sounds like a pretty unpleasant place..
constitution:
- slaves ('helots'), who could be killed at a certain time each year by elite soldiers, possiblly as an initiation. 90% of population.
- ephoroi ("overseer"), 5 (maybe originally one from each of 5 villages? but later on it seems not), act by majority (elected annually, could not be re-elected; must be older than age 30 or older, usually in their forties or fifties [1]) ("Although the five ephors were the only officials with regular legitimization by popular vote, in practice they were often the most conservative force in Spartan politics." [2]; why is this?); civil judicial function; criminal judicial function over non-citizens
- [3] says "The ephors were a set of five annually chosen magistrates, with a wide range of jobs which included making sure that all of the officials of the state – especially the kings – were executing the laws (Arist. Pol. 1271a). The ephors had quite a few disparate functions – they declared war on the helots every year (Plut. Lyc. 28.4), levy fines and handle legal matters (Xen. Lac. 8.3-4), root out conspiracies (Xen. Hell. 3.3), keep an eye on the kings (Plut. Lyc. 7.1-2) and so on. The array of formal powers the ephors had was considerable. Yet we know the names of very few ephors from our sources. When they appear, they are almost always reactive, acting against some overreach by the king or in a crisis (one of the few notable exceptions is the intervention of an ephor in favor of war with Athens, Thuc. 1.86). In this, they were frequently effective – we know of quite a few kings successfully referred for prosecution – such cases were tried by the gerousia. As a check on the power of the kings to make themselves tyrants, the ephorate seems to have been very successful. But the ephors did not represent a long-term political power the way, say, the US Congress or Supreme court does. Ephors only served one year and could not serve a second time, so no ephor was liable to build up any kind of political position of his own. Moreover, as Aristotle notes, the fact that any spartiate could become an ephor made the office vulnerable to being co-opted by the wealthiest spartiates, since poor spartiates were vulnerable to bribes (Arist. Pol. 2.1271a; by whom, Aristotle does not say, but the obvious candidates would be the kings, e.g. Plut. Cleom. 6.1). "
- two hereditary 'kings', mostly military commanders
- kings are mostly subordinate to ephoroi, although earlier on they had other powers, such as to declare war, conduct foreign policy, civil judicial functions over citizens (and criminal judicial over the kings?)
- kings are also the richest landholders [4]
- "the kings had the power to legalize the adoption of children and to secure husbands for widows and heiresses – the latter power is eventually limited if the woman’s father was still alive, but in a low life-expectancy society, this must have frequently been untrue." [5]
- may have been crucial in light of "the wealthiest families tended to want to marry each other in order to keep and consolidate those large estates (Plut. Lys. 30.5, Agis. 5.1-4). Success in this necessarily meant being close to the kings, because they approved of the marriages of heiresses and widows (discussed above)."
- gerousia (28 men over 60 elected for life by the citizens, plus the two kings), initiate/draft legislation to be presented to the apelia and can veto the apelia, interpret the law, criminal judicial function over citizens (or mb just capital charges? [6])
- "election to the gerousia was the one office actively canvassed for (ancient canvassing often more nearly resembled modern electoral bribery)." [7]
- [8] thinks that the "The kings – in their competition with each other – had a vested interest in seeing their own friends on the gerousia. But consider what might make a spartiate’s service conspicuous enough to win election. He might have been a capable officer – positions appointed by the kings (in their role as chief warleaders), with the most successful officers dining with the kings while on campaign. He might have held some sort of public office – the ephorate is random, but the pythioi are selected by the kings. Or he might be generous with his wealth – as we’ve already established, the wealth is arrayed in a phalanx around the kings.". That author also cites Paul Rahe who says "the two royal houses played a crucial role in promoting the selection of their adherents" (The Spartan Regime (2016), 55).
- apelia, the popular assembly; every citizen; once a month; presided by the ephors (and could be summoned by the ephors, i guess this means the ephors could summon a special session in addition to the ordinary monthly one?)
- [9] holds that "the Apella is remarkably weak compared to other Greek assemblies" because "the apella did not set its own agenda, nor could it debate. The agenda for the apella was set by the gerousia and the ephors...It could only vote yes or no to proposals provided to it" and "the decisions of the apella were not binding! This is the significance of the ‘Great Rhetra,’ a law attributed either to the time of Lycurgus or shortly after which specified, among other things that “if the people should adopt a crooked motion, the kings and the gerousia shall have the power to set it aside” (Plut. Lyc. 6.4). What this meant in practice was that the gerousia could veto any decision of the apella with no opportunity for the apella – or anyone – to override that veto." and "the apella voted by acclamation, not by a strict count....Consequently, the power of the ephors and the gerontes who attempt to determine which side was loudest is considerable.". He concludes that the Apella "...is not a system for popular decision making, it is a system for consensus building".
- stratified: citizens, non-citizen civilians ('perioeci'), slaves ('helots')
- Crypteia possibility a sort of secret police/initiation of elite young men in which initiates would possibly spy on/butcher slaves; not every young man in training gets to be crypteia, only the elite (who gives them their orders? this diagam on Wikipedia implies it is the ephoroi)
citizens must:
- eat dinner with the men
- sleep in barracks until 30
- i think that the State may have effectively controlled the land/estates of the citizens while they were in the barracks
- forbidden to leave the area without permission
to be a citizen, must:
- be a (male, i guess) descendent of a citizen (or adopted)
- pass military training
- continue to contribute food to the mandatory dinners
writing and making money through commerce discouraged
originally there may (or may not) have been a law that every Spartan head of a family had an equal portion of land, [10], but then later this was repealed and the eventual result was an accumulation of wealth (land) in the 100 richest citizens, with the other citizens being mired in debt [11]. A king, Agis IV, tried to have land reform but failed [12]. However, Agis' ideas outlived him and inspired a successor, and so the land reform actually happened; but was short-lived because Sparta lost within the successor's lifetime, due to a military conflict involving the soon-to-be-empire of Macedon [13].
of course, note that our knowledge about Sparta probably most comes filtered through their rival, Athens, so maybe this is not all true
[14] evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of this system, and the reason for the ultimate decline of Sparta, as follows: " First, I want to note the things Sparta does well. The system of government is quite good at keeping balance between the main centers of power, the ephorate, the gerousia and the kings. Our sources amusingly differ on exactly which part of the Spartan system seemed to them most like a tyranny, some thought it was the ephors (Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle among them), some thought it was the gerousia (Demosthenes and Dionysius of Halicarnassus), while in the biographies of Plutarch, the kings seem to dominate. As a ‘mixed constitution’ – not quite democratic, oligarchic or monarchic – Sparta’s system was a success (as was Rome’s, note Plb. 6.14).
We can think of this in terms of stopping any one person or part of the government from usurping complete control. The ephors can’t do it – they only serve for a single year and cannot serve twice, leaving little reason to aggrandize an office you will have to hand off to who-knows-who in just 12 months. The gerousia can’t do it, because it lacks control of the army or any direct administration of anything. The apella can’t do it, because it is laughably weak. Even the kings are controlled: the two of them must often have been in conflict (a point Rahe (2016) makes), looking to undermine the other through their friends in the ephorate and the gerousia. In turn, it would always be in the interests of the gerontes to rein in a king who was exceeding his authority (and in the interest of the other king to help them).
All of which brings us back to our big question: why didn’t Sparta act to halt its decline? The men of the gerousia of 410 must have known at their own citizen body was once more than double the size it stood in their day. The same would have been true of the gerousia of 371. Some demographic declines are so slow as to be imperceptible, but the Spartan citizen population collapses by 80% in just a century, from 464 to 371. The decline would have been obvious – and evidently it was obvious.
We know it was obvious because Cinadon points it out, c. 390 (Xen. Hell. 3.3.5). We know it was obvious because we can see the sad half-measures to arrest the problem: the creation of classes of freed helots (the neodamodes) to serve in the army and the increasing prominence of mothakes and hypomeiones in the years leading up to Cinadon’s conspiracy. In short, we know it was obvious because we can see our historical subjects observing it. Why couldn’t they arrest this decline? In Sparta, the Rich Eat You
The problem, of course, is that if a situation ever arose within this system where the gerousia and the kings specifically had a community of interests (read: they wanted the same things) – even if it was to the disadvantage of the community as a whole – the neat system of restrained power falls apart. And that’s exactly what seems to have happened.
In essence, what we have is the formation of a clique around the two kings which consisted of the wealthiest of the spartiates – the ones who had benefited the most from the steady consolidation of kleroi into ever larger and ever fewer estates. "
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