The Historians' History of the World 04

After the Peloponnesian War, the ephor Epitadeus had passed a law authorising citizens to dispose of their property and land. The effects of this rhetra were so prompt to appear that Aristotle was given cause to write: “The land has passed into the hands of a few.” In the time of Agis IV the entire territory was owned by a hundred Spartans. Thus the government had become more and more oligarchical. All the national affairs were carried on by the ephors and the senate, even the general assembly was rarely consulted, and in consequence the rulers, being few in number, were all the more jealous of the privileges of their station and less disposed to suffer them to be curtailed. To open their ranks, moreover, for the readmission of families that poverty had driven forth would have been to expose themselves, by relinquishing the majority, to some territorial reform tending toward a fresh division of the immense domains now concentrated in the possession of a few. Public interest might point this way but private interest decidedly opposed it, and private interest won.

There resulted from this a violent hatred between the privileged and the lower classes; the latter being formed of Spartans degraded from their ranks, enfranchised helots, Laconians to whom had been accorded certain rights, and the children of Spartan fathers of the higher order and alien mothers. These classes were given denominations that kept them separate and distinct; there was doubtless also a wide difference in conditions. Below the Equals, who formed a restricted oligarchy, were the Inferiors, or Spartans, who were excluded from the public tables, and the neodamodes or helots enfranchised for services rendered the state, and lastly the periœci. Though they had no share in the actual government of their country these men estimated highly the value of their services to the state; and at different times many prominent figures, sons of Spartan fathers and helot mothers, such as Lysander, Gylippus, and Callicratidas had issued from this class. In a vindictive address against Lacedæmon the Thebans at Athens declared that the Spartans recruited their military governors from among men who had helot blood in their veins; and indeed many of these people had amassed competencies that gave them the ambition to leave the inferior station in which custom held them. When Cleomenes III promised liberty to those among the helots who could pay into the public treasury the sum of five minæ [£21 or $108], six thousand presented themselves.

Lacedæmon’s two royal houses, however, had been retained, and it should have been the function of these to maintain discipline in the state. But the newly-acquired wealth of Sparta, coupled with the growing authority of the ephors, appreciably diminished the power of the kings. Reduced to the rôle of hereditary generals these monarchs could never depart on an expedition without being accompanied by ten supervisors, who, under the name of councillors, in reality directed all the military operations. During the last years of the Peloponnesian War the decisive battles had been fought on sea, and the fleets were commanded, captives sold, cities ransomed and subsidies received from the Great King by men who were not of pure Spartan blood. Aristotle in his Politics calls the office of admiral among them “a second royalty.”

Lysander was not obeying the dictates of ambition when, as Sparta’s leading citizen, he undertook to reform for his own advantage the political system of the city. “He could not,” says Plutarch, “see without regret a city whose glory he had done so much to increase governed by kings who had no more ability to rule than he, so he formed the plan of depriving the reigning houses of their dignity to make it the common appanage of all the Heraclids.” The discovery of the plot of Cinadon [described later] revealed an abyss of hatred yawning beneath the social system of Sparta, and at the same time an alarming unanimity of feeling between the inferior classes, both free and slaves. A civil war could easily have resulted from the situation; but Sparta, with that vigilance which continued distrust arouses in all oligarchies, discovered and baffled all the plots that were formed against her.