Lacedaemon is the republic Machiavelli and Harrington could not stop citing, and the closed camp Aristotle criticized. The period from Sparta to Bronze Age pastiche is central to the lineage, because Lacedaemon shaped political thought, blending Aristotle’s critique and Machiavelli’s praise od Sparta’s mixed government and military focus.
ARISTOTLE EXAMINES THE SPARTAN CONSTITUTION in Politics II as a mixed regime that had achieved stability yet failed the standards of the best practicable city. The mixture of kingship, the gerousia, and the ephorate prevented any single element from dominating for long periods. That is the mixture that later writers would praise. Aristotle, however, finds the laws directed almost entirely toward one part of virtue, military valor, because the regime was organized for conquest and the control of the helots. The result is a city skilled in war and unskilled in the uses of peace. Women are left without the education that would fit them for the city’s ends, and the unequal distribution of land produces a small body of full citizens surrounded by a large population of dependents and perioikoi (Aristotle, Politics 2.9, 1269a29-1271b19). The closed camp produces courage and obedience. It does not produce the deliberative capacity required for ruling and being ruled in turn among free men.
Machiavelli and Harrington in Oceana cite the same regime for a different purpose. In the Discourses Machiavelli treats Sparta as proof that a republic can endure when it arms its citizens, rotates high office, and maintains equality of poverty among those who rule. The long survival of the Lacedaemonian constitution shows that a mixed government need not collapse into the cycle Polybius described, provided the people remain in arms and the laws prevent the accumulation of private wealth that would create dependents (Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 1.2, 1.6). Harrington returns to the same example in Oceana. The Spartan balance, in which land was divided and citizens lived under common meals and military discipline, illustrates the principle that empire follows the balance of property. Where the many hold the land and the arms, the public decisions remain public. Both writers abstract the institutional features that secured longevity and equality. They set aside, or treat as secondary, the helotage and the narrow military end that Aristotle had condemned.
The two uses must be held together, because Sparta supplied later republicans with a working model of mixture, citizen arms, and resistance to luxury. It also supplied the standing warning that a regime organized solely for war and for the domination of a subject population will not cultivate the full range of civic capacities. A recovery of the tradition that leaves Sparta as heroic pastiche loses both the institutional lesson Machiavelli and Harrington extracted and the criticism Aristotle directed at the closed camp. The city remains legible only when both readings are retained.
