All this, and much besides, was observed, and the proper inferences drawn, by Eduard Meyer twenty years ago;[36] so that the amazement with which the English archæologists, who have excavated in Laconia during the past five or six years, report their remarkable "finds" is a source of no little amusement to the wary. They have discovered that prior to 580 B.C. Sparta was the maker of a kind of artistic pottery which was known and imitated in far-distant Cyrene and Tarentum; that she then had trade relations with Egypt and Lydia; that "combs, toilet-boxes, elaborate pins and bronze ornaments, seals, necklaces, and gold and ivory gewgaws" were made and used--witnesses _for_ "a golden age of Spartan art," _against_ the puritanical spirit traditionally attributed to early and middle Sparta.[37] In Athens, as we have seen, supremacy in art and literature was attained by making universal among citizens the spirit and culture of the aristocracy, the whole people, thus ennobled, being supported on the shoulders of the tributary allies and enriched by the commercial advantages of maritime empire. The development of Sparta was directly the reverse of this. There the aristocracy, whose exuberance of life and responsiveness to sensuous impressions are attested with sufficient certainty, was destroyed in the sixth century B.C. This century was one of repression in Greece generally; whence some historians have called it the epoch of the Greek Reformation. It is the time of the "Seven Wise Men," from one of whom came the Delphian motto "nothing in excess," a time in which the riotous joy of living and the fresh spontaneity of the so-called Ionian Renascence were subdued by a force, which might have been everywhere a blight,--as in Sparta,--but which in fact, when later the inspiration of the great Persian War came, exerted the gentle restraint which marks the classic in Greek art and letters. In this perilous period the aristocracy of Sparta perished, and with it the ideals and accomplishments of which it had been the exponent. The instrument of repression of all that was superior to the average in Spartan life was the college of the five ephors, which Cicero compares with the tribunate in Rome. The ephors acquired such power that they made the continuance of even the kingship dependent upon the submission of the kings to their authority; and upon the kings, as upon all others, they enforced the new rules of law of which they were the living expositors.