This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
So eager was Lycurgus for the establishment of this form of government, that he obtained an oracle from Delphi about it, which they call a
‘rhetra.’ And this is the way it runs:
‘When thou hast built a temple to Zeus Syllanius and Athena Syllania, divided the people into ‘phylai’ and into ‘obai,’ and established a senate of thirty members, including the ‘archagetai,’ then from time to time ‘appellazein’ between Babyca and Cnacion1 and there introduce and rescind measures; but the people must have the deciding voice and the power.’
1 Probably names of small tributaries of the river Eurotas.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. 1.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.