The Rise of Athens

We are told that the reforms were based on a consultation with the famous oracle at Delphi in central Greece. “The Lord of the Silver Bow, Far-shooting Apollo, the Golden-haired spoke from his rich shrine,” wrote Tyrtaeus. On this occasion, the god did not initiate a plague as he had among the Greeks in front of Troy. He gave helpful advice and a proclamation, the Great Rhetra, which reflected his ideas, was issued.

The basic proposition was to give full citizenship to several thousand (perhaps nine thousand at the outset) Spartan males and, as we have seen, to free them from the business of earning a living from farming or manufacturing. They would be trained to be the best soldiers in Greece. The Messenians were all “helotized,” or turned into public serfs. Their task was to farm the allotments allocated to Spartan male citizens. According to Tyrtaeus, they were

Just like donkeys weighed down with heavy burdens

Bringing to their masters from cruel necessity

Half of all the produce their land bears.

The state’s political institutions were reorganized. At its base was a citizen assembly, or ecclesia, which passed laws, elected officials, and decided policy. But in practice its powers were limited; it could not initiate or amend legislation. Votes at elections were measured in a most peculiar way (presumably it was designed to counter vote rigging). Some specially selected judges were shut up in a nearby building; candidates for office were silently presented to the assembly, which shouted its endorsements. The judges assessed the volume of the shouts, without knowing which candidates they were for. Those who attracted the loudest applause were declared elected.

The assembly was guided by a council of elders or gerousia

and Sparta’s two kings. These elders were all more than sixty years old and were members for life. They were “ballast for the ship of state,” as Plutarch put it, and a force for conservatism, although they could fall under the influence from time to time of a particularly able king. The gerousia’s main power was to prepare the agenda for the assembly and it was empowered to set aside any popular decision of which it disapproved.

Executive authority lay in the hands of five ephors. Appointed by the assembly, they held office for one year and could not be reelected. They wielded great (and somewhat sinister) powers, and played a role not altogether unlike that of the political commissars who accompanied officers in the Red Army. They had a judicial function, and could levy instant fines. They could depose, imprison, and bring to trial any official, including a king (in which latter case they sat in judgment alongside the other king and the council of elders). They also negotiated with foreign embassies and expelled unwelcome foreigners. They chaired the assembly and implemented its decisions. When a king led an army abroad, two ephors accompanied him to oversee his behavior. Once a year they formally declared war on the

helots, so that killing them would not be illegal and a religious pollution.

The Spartans were terrified that their helots would rise again against them and believed that the most efficacious means of preventing this was through wholesale oppression. A secret police called the crypteia (literally “hidden things”) was tasked with ensuring peace and quiet in Messenia. Its members were recruited from the brightest and best of the younger generation, and only those willing to serve were likely to obtain senior public posts in later life. According to Plutarch, the ephors from time to time sent out into the countryside young Spartiates in the crypteia,

equipped only with daggers and basic rations. “In the daytime they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, where they lay low and rested. At night they came down into the roads and murdered every helot they came across.” Often they even went into the fields where helots were working and cut down the strongest and best of them.

On one occasion in the fifth century it is reported that the helots were invited to volunteer names of those who had shown bravery on the battlefield and deserved to be given their freedom. Two thousand helots were singled out, crowned with wreaths, and ushered in procession around the sanctuaries of the gods. But then a little while later they all disappeared and were secretly liquidated. No one ever found out how they had met their ends.

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