Chapter V.

The Spartans, instead of having one king, had two kings and two royal families, so that their system of government may best be described as a dual heroic kingship. Of this government, and of the conquests made by the Spartans while they lived under it, I shall have more to say in the next chapter.

Herodotus VI. 52.

Of the other tribes in the prehistoric age we have no traditions: but Thucydides says without hesitation concerning the early Greeks in general that their governments were "hereditary kingly governments with limited prerogatives": and the same view, which was shared by all the later Greeks, falls in with the little that is known of the Greek peoples in the first two or three centuries of their history.

Thucydides I. 13 ἐπὶ ῥητοῖς γέρασι πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι.

It is clear from many indications that the monarchical part of the old tribal constitutions was necessary or especially useful to the primitive Greek peoples so long as they were employed in making conquests or settlements of new territory, and no longer. In the prehistoric age the Athenians and all the Dorian peoples were conquering peoples: and all of them made their conquests under the leadership of kings. In the next age, which came between the heroic period and the beginning of Greek history in the proper sense of the word, the great majority of the Greek peoples had ceased to acquire new territory within Greece and had also ceased or were ceasing to be monarchically governed: two peoples, the Spartans and the Argives, were exceptional both in continuing to make territorial conquests and in still living under kingly rule.