d, exiled, put to death. If he
went as ambassador to foreign states, spies were not unfrequently sent
with him, and colleagues the most avowedly hostile to his person
associated in the mission. Thus curbed and thus confined was his
authority at home, and his prerogative as a king. But by law he was
the leader of the Spartan armies. He assumed the command--he crossed
the boundaries, and the limited magistrate became at once an imperial
despot! [132] No man could question--no law circumscribed his power.
He raised armies, collected money in foreign states, and condemned to
death without even the formality of a trial. Nothing, in short,
curbed his authority, save his responsibility on return. He might be
a tyrant as a general; but he was to account for the tyranny when he
relapsed into a king. But this distinction was one of the wisest
parts of the Spartan system; for war requires in a leader all the
license of a despot; and triumph, decision, and energy can only be
secured by the unfettered exercise of a single will. Nor did early
Rome owe the extent of her conquests to any cause more effective than
the unlicensed discretion reposed by the senate in the general. [133]

VI. We have now to examine the most active and efficient part of the
government, viz., the Institution of the Ephors. Like the other
components of the Spartan constitution, the name and the office of
ephor were familiar to other states in the great Dorian family; but in
Sparta the institution soon assumed peculiar features, or rather,
while the inherent principles of the monarchy and the gerusia remained
stationary, those of the ephors became expanded and developed. It is
clear that the later authority of the ephors was never designed by
Lycurgus or the earlier legislators. It is entirely at variance with
the confined aristocracy which was the aim of the Spartan, and of
nearly every genuine Doric [134] constitution. It made a democracy as
it were by stealth. This powerful body consisted of five persons,
chosen annually by the people. In fact, they may be called the
representatives of the popular will--the committee, as it were, of the
popular council. Their original power seems to have been imperfectly
designed; it soon became extensive and encroaching. At first the
ephoralty was a tribunal for civil, as the gerusia was for criminal,
causes; it exercised a jurisdiction over the Helots and Perioeci, over
the public market, and the public re