Lycurgus

    Indeed, whosoever shall look at the sedition and misgovernment which befell these bordering nations to whom they were as near related in blood as in situation, will find in them the best reason to admire the wisdom of Lycurgus.  For these three states, in their first rise, were equal, or, if there were any odds, they lay on the side of the Messenians and Argives, who, in the first allotment, were thought to have been luckier than the Spartans; yet was their happiness of but small continuance, partly the tyrannical temper of their kings and partly the ungovernableness of the people quickly bringing upon them such disorders, and so complete an overthrow of all existing institutions, as clearly to show how truly divine a blessing the Spartans had had in that wise lawgiver who gave their government its happy balance and temper.  But of this I shall say more in its due place.


    After the creation of the thirty senators, his next task, and, indeed, the most hazardous he ever undertook, was the making a new division of their lands.  For there was an extreme inequality amongst them, and their state was overloaded with a multitude of indigent and necessitous persons, while its whole wealth had centred upon a very few.  To the end, therefore, that he might expel from the state arrogance and envy, luxury and crime, and those more inveterate diseases of want and superfluity, he obtained of them to renounce their properties, and to consent to a new division of the land, and that they should live all together on equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence, and the disgrace of evil, and credit worthy acts, their one difference  between man and man.

    Upon their consent to these proposals, proceeding at once to put them into execution, he divided the country of Laconia in general into thirty thousand equal shares, and the part attached to the city of Sparta into nine thousand; these he distributed among the Spartans, as he did the others to the country citizens.  Some authors say that he made but six thousand lots for the citizens of Sparta, and that King Polydorus added three thousand more.  Others say that King Polydorus doubled the number Lycurgus had made, which, according to them, was but four thousand five hundred.  A lot was so much as to yield, one year with another, about seventy bushels of grain for the master of the family, and twelve for his wife, with suitable proportions of oil and wine.  And this he thought sufficient to keep their bodies in fine health and strength; superfluities they were better without.  It is reported, that, as he returned from a journey shortly after the division of the lands, in harvest time, the ground being newly reaped, seeing all the stacks all standing equal and alike, he smiled, and said to those about him, "Methinks all Laconia looks like one family estate just divided among a number of brothers."

    Not contented with this, he resolved to make a division of their moveables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left among them; but finding that it would be very dangerous to go about it openly, he took another course, and defeated their avarice by the following stratagem:  he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money made of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was very little worth; so that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds there was required a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen.  With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were banished from Lacedaemon; for who would rob another of such a coin?  Who would unjustly detain or take by force, or accept as a bribe, a thing which it was not easy to hide, nor a credit to have, nor indeed of any use to cut in pieces?  For when it was just red hot, they quenched it in vinegar, and by that means spoilt it, and made it almost incapable of being worked.

    In the next place, he declared an outlawry of all needless and superfluous arts; but here he might have almost spared his proclamation; for they of themselves would have gone after the gold and silver, the money which remained being not so proper payment for curious work; for, being of iron, it was scarcely portable, neither, if they should take the means to export it, would pass amongst the other Greeks, who ridiculed it.  So there was now no means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares; merchants sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no rhetoric-master, no itinerant fortune-teller, no harlot-monger, or gold or silversmith, engraver, or jeweller, set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury, deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, wasted to nothing and died away of itself.  For the rich had no advantage here over the poor, as their wealth and abundance had no road to come abroad by but were shut up at home doing nothing.  And in this way they became excellent artists in common, necessary things; bedsteads, chairs, and tables, and such staple utensils in a family, were admirably made there; their cup, particularly, was very much in fashion, and eagerly bought up by soldiers, as Critias reports; for its colour was such as to prevent water, drunk upon necessity and disagreeable to look at, from being noticed; and the shape of it was such that the mud stuck to the sides, so that only a purer part came to the drinker's mouth.  For this, also, they had to thank their lawgiver, who, by relieving the artisans of the trouble of making useless things, set them to show their skill in giving beauty to those of daily and indispensable use.

From "Plutarch's Lives," -- Lycurgus, The Dryden Translation