Two guardian kings, a senate, and the voice
Of the concurring people, lasting laws
Shall with joint power establish.

Though the government was thus tempered by Lycurgus, yet soon after it
degenerated into an oligarchy, whose power was exercised with such
wantonness and violence, that it wanted indeed a bridle, as Plato
expresses it. This curb they found in the authority of the Ephori, about
a hundred and thirty years after Lycurgus. Elatus was the first invested
with this dignity, in the reign of Theopompus; who, when his wife
upbraided him, that he would leave the regal power to his children less
than he received it, replied, "Nay but greater, because more lasting."
And, in fact, the prerogative, so stripped of all extravagant
pretensions, no longer occasioned either envy or danger to its
possessors. By these means they escaped the miseries which befell the
Messenian and Argive kings, who would not in the least relax the
severity of their power in favour of the people. Indeed, from nothing
more does the wisdom and foresight of Lycurgus appear, than from the
disorderly governments, and the bad understanding that subsisted between
the kings and people of Messena and Argos, neighbouring states, and
related in blood to Sparta. For, as at first they were in all respects
equal to her, and possessed of a better country, and yet preserved no
lasting happiness, but, through the insolence of the kings and
disobedience of the people, were harassed with perpetual troubles, they
made it very evident that it was really a felicity more than human, a
blessing from heaven to the Spartans, to have a legislator who knew so
well how to frame and temper their government. But this was an event of
a later date.

A second and bolder political enterprise of Lycurgus was a new division
of the lands. For he found a prodigious inequality, the city overcharged
with many indigent persons, who had no land, and the wealth centred in
the hands of a few. Determined, therefore, to root out the evils of
insolence, envy, avarice, and luxury, and those distempers of a state
still more inveterate and fatal, I mean poverty and riches, he persuaded
them to cancel all former divisions of land, and to make new ones, in
such a manner that they might be perfectly equal in their possessions
and way of living. Hence, if they were ambitious of distinction they
might seek it in virtue, as no other difference was left between them
but that which arise