204 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be permitted to him. AVhore claims derived from descent were disputed, 

 personal superiority or election would determine which member of the 

 compound head should take the lead. If within each of the compo- 

 nent groups the power of its chief was unqualified, there would result 

 from union of such chiefs a close oligarchy ; while the closeness of 

 the oligarchy would become less in proportion as recognition of the 

 authority of each chief, given by nearness in blood to the divine or 

 semi-divine ancestor, diminished. And in cases where there came to 

 be incorporated numerous aliens, owing allegiance to the heads of 

 none of the component groups, there would come into play influences 

 tending still more to widen the oligarchy. 



Such, we may conclude, were the origins of those compound head- 

 ships of the Greek states which existed at the beginning of the his- 

 toric period. In Crete, where there survived the tradition of primitive 

 kingship, but where dispersion and subdivision of clans had brought 

 about a condition in which "different towns carried on oj)en feuds," 

 there were " patrician houses, deriving their rights from the early ages 

 of roval government," who continued "to retain possession of the 

 administration." In Corinth, the line of Herakleid kings " subsides 

 gradually, through a series of empty names, into the oligarchy de- 

 nominated Bacchiadoe. . . . The persons so named were all accounted 

 descendants of Herakles, and formed the governing caste in the city." 

 So was it with Megara. According to tradition, this arose by com- 

 bination of several villages inhabited by kindred tribes, which, origi- 

 nally in antagonism with Corinth, had probably, in the course of this 

 antagonism, become consolidated into an independent state. And at 

 the opening of the historic period the like had happened in Sikyon 

 and other places. Though in Sparta kingship had survived under an 

 anomalous form, yet the joint representatives of the primitive king, 

 still reverenced because the tradition of their divine descent was jDre- 

 served, had become little more than members of the governing oligar- 

 chy, retaining certain prerogatives. And, though it is true that in 

 its earliest historically-known stage, the Spartan oligarchy did not 

 present the form which would spontaneously arise from the union of 

 the lieads of clans for cooperation in war though it had become 

 elective within a limited class of persons yet the fact that an age of 

 not less than sixty was a qualification, harmonizes with the belief 

 that it at first consisted of the heads of the respective groups, who 

 were always tlie eldest sons of the eldest ; and that these groups with 

 their heads, described as having been in in pre-Lykurgean times " the 

 most lawless of all the Greeks," became united by that continuous 

 militant life which distinguished them.* 



* As bearing on historical interpretations at large, and especially on interpretations 

 to be made in this work, let me point out further reasons than those given by Grote and 

 others for rejecting the tradition that the Spartan constitution was the work of Lykurgus. 

 The universal tendency to ascribe an effect to the most conspicuous proximate cause is 



