HKB
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Often appears with: spartan constitution · lycurgus · forms of government · corruption, patronage, and bribery · constitutions and founding law · balance of powers
Usually: argument (1)
“So in each constitution there is naturally engendered a particular vice inseparable from it: in kingship it is absolutism; aristocracy it is oligarchy; in democracy lawless ferocity and violence;” Polybius, The Histories of Polybius, Vol. 1 (of 2) · insight
Polybius says Lycurgus recognized that unmixed governments naturally develop matching “vices,” so he balanced powers in Sparta so no one part dominates and the polity stays stable for a long time.
[Sidenote: Lycurgus recognized these truths, and legislated accordingly.] +10.+ For the present I will make a brief reference to the legislation of Lycurgus: for such a discussion is not at all alien to my subject. That statesman was fully aware that all those changes which I have enumerated come about by an undeviating law of nature; and reflected that every form of government that was unmixed, and rested on one sp…