Although Lycurgus thus tempered his civil polity, nevertheless the oligarchical element in it was still unmixed and dominant, and his successors, seeing it
‘swelling and foaming,’ as Plato says,1
‘imposed as it were a curb upon it, namely, the power of the ephors.’ It was about a hundred and thirty years after Lycurgus that the first ephors, Elatus and his colleagues, were appointed, in the reign of Theopompus.
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