a diseased body, the original cause of the disorder must be burned out or purged away, and the patient begin an entirely new life.  After reflecting on this, he made a journey to Delphi.  Here he sacrificed to the god, and, on consulting the oracle, received that celebrated answer in which the Pythia speaks of him as beloved by the gods, and a god rather than a man, and when he asked for a good system of laws, answered that the god gives him what will prove by far the best of all constitutions.  Elated by this he collected the leading men and begged them to help him, first by talking privately to his own friends, and thus little by little obtaining a hold over more men and banding them together for the work.  When the time was ripe for the attempt, he bade thirty of the nobles go into the market-place early in the morning completely armed, in order to overawe the opposition.  The names of twenty of the most distinguished of these men have been preserved by Hermippus, but the man who took the greatest part in all Lykurgus’s works, and who helped him in establishing his laws, was Arthmiades.  At first King Charilaus was terrified at the confusion, imagining that a revolt had broken out against himself, and fled for refuge to the temple of Minerva of the Brazen House; but, afterward reassured and having received solemn pledges for his safety, returned and took part in their proceedings.  He was of a gentle nature, as is proved by the words of his colleague, King Archelaus, who, when some were praising the youth, said, “How can Charilaus be a good man, if he is not harsh even to wicked men?”

Of Lykurgus’s many reforms, the first and most important was the establishment of the Council of Elders, which Plato says by its admixture cooled the high fever of royalty, and, having an equal vote with the kings on vital points, gave caution and sobriety to their deliberations.  For the state, which had hitherto been wildly oscillating between despotism on the one hand and democracy on the other, now, by the establishment of the Council of the Elders, found a firm footing between these extremes, and was able to preserve a most equable balance, as the eight-and-twenty elders would lend the kings their support in the suppression of democracy, but would use the people to suppress any tendency to despotism.  Twenty-eight is the number of Elders mentioned by Aristotle, because of the thirty leading men who took the part of Lykurgus two deserted their post through fear.  But Sphairus says that those who shared his opinions were twenty-eight originally.  A reason may be found in twenty-eight being a mystic number, formed by seven multiplied by four, and being the first perfect number after six, for like that, it is equal to all its parts.[A] But I think that he probably made this number of elders, in order that with the two kings the council might consist of thirty members in all.

[Footnote A:  14, 2, 7, 4, 1, make by addition 28; as 3, 2, and 1 make 6.]