Great Rhetra

The Great Rhetra is the traditional name for the constitution of ancient Sparta, credited by ancient sources to the quasi-legendary lawgiver Lycurgus, who is said to have received it in the form of an oracle from Delphi or established it as an oral code of governance. Its precise date is uncertain: association with the Spartan kings Leon and Agasicles, who reigned around 590 BCE, suggests the Rhetra predates that period, while an alternative chronology tied to King Labotas would place its origin as early as the ninth century BCE. The Rhetra set out the basic institutions of the Spartan state, establishing the dual kingship, the Gerousia or council of elders, the Ephorate, and the popular Assembly, and it described their relative standing in a passage preserved by later writers describing the kings and elders as foremost in counsel with the common assembly deciding last. Although later tradition insisted the Rhetra was never to be written down, ancient historians who quote it at length imply that some record of its content was preserved and transmitted across the centuries that Sparta operated under its framework, a tension historians still debate. As Sparta's foundational law, the Great Rhetra shaped the city-state's distinctive mixed constitution for centuries until Sparta's political decline in the Hellenistic period.