About that time and soon afterwards we meet with several reigns that might account for a diminution of the kingly power. In one of the regal houses there were Cleomenes I. (519-491 B.C.) and Pleistarchus (480-458 B.C.): in the other Leotychidas (491-461 B.C.). Cleomenes contrived the unfair deposition of Demaratus, was half insane for some time before his death, and slew himself in a fit of madness. Pleistarchus was a little child at the death of his father Leonidas the hero of Thermopylæ: his guardian was Pausanias, who tried to betray Sparta into the power of the Persian king. Leotychidas was brought into royal power, without any sound title, by the intrigues of Cleomenes. Whatever may have been the causes of the decline of the kingly prerogative, it is certain that between 500 B.C. and 467 B.C. the Ephors rose to supreme power at Sparta: they sat in judgement on king Cleomenes I. on an accusation of bribery, they imprisoned the regent Pausanias (about 467 B.C.) on suspicion of treason, and above all, in the year 479 B.C., it was on their own sole responsibility that they despatched the great armament to resist Mardonius in Bœotia[100]. The power which they then possessed they never lost till the decline of Sparta in the third century B.C., except perhaps during the reign of an unusually able king such as Agesilaus (398-361 B.C.). [100] For Cleomenes, see Herodotus VI. 73-82: for Pausanias, Thucydides I. 131. 3: for the sending of the great armament, Herodotus IX. chapters 10, 11, 28: and above, page 38. It has already been remarked that in the period from Theopompus to about 500 B.C. we do not know how the Ephors were appointed or elected: in the time of Aristotle (about 330 B.C.) they were elected from the whole body of Spartan citizens, and no doubt by the whole body of Spartan citizens[101]. They must have been thus elected as early as the time of Cleomenes I.: for if they had been appointed by the kings or the council of elders they could not have gained that independence which they then displayed. [101] Aristotle, _Politics_ II. 9. 19 γίγνονται ἐκ τοῦ δήμου πάντες (they are all created from the people). _Ibid._ II. 9. 23 (αἱρετὴν τὴν ἀρχὴν ἐξ ἁπάντων), (the office is filled by election from the whole body). During the period of their greatness (beginning about 480 B.C.) the Ephors were a board of five[102] magistrates elected annually. One of them gave his name to the year[103]: they received ambassadors and sometimes at least gave them an answer[104]: they could, as we have seen, send out an armament to a foreign war and fix what troops should go, and whenever it chanced that the assembly of the Spartiatæ was called together an Ephor presided over it and took the votes[105]. [102] Aristotle, _Politics_ II. 10. 6. [103] Xenophon, _Hellenica_ II. 3. §§ 9 and 10.