what he termed “well-constituted civic communities [civitates] .”^69