54 Dr Arnold on the of the body of Spartans; hence Demosthenes says that the Spartan councillor is lord of the community (oecrTror^^ twv TToXXcov, in Lept. p. 489. 20.); and the effect of this au- thority on the internal affairs of Sparta may be illustrated by reflecting that the institution of the gerusia (as Miiller has remarked) was in fact in its main features once established at Athens, when Lysander nominated the Thirty, who were to be a legislative body, and at the same time a supreme court of justice,'*' (Vol. II. p. 99-) • this comparison however is not quite accurate, and is somewhat unfavorable to the Spartan constitution; for though the Thirty of Athens might have been copied from the Spartan gerusia, yet at Athens there were no ephors annually elected by the mass of the people to con- trol their power, nor was there any popular assembly to exercise even a silent veto on theii^ proceedings ^~. According to the above explanation, the Spartan con- stitution about the time of the Persian war may be thus described. The whole nation or society was divided into three orders. 1. The Doric Spartans, out of whose body none enjoyed the full rights of citizenship. 2. The Perioeci, who were not slaves, but were excluded from all political rights enjoyed by the Spartans: they lived in the country, or in small towns of the Laconian territory, and cultivated the land, which they did not hold of any individual Spartan, but paid for it a tribute or rent to the state^ or body of Spartans, being exactly in the same situation as the possessores of the Romain domain, or the Ryots in Hindostan before the introduction of the Permanent Settlements^. 3. The '■^ Perhaps the resemblance between the Thirty of Athens and the Spartan Gerusia goes no further than this : that the numbers of both were the same, and that both bodies had great power. For the Thirty did not like the Gerusia act directly as a court of justice, but only compelled the senate to go through the forms of judicature, (Philol. Mus. Vol. I. p. 425.) The nature of the office of the Thirty corresponds much more closely to that of the Roman decemvirs.
- 8 A state of things, bearing some analogy to that in Laconia, (viz. three orders of
persons, of three different races) existed in Ireland soon after its invasion by the Nor- mans and the Saxons or English. The latter, in a state of servitude in their own country, accompanied their masters in this expedition, and retained in Ireland both their superiority as conquerors and inferiority as conquered. " Anglici nostram inha- bitantes terram, qui se vocant medice nationis^'*^ say the Irish in a letter addressed about the middle of the 14th century to the Pope. Fordun. Hist. Scot. Vol. in. p. 916. Compare Thierry, Hist, of the Norman conquest. Vol. in. p. 155. Engl. Transl. ^' Thus the men of English race who had come to Ireland in the train of the Normans
