Abstract: Of all the Greek city-states, Sparta offers certainly the most abundant and partly also the best literary evidence about the development of the constitution of an early polis (prior to the 6th century BC). This is true at least in respect of what may be called early documentary evidence. In the first place we have the so-called Great Rhetra, allegedly a Delphic prescription to the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos, quoted by Plutarch in the biography of Lykourgos as his main constitutional enactment. By all probability the Rhetra with its commentary d...
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Topics: 
Epistemology
Literature