VI.  Lykurgus was so much interested in this council as to obtain from Delphi an oracle about it, called the rhetra, which runs as follows:  “After you have built a temple to Zeus of Greece and Athene of Greece, and have divided the people into tribes and obes, you shall found a council of thirty, including the chiefs, and shall from season to season apellazein the people between Babyka and Knakion, and there propound measures and divide upon them, and the people shall have the casting vote and final decision.”  In these words tribes and obes are divisions into which the people were to be divided; the chiefs mean the kings; apellazein means to call an assembly, in allusion to Apollo, to whom the whole scheme of the constitution is referred.  Babyka and Knakion they now call Oinous; but Aristotle says that Knakion is a river and Babyka a bridge.  Between these they held their assemblies, without any roof or building of any kind; for Lykurgus did not consider that deliberations were assisted by architecture, but rather hindered, as men’s heads were thereby filled with vain unprofitable fancies, when they assemble for debate in places where they can see statues and paintings, or the proscenium of a theatre, or the richly ornamented roof of a council chamber.  When the people were assembled, he permitted no one to express an opinion; but the people was empowered to decide upon motions brought forward by the kings and elders.  But in later times, as the people made additions and omissions, and so altered the sense of the motions before them, the kings, Polydorus and Theopompus, added these words to the rhetra, “and if the people shall decide crookedly, the chiefs and elders shall set it right.”  That is, they made the people no longer supreme, but practically excluded them from any voice in public affairs, on the ground that they judged wrongly.  However these kings persuaded the city that this also was ordained by the god.  This is mentioned by Tyrtaeus in the following verses: 

    “They heard the god, and brought from Delphi home,
      Apollo’s oracle, which thus did say: 
    That over all within fair Sparta’s realm
      The royal chiefs in council should bear sway,
    The elders next to them, the people last;
      If they the holy rhetra would obey.”

VII.  Though Lykurgus had thus mixed the several powers of the state, yet his successors, seeing that the powers of the oligarchy were unimpaired, and that it was, as Plato calls it, full of life and vigour, placed as a curb to it the power of the Ephors.  The first Ephors, of whom Elatus was one, were elected about a hundred and thirty years after Lykurgus, in the reign of Theopompus.  This king is said to have been blamed by his wife because he would transmit to his children a less valuable crown than he had received, to which he answered:  “Nay, more valuable, because more lasting.”  In truth, by losing the odium of absolute power, the King of