Reforms in Place before Leon and Agasicles

We have a terminus ante quem. Herodotus notes that Lycurgan reforms stood before the reigns of Leon and Agasicles—kings whose accessions he places around 590 BCE [2]. By that date, the Eurotas valley had already learned to vote between Babyca and Cnacion and to drill in enomotiai under scarlet banners. This anchor matters for chronology. It places the Great Rhetra’s core—temples, phylai and obai, a gerousia of 30, assemblies by acclamation—in the early to mid‑7th century [5]. It seats the rider of Polydorus and Theopompus around 650 BCE, when Tyrtaeus sang Eunomia and Messenian pressure was intense [5][8][18]. The picture is coherent. Citizens ate in syssitia, clattered bowls in the Agora’s shadow, then moved as triakades on training fields near the Eurotas. A herald’s cry cracked the open air; the people’s roar answered; silence fell at adjournment. Pausanias’ later Skias was not yet the stage [2][5][7]. Aristotle’s critiques, written two centuries on, land on a mature system. He laments gerontes’ life tenure and the ephors’ bribability—complaints that only make sense if the institutions have hardened across generations [6]. So by Leon and Agasicles’ time, Spartans already remembered Lycurgus with a hero’s aura and lived inside a constitution that felt like custom. Between the river and Taygetus, novelty had become norm. The date does not solve authorship. But it does fix a window in which sacred charter became daily practice: c. 700–650 BCE for the main elements, before 590 for their consolidation [2][5].