PROBOULI
PROBOULI (
πρόβουλοι), a name
applicable to any persons who are appointed to consult or take measures for
the benefit of the people. Thus, the delegates who were sent by the twelve
Ionian cities to attend the Panionian council, and deliberate on the affairs
of the confederacy, were called
πρόβουλοι
(
Hdt. 6.7). So were the deputies sent by the
several Greek states to attend the congress at the Isthmus, on the occasion
of the second Persian invasion (
Hdt. 7.172); and
also the envoys whom the Greeks agreed to send annually to Plataea (
Plut. Arist. 21). The word is also used to
denote an oligarchical body, which in oligarchies performed the functions
discharged by the
βουλὴ in democracies,
being a sort of committee for initiating measures. Where it co-existed with
the
βουλή, it was established as a check
upon it to prevent more democratic tendencies. (Arist.
Pol. 6.15, 11 = p. 1299; 7.8, 17 = p. 1322.) Such was the
government at Corinth after the fall of the Cypselids (Müller,
Fr. Hist. Gr. 3.394). A body of men called
πρόβουλοι were appointed at Athens, after the
end of the Sicilian war, to act as a committee of public safety (
Thuc. 8.1;
Aristoph.
Lys. 467; Lys.
c. Erat. § 65). Thucydides
calls them
ἀρχήν τινα πρεσβυτέρων ἀνδρῶν,
οἵτινες περὶ τῶν παρόντων ὡς ἂν καιρὸς ᾖ
προβουλεύσουσι. They were then in number (Suidas, s. v.
Πρόβουλοι). Whether their appointment arose out
of any concerted plan for overturning the constitution, is doubtful. The
ostensible object at least was different; and the measures which they took
for defending their country and prosecuting the war appear to have been
prudent and vigorous; it is clear, however, from the words of Lysias, that
their appointment was regarded by him as tending to oligarchy. Their
authority did not last much longer than a year; for a year and a half
afterwards Pisander and his colleagues established the council of Four
Hundred, by which the democracy was overthrown. (
Thuc.
8.67; Wachsmuth, vol. i. pt. 2, p. 197.) There is no sufficient
ground for the conjecture that the
ξυγγραφῆς
αὐτοκράτορες were the same persons as the
πρόβουλοι. (See Grote,
Hist. of
Greece, 8.46; Gilbert,
Staatsalt. 2.90, 315.) [
C.R.K] [
G.E.M]
(Appendix). The statement (p.
493
b) in which we followed Grote, that there
was no sufficient ground for supposing that the
ξυγγραφῆς αὐτοκράτορες of
Thuc.
8.67 were the same persons as the
πρόβουλοι must be modified. In 100.29 we are told that on the
motion of Pythodorus twenty persons over forty years of age were elected, in
addition to the ten
προὔπάρχοντες
πρόβουλοι, to draw up the constitution under the 400. We should
infer, with Mr. Kenyon, that this “pre-existing” board of ten
commissioners was a continuation of that mentioned in
Thuc. 8.1; and that the party of Pisander having either
reappointed them, or appointed others with the same title, added twenty to
carry out the work. So far this treatise justifies Androtion and Philochorus
when Harpocration (s. v.
συγγραφεῖς) cites
as speaking of
thirty in all; and Grote is probably
wrong in supposing that they confused the oligarchy of the 400 with that of
the Thirty.
