doubtless a source of importance, but it imposed troublesome labor, gave no pay, and entailed a certain degree of peril upon any archon who might have given offence to powerful men, when he came to pass through the trial of accountability which followed immediately upon his year of office. There was little to make the office acceptable either to very poor men, or to very rich and ambitious men; and between the middling persons who gave in their names, any one might be taken without great practical mischief, always assuming the two guarantees of the dokimasy before, and accountability after, office. This was the conclusion—in my opinion a mistaken conclusion, and such as would find no favor at present—to which the democrats of Athens were conducted by their strenuous desire to equalize the chances of office for rich and poor. But their sentiment seems to have been satisfied by a partial enforcement of the lot to the choice of some offices,—especially the archons, as the primitive chief magistrates of the state,—without applying it to all, or to the most responsible and difficult. Nor would they have applied it to the archons, if it had been indispensably necessary that these magistrates should retain their original very serious duty of judging disputes and condemning offenders. [260] Aristotle puts these two together; election of magistrates by the mass of the citizens, but only out of persons possessing a high pecuniary qualification; this he ranks as the least democratical democracy, if one may use the phrase (Politic. iii, 6-11), or a mean between democracy and oligarchy,—an ἀριστοκρατία, or πολιτεῖα, in his sense of the word (iv, 7, 3). He puts the employment of the lot as a symptom of decisive and extreme democracy, such as would never tolerate a pecuniary qualification of eligibility. So again Plato (Legg. iii, p. 692), after remarking that the legislator of Sparta first provided the senate, next the ephors, as a bridle upon the kings, says of the ephors that they were “something nearly approaching to an authority emanating from the lot,”—οἷον ψάλιον ἐνέβαλεν αὐτῇ τὴν τῶν ἐφόρων δύναμιν, ἐγγὺς τῆς κληρωτῆς ἀγαγὼν δυνάμεως. Upon which passage there are some good remarks in Schömann’s edition of Plutarch’s Lives of Agis and Kleomenês (Comment. ad Ag. c. 8, p. 119). It is to be recollected that the actual mode in which the Spartan ephors were chosen, as I have already stated in my first volume, cannot be clearly made out, and has been much debated by critics:—