Testo e Contesti. La Grande Rhetra e le procedure spartane di ammissione alla cittadinanza

According to the interpretation provided by Plutarch and based on Aristotle’s authority, the so-called Great Rhetra was a Spartan archaic document that provided for regular meetings of the popular assembly with powers to make decisions. The use of this document in the fourth-century political debate on the Spartan constitution has made scholars more and more cautious in fully accepting Plutarch’s exegesis, but none has ever gone so far as to deny that the rhetra is talking about the roles of kings, elders and people in the policy-making process within the assembly. On the contrary, what it is argued here is that a better understanding of the rhetra can be achieved only if the literary context in which it is embedded, namely Plutarch’s commentary, is put aside. In fact, although Plutarch translates the key term of the text, apel-lazein, as «to hold ekklesia», no ancient text refers to Spartan assemblies by the name of apella. Rather, the regulations of the Delphic phratry of the Labyades attest that the Apellai were the festival during which new members were admitted into the phratry. Read within this different context, the rhetra does not refer to the act of ‘introducing’ or ‘rejecting’ a proposal in the assembly, but instead to the act of examining whether new members of the community have suitable qualifications for being ‘admitted inside’ or ‘set outside’ the citizenship.