The ephors, a magistracy peculiarly characteristic of the Spartan state, are ascribed by Herodotus and Xenophon to the institution of Lycurgus.(176) Aristotle however and Plutarch attribute them to king Theopompus; and represent his act to have been dictated by a long-sighted desire of rendering the royal office more durable by diminishing its power.(177)

The helots, as the slaves of the Lacedæmonians were called, are stated to have derived their name from the town Helos, which rebelled in the time of Agis, the next king after Eurysthenes, and whose inhabitants were in consequence reduced to slavery. (178) This story, however, is probably a mere etymological legend, not founded on any trustworthy historical evidence.

It is to be observed that, as the Spartans discouraged literature, they had no native historians: nearly all the writers on Sparta were foreigners: (179) Dicæarchus, whose work on the Spartan constitution was annually read to the youths in the office of the ephors, was a native of the Sicilian Messene.(180) If there had been a class of native writers, who occupied themselves with the early history of their country, they would probably have elaborated the stories and legends respecting the early kings, in the same manner that the Roman historians, from Fabius downwards, constructed a history for their seven kings, and the first centuries of the republic, full of events, and explanations of the origins of institutions. If Sparta had possessed a literary class, we might have had an early Lacedæ

(176) τοὺς ἐφόρους καὶ γέροντας ἔστησε Λυκοῦργος, Herod. i. 65. He is followed by Xenophon, Plato, and others; see Clinton, vol. i. p. 338.

(177) Pol. v. 11; Lyc. 7. The same story is alluded to by Cic. Leg. iii. 7; Rep. ii. 33. The existence of the office of ephor is traced by clear evidence up to the time of king Ariston. The ephors who had been sitting with him when the news of the birth of his son Demaratus was brought to him, were produced as witnesses in the investigation concerning the legitimacy of the latter, about 491 B.C.; Herod. vi. 65.

(178) Ephor. fragm. 18. See Müller, Dor. iii. 3, § 1; Niebuhr, ib. p. 236; Grote, vol. ii. p. 496, who all reject the derivation of enos from Ελος.

(179) Müller, Dor. iv. 8, § 1. Manso, Sparta, vol. i. part ii. p. 70. (180) Fragm. 21, ap. Fragm. Hist. Gr. vol. ii. p. 241.

monian history, written under the influence of Lacedæmonian feeling, not less copious and minute, than the history of the Messenian wars, which, after the restoration of Messenia, was written under the influence of Messenian feeling.

§ 16 Phidon, king of Argos, who is reported to have extended both his power and his kingdom, and to have caused his influence to be felt over a large part of Greece, has, like Lycurgus, two dates, divided by a long interval from each other. He is placed at 895 and also at 748 B.C., a difference of 147 years. (181) He was celebrated as the author of the scale of weights and measures used in the Peloponnesus;(182) but whether this is more historical than many other origins of useful inventions must, with respect to so ancient a name, remain undetermined.

The time when the names of Spartan kings, and the years of their reigns, were first noted by contemporary registration, cannot be determined with certainty. Theopompus, who lived in the Second Messenian War, is mentioned by Tyrtæus ; which of his predecessors up to Eurysthenes and Procles are real men, and which are fictitious names, inserted in order to make a continuous genealogy ascending to Hercules, is doubtful. (183) The variations in the names and succession of the early kings show, however, that no list of paramount authority was received

(181) See Clinton, vol. i. p. 247.

(182) Herod. vi. 127; Strab. viii. 3, § 33; Plin. H. N. vii. 57; Müller, Eginetica, p. 56. Compare above. vol. i. p. 452, n. 138, p. 509, n. 105, where the introduction of coined money is ascribed to Numa, and also to Servius. The establishment of weights and measures is also attributed to Servius. Mr. Grote says of Phidon: The few facts which we learn respecting this prince exhibit to us, for the first time, something like a real position of parties in the Peloponnesus, wherein the actual conflict of living, historical men and cities comes out in tolerable distinctness;' vol. ii. p. 419. Niebuhr considers Phidon as historical, and his personal history as quite certain; he likewise credits the statement that Phidon established common weights and measures for the whole of Peloponnesus; ib. p. 260.

(183) The views of O. Müller respecting the registers of the early Spartan kings are fully explained by him, in a review of Mr. Clinton's first volume, in the Göttingische gel. Anzeigen, 1837, vol. ii. P. 893-6. Speaking of the lists of the Spartan kings, and the catalogue of the priestesses of Juno at Argos, he says: It is certain that these documents

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in antiquity; (184) although Charon of Lampsacus, a historian anterior to Herodotus, composed a chronological work on the kings of Sparta ;(185) which was probably founded on native accounts. The quadriennial register of Olympic victors seems

were proportionably old, since the most skilful inquirers-Hellanicus for the Argive and Eratosthenes for the Spartan lists-considered them sufficiently authentic, to serve as the basis of the chronology of entire periods. Nevertheless, we are compelled to assume that at the time when writing can be clearly proved to have been used in Greece-that is, in the eighth, or at the earliest the ninth century B.C.-these registers were compiled from the recollections of the oldest persons, by Spartans versed in their native history, and from various traces and conjectures by priests of Argos, who felt a pride in the antiquity of their temple. There were many such registers in temples; such as the lists of the kings and priests of Apollo at Sicyon, cited by the chronographers, the genealogy of the Butadæ in the temple of Minerva Polias at Athens, the interesting and important catalogue of the priests of Neptune, of the family of Antheade, at Halicarnassus, which has recently been brought to light. (Corp. Inscript. Gr. No. 2655.) If however all these names had been recorded at the times to which they relate, or even from the Return of the Heraclidæ, there must have existed a practice in the art of writing, and a zeal for the preservation of remarkable facts, which cannot be reconciled with the meagreness and uncertainty of the Greek history in these centuries. We must, in that case, suppose the Greek history, at this early period, to have possessed contemporary annals, like Rome from the commencement of the republic. It is also certain that the Argive, as well as the Halicarnassian list (Boeckh, ib. vol. ii. p. 450) was full of unhistorical statements.'

O. Müller contests the view of Mr. Clinton that the lists of the early Spartan kings may have contained names alone, without numbers. He admits, however, the force of the objection that the descents in both the royal houses for all the early kings cannot have been from father to son, as they are represented, especially as collateral descents begin as soon as we arrive at the age of contemporary history. He remarks that in other lists of hereditary rulers in early times a similar direct descent occurs, as in the kings of Arcadia and the Bacchiada of Corinth. Hence he supposes that the lists of the names were without any statement of the genealogical relations, and that it was taken for granted that the descent was always from father to son, except in one case, when Zeuxidamus the Eurypontid followed immediately after his grandfather Theopompus, the conqueror of Messenia; a circumstance which may have been mentioned in the poems Tyrtæus. This construction of the lists of the Spartan kings, is (he adds) at all events older than Herodotus; see vii. 204, viii. 131.

of

According to Niebuhr, Eratosthenes made up the lists of Spartan kings from traditionary names, but the dates which he added were fictitious; ib. p. 187. See also p. 257, where the lists of Spartan kings made by Eratosthenes are treated as unworthy of confidence. In p. 231 he says that the authentic history begins with the kings Eurypon and Agis. Compare p. 236.

(184) See Clinton, F. H. vol. i.

p. 144.

(185) πρυτάνεις ἢ ἄρχοντες οἱ τῶν Λακεδαιμονίων· ἔστι δὲ χρονικά. Suidas in Xápov. See Fragm. Hist. Gr. vol. i. p. xviii. No fragment of it is preserved. Compare Mure, vol. iv. p. 76, 168.

to have been kept with regularity from the year 776 B.C. ;(186) but it was a mere instrument of chronological notation; it afforded no historical information.

§ 17 That the Dorians at some early period settled in the Peloponnesus, and reduced the previous population to subjection, cannot be doubted; but the detailed account of this event, under the denomination of the Return of the Heraclidæ, in 1104 B.C., eighty years after the capture of Troy, belongs to legend, and not to history. We do not know that either the persons or the events are real; no contemporary poet makes mention of it; and the time is too remote for a faithful oral tradition to have descended to the age of the historians. (187)

Mr. Grote says that, at the Return of the Heraclidæ, 'we pass, as if touched by the wand of a magician, from mythical to historical Greece.'(188) Colonel Mure likewise speaks of the Dorian revolution as forming a marked line between mythical and real in the annals of Greece. (189) It seems however im

(186) Col. Mure rejects the statements which distinguish the olympiad of Iphitus from that of Corobus, and supposes that there was a series of unrecorded victors before Corbus; vol. iv. p. 78-90. Mr. Clinton does not agree with Clavier in assuming that there were three persons named Iphitus, but he thinks that there were two; F. H. vol. i. p. 142. Varro divided time into three periods; the first he called the uncertain period, the second the mythical, and the third the historical period. He reckoned the historical period from the first olympiad; Censorin. de die nat. c. 21.

(187) Niebuhr considers all the details connected with the Return of the Heraclidæ as fabulous. My decided opinion (he says) is, that we do not possess the slightest historical knowledge of the circumstances accompanying the conquest. All the stories about it, as those of the fights of Tisamenus, the son of Orestes, with the Dorians, of the Achæans throwing themselves upon the Ionians, of the emigration of the latter, and the like, are quite irreconcilable with the traditions of the preceding period; the whole account does not possess a shadow of historical truth. The instinctive desire of man to fill up what is deficient, led men to invent and record the story of an immigration. When this is once done, everything, according to a natural paralogism, is credulously taken for true tradition; and posterity forgets that the things recorded many centuries after the event, though the record itself may be centuries old, has no more authenticity than if the story were now written down for the first time;' ib. p. 228-30.

(188) Hist. vol. ii. p. 7.

(189) Hist. of Gr. Lit. vol. iv. p. 71. Niebuhr makes the historical period commence with the Doric migration; but he remarks that though the previous period is mythical, the subsequent period is not altogether

possible to fix any one period for the commencement of authentic history in all the different Greek states. It is probable, that, for reasons of which we are now ignorant, the traditions of certain states may have mounted higher than others, or may have been registered at an earlier date. We cannot suppose the illumination to have been simultaneous and universal: a few bright spots probably appeared in different places, as precursors of the full light of history, which after a time overspread the entire country. Thus the history of Athens, for 794 years during the reign of sixteen kings from Cecrops I. to Codrus, of thirteen perpetual archons from Medon to Alcmæon,(190) and also under seven decennial archons from Charops in 752 to Eryxias in 684 B.C., and under the annual archons from Creon in 683 B.C. to the time of Cylon, is a complete blank, except so far as it is decorated with fabulous legends attached to the names of Theseus and Codrus.(191) Various accounts were given of the death of Codrus, who was supposed to have sacrificed himself by a stratagem for the safety of his country.(192) He was said to be the last Athenian king, and it was supposed that after him the royalty was abolished in order to do him

historical; ib. p. 184. Diodorus states that Ephorus passed over the ancient mythical period in silence, on account of its obscurity and uncertainty, and began his history with the Return of the Heraclida; iv. 1.

(190) See Meursius, de Reg. Athen. iii. 16; Clinton, vol. i. p. 59, 121, 131. Concerning the beginning of the annual archons, see Clinton, ib. 182. Niebuhr says: It is not impossible that at Athens there may have been records even of the last kings and of the archons for life; their names at least do not appear to be fictitious, like those which strike us at once in so many myths; ib. p. 183. In p. 225 he remarks that the years of the archons for life have as little authenticity as those of Theseus and Erechtheus.

(191) Niebuhr considers the accounts of the kings and perpetual archons of Attica as fabulous: at the most, he thinks that some of the names of the real kings have been preserved; ib. p. 224-5. Afterwards he remarks that we know absolutely nothing of the history of Attica under the government of the archons for life, and those who held their office for ten years, until we approach the time of Solon. We possess two lists, but do not know a single fact, if we except the mention of the ayos Kuλóvetov and the legislation of Draco;' p. 260. Compare Grote, vol. i. p. 262-298; vol. iii. p. 65-7, who says that all our historical knowledge of Athens is confined to the period of the annual archons.'

(192) See Meursius, de Reg. Athen. iii. 12, 13.