IV. While the Spartans were waging their great war against the Athenians (432-404 B.C.) and afterwards when they were enjoying the advantages which their success procured for them, many alterations were gradually introduced in their customs and government. Helots were emancipated for service as soldiers: inequalities arose among the Spartiatæ, some of them acquiring great fortunes as regulators (harmosts) in foreign cities, others sinking to poverty and losing their civic rights: and the Ephors used their time of office for the getting of wealth and enjoyment of luxury.
Helots had been employed as light-armed soldiers attending on the heavy-armed Spartiatæ as early as the battle of Platæa in 479 B.C.: in the first years of the Peloponnesian war some of them had distinguished themselves in the field, and in the eighth year of the war (in the beginning of 424 B.C.) the Spartans, fearing they might be dangerous, thought of sending them on foreign service. This plan of removing them was not carried into effect: but a proclamation was put out that those Helots who were conscious of having done good service in the war might apply for their freedom: two thousand were selected and were emancipated with striking solemnities: but within a short time most of them disappeared, no one knew how, by secret assassination[109]. This first liberation of Helots ended in treachery and murder: but afterwards emancipations were frequently made in good faith. The men who were raised from serfdom did not become Periœci but were known as νεοδαμώδεις, or "men resembling new commoners."
Bodies of Neodamodês are mentioned by Thucydides as existing in the years 421, 418, 413, 412 B.C.[110]: and in one of the occasions where he speaks of Neodamodês and Helots as serving together he explains the difference between the two by remarking that "the word Neodamodês signifies that freedom has been already acquired," thus proving for certain that a Neodamodês was an emancipated Helot[111]. After the end of the war the Neodamodês became more numerous: in the year 399 B.C. the Spartans sent out a thousand under Thimbron to Asia Minor at the request of the Asiatic Greek cities[112].
In 398 or 397 B.C., before Agesilaus had reigned a whole year, a conspiracy against the Spartan government was set on foot by a man named Cinadon. Xenophon in his account of its detection says that Cinadon was a young man and vigorous in body and mind but was not one of the Equals (οὐ μέντοι τῶν ὁμοίων). When the informer was questioned by the Ephors, he said Cinadon had expressed confidence that many of the Helots, the Neodamodês, the Inferiors (οἱ ὑπομείονες), and the Periœci were in sympathy with his aims: for whenever men of these classes talked about the Spartiatæ, they could not conceal that they would like to eat them raw[113]. The story shows that the Equals were the highest of all the classes at Sparta, and that the Inferiors, being distinct from the Helots, the Neodamodês and the Periœci, were men who had been Spartiatæ but had lost their position. The difference between the Equals and the Inferiors is but imperfectly known. Aristotle tells us that any Spartan who was unable to pay his share of the cost of the public mess-table was deprived of his rights as a citizen, and many had thus been disfranchised[114]. From this we may infer that anyone who sank into the ranks of the Inferiors lost not only his vote in the assembly, which was of little value, as the assemblies were not influential, but also his right of being trained as a Spartan: hence he would have but a poor chance of rising to military distinction or of obtaining any position of importance.
When the Peloponnesian war ended in 404 B.C., the cities of Asia and the Ægean sea came under the power of Sparta. To each city a harmost or regulator was sent to establish an oligarchical government consisting usually of a decarchy or board of ten citizens distinguished for servility towards the Spartans and readiness to punish any sign of patriotic spirit with death or banishment and confiscation. Besides the harmosts, military detachments were sent to enforce the wishes of the Spartans in their new possessions: both the harmosts and the military commanders were harsh governors, and some of them amassed large fortunes by extortion[115]. They took home the wealth that they had acquired and thus introduced the inequalities among the Spartiatæ which were so conspicuous and so invidious in the time of Cinadon.
The supremacy which the Spartans acquired in 404 B.C. was lost again in 371 B.C. In that year an army with which they invaded Bœotia was severely defeated by the Thebans under Epaminondas; the victorious general marched into the Peloponnesus, deprived the Spartans of Messenia, and, summoning from all parts the descendants of Messenians who had gone into exile, established them as an independent people in the new city of Messenê on the site of the old stronghold of Ithomê. At the same time he founded the Arcadian city of Megalê Polis (in Latin Megalopolis) to bar the way between the Spartans and their old allies the Eleians: and in the year 369 B.C. he ensured the permanence of his work by winning the decisive battle of Mantineia. The Spartans were reduced lower than they had been for two centuries: but adversity did not restore them to what they had been before the days of their prosperity. The number of men possessed of wealth, small already, steadily became smaller, so that in the reign of Agis IV. (about 243 B.C.) the whole number of the Spartiatæ did not exceed seven hundred; of these only about a hundred were landowners, and the rest were reduced to poverty and distress[116].
The office of the Ephors shared in the general deterioration of the Spartan commonwealth, and Aristotle (writing about 330 B.C.) speaks of it with some severity. We can indeed see from his remarks that access to the office was not obtained by bribery, for very poor citizens were frequently chosen: the election was conducted under a system which seemed to him very puerile, but which did not close the door to poverty. On the other hand the Ephors when in office frequently accepted bribes: and he says that on one occasion they did all that in them lay towards the ruin of the state. They often spent the wealth that they got by such dishonest means in leading a life of extreme self-indulgence, in strong contrast with the hardships which the poorer citizens endured[117].
We may now sum up the results of our observations of the Spartans and their institutions. From the earliest times they devoted themselves to acquiring and cultivating those qualities which would enable them to excel as a people of conquerors and of slave-owners: but in doing this they lost most of the other virtues, and especially the qualities which make intelligent citizens. There were few political questions in which the Spartans took any interest: they did not make new laws; they had no commerce, no gold or silver except in the treasury of the state: the only subjects debated in their assemblies were questions of war, peace, alliances, disputed successions to the throne, and the like: so that the assembly did not meet save when such questions arose, or when one of the annual elections of Ephors came round. They did not even care what men were set over them as rulers: their method of electing Ephors was childish, and the elections are generally if not always passed over in silence by the historians. Nor is their indifference surprising: for their real ruler was, not the Ephors nor any living men, but their rigid system of custom and discipline: and under that system it mattered little which of them was in command and which had to obey, since nearly every Spartan was competent to issue such orders as custom and usage dictated, and every other Spartan was prepared to obey them.
If this estimate is a just one, it follows that the really important part of the Spartan institutions was not the political part but the disciplinary: that their discipline destroyed their capacity for political activity: that the Spartans from the age of Theopompus till the Peloponnesian war were rather a military order than a political body: and that they and their institutions cannot be very interesting or instructive to students of Politics, except as showing how a community, which was originally political, may lose the characteristics by which political communities are distinguished.
After the Peloponnesian war the Spartans got access to rich spoil at a distance from their own country and began to think less of their common interests as slave-owners at home, than of their individual hopes of plundering the inhabitants of the cities of Asia Minor. In consequence many of the Helots were emancipated to serve as soldiers in foreign war, and the intensity of the oppression of the rest was probably diminished: while on the other hand each individual Spartan acted no longer for the common good of the Spartiatæ but for the sole good of himself, and the government was conducted in the interest not of the whole ruling caste but of that smaller number among them who had been successful in enriching themselves.