Gerousia

The council of elders. Twenty-eight men over sixty, holding office for life, sitting with the two kings to make thirty. Plutarch says Lycurgus set it between kings and people as ballast, checking whichever side was pulling hardest, and that this was the innovation that made the Spartan constitution stable where others were not.

Election was by acclamation. Candidates passed in silence before the assembly while judges sat shut in a nearby building, unable to see who was passing, and recorded which shout was loudest. Aristotle called the method childish. Plutarch reports it without embarrassment.

The council prepared business for the assembly and tried capital cases, which meant that the body deciding whether a Spartan lived was composed entirely of men who had survived the system for six decades.