Lycurgus and the Spartan Constitution: How Sparta Was Ruled

Lycurgus was the legendary lawgiver to whom the ancient Spartans credited their whole way of life: the dual kingship, the council of elders, the assembly, the ephors, the common messes and the harsh training of boys known as the agoge. Ancient writers placed him anywhere from the 11th to the 8th century BC, most often around the 9th or 8th century. Whether he existed at all is uncertain, but the system attributed to him made Sparta one of the most distinctive and stable states in Greek history.

Background: a lawgiver without a biography

Every ancient account of Lycurgus is late. Herodotus, writing around 430 BC, says Sparta had once been the worst-governed state in Greece until Lycurgus gave it good order, known as eunomia. He reports that some people believed the Pythia, the priestess at Delphi, dictated the laws, while the Spartans themselves said Lycurgus brought them from Crete.

Herodotus makes Lycurgus the guardian of a young Agiad king, Leobotes. Other writers made him the uncle and regent of a Eurypontid king, Charillus. Aristotle linked him to the founding of the Olympic truce with Iphitus of Elis, which would place him in the 8th century BC. Plutarch, writing his Life of Lycurgus around AD 100, admitted at the outset that nothing could be said about the man that was not disputed.

This uncertainty matters. Many historians now think that Spartan institutions developed over generations, especially during the 7th and 6th centuries BC, and were later gathered under the name of a single revered founder. Sparta even honoured Lycurgus with a shrine, as if he were a hero or demigod.

The Great Rhetra

The oldest text linked to the Spartan constitution is the Great Rhetra, a short and archaic-sounding decree preserved by Plutarch. It orders the Spartans to found a sanctuary of Zeus and Athena, to divide the people into tribes and smaller units called obai, and to set up a council of thirty elders including the two kings, known in the text as the founding leaders. The people were to meet in assembly at regular intervals at a set place, and the final decision was to rest with them.

Plutarch adds a rider attributed to the kings Theopompus and Polydorus, who reigned around 700 BC or a little later. It allowed the elders and kings to set aside a “crooked” decision of the people. The 7th-century poet Tyrtaeus, who fought for Sparta in the Second Messenian War, paraphrased a similar oracle in his poem Eunomia. Most scholars therefore date the Rhetra to the 7th century BC rather than to the far earlier era assigned to Lycurgus.

How Sparta was governed

The constitution that classical Greeks admired had four main parts. Writers such as Aristotle and Polybius described it as a “mixed” constitution, balancing monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.

The ephors were the most powerful officials in classical Sparta. Each month the kings swore to rule according to the laws, and the ephors swore to uphold the kings as long as they did so. Two ephors accompanied a king on campaign. The traditional list of ephors began in 754 BC, but whether the office was created by Lycurgus or by Theopompus was already debated in antiquity.

The Lycurgan way of life

Lycurgus was also credited with reshaping Spartan society. Boys left home at about seven and were raised in age groups under state supervision in the agoge. Adult men ate together in common messes, the syssitia, to which each had to contribute food. A man who could not pay lost his full citizen status.

Plutarch claims that Lycurgus divided the land of Laconia and Messenia into equal lots, 9,000 for Spartiates, and replaced gold and silver coins with heavy iron money to discourage wealth. Historians treat both stories with caution. Inequality of land was a real and growing problem in classical Sparta, and the equal division may be a later idealised reconstruction. Iron spits used as a form of currency are known from early Greece, so the iron money story may preserve an older custom.

The whole system rested on the labour of the helots, a subject population who farmed the land for their Spartan masters. Sparta’s conquest of Messenia, described in the article on the Messenian Wars, was the foundation of this arrangement.

Key people

• Lycurgus: the semi-legendary lawgiver, honoured at Sparta with a shrine.
• Theopompus and Polydorus: Spartan kings around 700 BC, credited with the rider to the Great Rhetra; Theopompus is also linked to the creation of the ephorate.
• Tyrtaeus: Spartan poet of the 7th century BC whose verses are the earliest surviving evidence for Spartan political ideas.
• Xenophon: Athenian writer who lived among Spartans and wrote the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians in the 4th century BC, attributing almost everything to Lycurgus.
• Plutarch: Greek biographer of the Roman period whose Life of Lycurgus is the fullest, but latest, account.

Myths and facts

Myth: Lycurgus wrote down a complete code of laws. Plutarch says one of the Rhetras forbade written laws, and Sparta was known for relying on custom and training rather than written statutes.

Myth: the Spartan system never changed. Sparta’s institutions evolved. The agoge seems to have been reorganised several times, and kings such as Agis IV and Cleomenes III in the 3rd century BC presented radical reforms as a “return to Lycurgus”.

Fact: much of the picture is idealised. Because Spartans wrote little about themselves, outsiders created what the French scholar François Ollier called in 1933 the “Spartan mirage”, an admiring or hostile image that often says more about the writers than about Sparta.

Consequences and legacy

The Lycurgan system produced a citizen body of full-time soldiers, admired across Greece for discipline, as shown at the Battle of Thermopylae. It also produced a small and shrinking citizen class. Aristotle criticised Sparta for the concentration of land, the power of the ephors and the shortage of citizens, which fell from around 8,000 men in 480 BC to perhaps 1,000 by his own day.

In 227 BC Cleomenes III abolished the ephorate, claiming to restore the original Lycurgan order. In 188 BC the Achaean general Philopoemen abolished the Lycurgan laws, but under Roman rule the Spartans revived the agoge as a showpiece of tradition that visitors came to watch.

Later thinkers, from Plutarch to Rousseau, used Lycurgus as a model of the wise founder who shapes a people’s character through education. The story of his consultation with the Oracle of Delphi became a favourite subject for artists.

Timeline

• c. 9th–8th century BC: traditional dates given by ancient writers for Lycurgus.
• 754 BC: traditional start of the Spartan list of ephors.
• c. 700 BC: reigns of Theopompus and Polydorus, linked to the rider to the Great Rhetra.
• 7th century BC: Tyrtaeus writes Eunomia; most scholars date the Great Rhetra to this period.
• c. 430 BC: Herodotus records the earliest surviving account of Lycurgus.
• 4th century BC: Xenophon and Aristotle describe and debate the Spartan constitution.
• 227 BC: Cleomenes III abolishes the ephorate in the name of Lycurgus.
• 188 BC: Philopoemen abolishes the Lycurgan laws; they are later revived under Roman rule.
• c. AD 100: Plutarch writes his Life of Lycurgus.

Why it matters

Lycurgus shows how a society can invent a founder to explain and protect its institutions. Whether or not he lived, the constitution credited to him shaped Sparta for centuries and gave European political thought one of its most enduring models of a mixed, disciplined and unchanging state.