Now we shall find on consideration that this new and equal partition of lands by Lykurgus is still more at variance with fact and probability than the two former alleged proceedings. All the historical evidences exhibit decided inequalities of property among the Spartans,—inequalities which tended constantly to increase; moreover, the earlier authors do not conceive this evil as having grown up by way of abuse out of a primeval system of perfect equality, nor do they know anything of the original equal redivision by Lykurgus. Even as early as the poet Alkæus (B. C. 600-580) we find bitter complaints of the oppressive ascendency of wealth, and the degradation of the poor man, cited as having been pronounced by Aristodêmus at Sparta: “Wealth (said he) makes the man,—no poor person is either accounted good or honored.”[687] Next, the historian Hellanikus certainly knew nothing of the Lykurgean redivision,—for he ascribed the whole Spartan polity to Eurysthenês and Proklês, the original founders, and hardly noticed Lykurgus at all. Again, in the brief, but impressive description of the Spartan lawgiver by Herodotus, several other institutions are alluded to, but nothing is said about a redivision of the lands; and this latter point is in itself of such transcendent moment, and was so recognized among all Grecian thinkers, that the omission is almost a demonstration of ignorance. Thucydidês certainly could not have believed that equality of property was an original feature in the Lykurgean system; for he says that, at Lacedæmon, “the rich men assimilated themselves greatly in respect of clothing and general habits of life to the simplicity of the poor, and thus set an example which was partially followed in the rest of Greece:” a remark which both implies the existence of unequal property, and gives a just appreciation of the real working of Lykurgic institutions.[688] The like is the sentiment of Xenophon:[689] he observes that the rich at Sparta gained little by their wealth in point of superior comfort; but he never glances at any original measure carried into effect by Lykurgus for equalizing possessions. Plato too,[690] while he touches upon the great advantage possessed by the Dorians, immediately after their conquest of Peloponnesus, in being able to apportion land suitably to all,—never hints that this original distribution had degenerated into an abuse, and that an entire subsequent redivision had been resorted to by Lykurgus: moreover, he is himself deeply sensible of the hazards of that formidable proceeding. Lastly, Aristotle clearly did not believe that Lykurgus had redivided the soil. For he informs us first, that, “both in Lacedæmon and in Krete,[691] the legislator had rendered the enjoyment of property common through the establishment of the Syssitia, or public mess.” Now this remark (if read in the chapter of which it forms a part, a refutation of the scheme of Communism for the select guardians in the Platonic Republic) will be seen to tell little for its point, if we assume that Lykurgus at the same time equalized all individual possessions. Had Aristotle known that fact, he could not have failed to notice it: nor could he have assimilated the legislators in Lacedæmon and Krete, seeing that in the latter no one pretends that any such equalization was ever brought about. Next, not only does Aristotle dwell upon the actual inequality of property at Sparta as a serious public evil, but he nowhere treats this as having grown out of a system of absolute equality once enacted by the lawgiver as a part of the primitive constitution: he expressly notices inequality of property so far back as the second Messenian war. Moreover, in that valuable chapter of his Politics, where the scheme of equality of possessions is discussed, Phaleas of Chalkedôn is expressly mentioned as the first author of it, thus indirectly excluding Lykurgus.[692] The mere silence of Aristotle is in this discussion a negative argument of the greatest weight. Isokratês,[693] too, speaks much about Sparta for good and for evil,—mentions Lykurgus as having established a political constitution much like that of the earliest days of Athens,—praises the gymnasia and the discipline, and compliments the Spartans upon the many centuries which they have gone through without violent sedition, extinction of debts, and redivision of the land,—those “monstrous evils,” as he terms them. Had he conceived Lykurgus as being himself the author of a complete redivision of land, he could hardly have avoided some allusion to it.
It appears, then, that none of the authors down to Aristotle ascribe to Lykurgus a redivision of the lands, either of Sparta or of Laconia. The statement to this effect in Plutarch, given in great detail and with precise specification of number and produce, must have been borrowed from some author later than Aristotle; and I think we may trace the source of it, when we study Plutarch’s biography of Lykurgus in conjunction with that of Agis and Kleomenês. The statement is taken from authors of the century after Aristotle, either in, or shortly before, the age when both those kings tried extreme measures to renovate the sinking state: the former by a thorough change of system and property, yet proposed and accepted according to constitutional forms; the latter by projects substantially similar, with violence to enforce them. The accumulation of landed property in few hands, the multiplication of poor, and the decline in the number of citizens, which are depicted as grave mischiefs by Aristotle, had become greatly aggravated during the century between him and Agis. The number of citizens, reckoned by Herodotus in the time of the Persian invasion at eight thousand, had dwindled down in the time of Aristotle to one thousand, and in that of Agis to seven hundred, out of which latter number one hundred alone possessed most of the landed property of the state.[694] Now, by the ancient rule of Lykurgus, the qualification for citizenship was the ability to furnish the prescribed quota, incumbent on each individual, at the public mess: so soon as a citizen became too poor to answer to this requisition, he lost his franchise and his eligibility to offices.[695] The smaller lots of land, though it was held discreditable either to buy or sell them,[696] and though some have asserted (without ground, I think) that it was forbidden to divide them,—became insufficient for numerous families, and seem to have been alienated in some indirect manner to the rich; while every industrious occupation being both interdicted to a Spartan citizen and really inconsistent with his rigorous personal discipline, no other means of furnishing his quota, except the lot of land, was open to him. The difficulty felt with regard to these smaller lots of land may be judged of from the fact stated by Polybius,[697] that three or four Spartan brothers had often one and the same wife, the paternal land being just sufficient to furnish contributions for all to the public mess, and thus to keep alive the citizen-rights of all the sons. The tendency to diminution in the number of Spartan citizens seems to have gone on uninterruptedly from the time of the Persian war, and must have been aggravated by the foundation of Messênê, with its independent territory around, after the battle of Leuktra, an event which robbed the Spartans of a large portion of their property. Apart from these special causes, moreover, it has been observed often as a statistical fact, that a close corporation of citizens, or any small number of families, intermarrying habitually among one another, and not reinforced from without, have usually a tendency to diminish.
The present is not the occasion to enter at length into that combination of causes which partly sapped, partly overthrew, both the institutions of Lykurgus and the power of Sparta. But taking the condition of that city as it stood in the time of Agis the Third (say about 250 B. C.), we know that its citizens had become few in number, the bulk of them miserably poor, and all the land in a small number of hands. The old discipline and the public mess (as far as the rich were concerned) had degenerated into mere forms,—a numerous body of strangers or non-citizens (the old xenêlasy, or prohibition of resident strangers, being long discontinued) were domiciled in the town, forming a powerful moneyed interest; and lastly, the dignity and ascendency of the state amongst its neighbors were altogether ruined. It was insupportable to a young enthusiast like king Agis, as well as to many ardent spirits among his contemporaries, to contrast this degradation with the previous glories of their country: nor did they see any other way of reconstructing the old Sparta except by again admitting the disfranchised poor citizens, redividing the lands, cancelling all debts, and restoring the public mess and military training in all their strictness. Agis endeavored to carry through these subversive measures, (such as no demagogue in the extreme democracy of Athens would ever have ventured to glance at,) with the consent of the senate and public assembly, and the acquiescence of the rich. His sincerity is attested by the fact, that his own property, and that of his female relatives, among the largest in the state, was cast as the first sacrifice into the common stock. But he became the dupe of unprincipled coadjutors, and perished in the unavailing attempt to realize his scheme by persuasion. His successor, Kleomenês, afterwards accomplished by violence a change substantially similar, though the intervention of foreign arms speedily overthrew both himself and his institutions.
Now it was under the state of public feeling which gave birth to these projects of Agis and Kleomenês at Sparta, that the historic fancy, unknown to Aristotle and his predecessors, first gained ground, of the absolute equality of property as a primitive institution of Lykurgus. How much such a belief would favor the schemes of innovation is too obvious to require notice; and without supposing any deliberate imposture, we cannot be astonished that the predispositions of enthusiastic patriots interpreted, according to their own partialities, an old unrecorded legislation from which they were separated by more than five centuries. The Lykurgean discipline tended forcibly to suggest to men’s minds the idea of equality among the citizens,—that is, the negation of all inequality not founded on some personal attribute,—inasmuch as it assimilated the habits, enjoyments, and capacities of the rich to those of the poor; and the equality thus existing in idea and tendency, which seemed to proclaim the wish of the founder, was strained by the later reformers into a positive institution which he had at first realized, but from which his degenerate followers had receded. It was thus that the fancies, longings, and indirect suggestions of the present assumed the character of recollections out of the early, obscure, and extinct historical past. Perhaps the philosopher Sphærus of Borysthenês (friend and companion of Kleomenês,[698] disciple of Zeno the Stoic, and author of works now lost, both on Lykurgus and Socrates, and on the constitution of Sparta) may have been one of those who gave currency to such an hypothesis. And we shall readily believe that, if advanced, it would find easy and sincere credence, when we recollect how many similar delusions have obtained vogue in modern times, far more favorable to historical accuracy,—how much false coloring has been attached by the political feeling of recent days to matters of ancient history, such as the Saxon Witenagemote, the Great Charter, the rise and growth of the English House of Commons, or even the Poor Law of Elizabeth.
When we read the division of lands really proposed by king Agis, it is found to be a very close copy of the original division ascribed to Lykurgus. He parcels the lands bounded by the four limits of Pellênê, Sellasia, Malea, and Taygetus, into four thousand five hundred lots, one to every Spartan; and the lands beyond these limits into fifteen thousand lots, one to each Periœkus; and he proposes to constitute in Sparta fifteen pheiditia, or public mess-tables, some including four hundred individuals, others two hundred,—thus providing a place for each of his four thousand five hundred Spartans. With respect to the division originally ascribed to Lykurgus, different accounts were given. Some considered it to have set out nine thousand lots for the district of Sparta, and thirty thousand for the rest of Laconia;[699] others affirmed that six thousand lots had been given by Lykurgus, and three thousand added afterwards by king Polydorus; a third tale was, that Lykurgus had assigned four thousand five hundred lots, and king Polydorus as many more. This last scheme is much the same as what was really proposed by Agis.
In the preceding argument respecting the redivision of land ascribed to Lykurgus, I have taken that measure as it is described by Plutarch. But there has been a tendency, in some able modern writers, while admitting the general fact of such redivision, to reject the account given by Plutarch in some of its main circumstances. That, for instance, which is the capital feature in Plutarch’s narrative, and which gives soul and meaning to his picture of the lawgiver—the equality of partition—is now rejected by many as incorrect, and it is supposed that Lykurgus made some new agrarian regulations tending towards a general equality of landed property, but not an entirely new partition; that he may have resumed from the wealthy men lands which they had unjustly taken from the conquered Achæans, and thus provided allotments both for the poorer citizens and for the subject Laconians. Such is the opinion of Dr. Thirlwall, who at the same time admits that the exact proportion of the Lykurgean distribution can hardly be ascertained.[700]
I cannot but take a different view of the statement made by Plutarch. The moment that we depart from that rule of equality, which stands so prominently marked in his biography of Lykurgus, we step into a boundless field of possibility, in which there is nothing to determine us to one point more than to another. The surmise started by Dr. Thirlwall, of lands unjustly taken from the conquered Achæans by wealthy Spartan proprietors, is altogether gratuitous; and granting it to be correct, we have still to explain how it happened that this correction of a partial injustice came to be transformed into the comprehensive and systematic measure which Plutarch describes; and to explain, farther, from whence it arose that none of the authors earlier than Plutarch take any notice of Lykurgus as an agrarian equalizer. These two difficulties will still remain, even if we overlook the gratuitous nature of Dr. Thirlwall’s supposition, or of any other supposition which can be proposed respecting the real Lykurgean measure which Plutarch is affirmed to have misrepresented.
It appears to me that these difficulties are best obviated by adopting a different canon of historical interpretation. We cannot accept as real the Lykurgean land division described in the life of the lawgiver; but treating this account as a fiction, two modes of proceeding are open to us. We may either consider the fiction, as it now stands, to be the exaggeration and distortion of some small fact, and then try to guess, without any assistance, what the small fact was. Or we may regard it as fiction from first to last, the expression of some large idea and sentiment so powerful in its action on men’s minds at a given time, as to induce them to make a place for it among the realities of the past. Now the latter supposition, applied to the times of Agis the Third, best meets the case before us. The eighth chapter of the life of Lykurgus by Plutarch, in recounting the partition of land, describes the dream of king Agis, whose mind is full of two sentiments,—grief and shame for the actual condition of his country,—together with reverence for its past glories, as well as for the lawgiver from whose institutions those glories had emanated. Absorbed with this double feeling, the reveries of Agis go back to the old ante-Lykurgean Sparta, as it stood more than five centuries before. He sees, in the spirit, the same mischiefs and disorders as those which afflict his waking eye,—gross inequalities of property, with a few insolent and luxurious rich, a crowd of mutinous and suffering poor, and nothing but fierce antipathy reigning between the two. Into the midst of this froward, lawless, and distempered community, steps the venerable missionary from Delphi,—breathes into men’s minds new impulses, and an impatience to shake off the old social and political Adam,—and persuades the rich, voluntarily abnegating their temporal advantages, to welcome with satisfaction a new system, wherein no distinction shall be recognized, except that of good or evil desert.[701] Having thus regenerated the national mind, he parcels out the territory of Laconia into equal lots, leaving no superiority to any one. Fraternal harmony becomes the reigning sentiment, while the coming harvests present the gratifying spectacle of a paternal inheritance recently distributed, with the brotherhood contented, modest, and docile. Such is the picture with which “mischievous Oneirus” cheats the fancy of the patriotic Agis, whispering the treacherous message that the gods have promised him success in a similar attempt, and thus seducing him into that fatal revolutionary course, which is destined to bring himself, his wife, and his aged mother, to the dungeon and the hangman’s rope.[702]
That the golden dream just described was dreamed by some Spartan patriots is certain, because it stands recorded in Plutarch; that it was not dreamed by the authors of centuries preceding Agis, I have already endeavored to show; that the earnest feelings, of sickness of the present and yearning for a better future under the colors of a restored past, which filled the soul of this king and his brother-reformers,—combined with the levelling tendency between rich and poor which really was inherent in the Lykurgean discipline,—were amply sufficient to beget such a dream, and to procure for it a place among the great deeds of the old lawgiver, so much venerated and so little known,—this too I hold to be unquestionable. Had there been any evidence that Lykurgus had interfered with private property, to the limited extent which Dr. Thirlwall and other able critics imagine,—that he had resumed certain lands unjustly taken by the rich from the Achæans,—I should have been glad to record it; but, finding no such evidence, I cannot think it necessary to presume the fact, simply in order to account for the story in Plutarch.[703]
The various items in that story all hang together, and must be understood as forming parts of the same comprehensive fact, or comprehensive fancy. The fixed total of nine thousand Spartan, and thirty thousand Laconian lots,[704] the equality between them, and the rent accruing from each, represented by a given quantity of moist and dry produce,—all these particulars are alike true or alike uncertified. Upon the various numbers here given, many authors have raised calculations as to the population and produce of Laconia, which appear to me destitute of any trustworthy foundation. Those who accept the history, that Lykurgus constituted the above-mentioned numbers both of citizens and of lots of land, and that he contemplated the maintenance of both numbers in unchangeable proportion,—are perplexed to assign the means whereby this adjustment was kept undisturbed. Nor are they much assisted in the solution of this embarrassing problem by the statement of Plutarch, who tells us that the number remained fixed of itself, and that the succession ran on from father to son, without either consolidation or multiplication of parcels, down to the period when foreign wealth flowed into Sparta, as a consequence of the successful conclusion of the Peloponnesian war. Shortly after that period (he tells us) a citizen named Epitadeus became ephor,—a vindictive and malignant man, who, having had a quarrel with his son, and wishing to oust him from the succession, introduced and obtained sanction to a new Rhetra, whereby power was granted to every father of a family either to make over during life, or to bequeathe after death, his house and his estate to any one whom he chose.[705] But it is plain that this story (whatever be the truth about the family quarrel of Epitadeus) does not help us out of the difficulty. From the time of Lykurgus to that of this disinheriting ephor, more than four centuries must be reckoned: now, had there been real causes at work sufficient to maintain inviolate the identical number of lots and families during this long period, we see no reason why his new law, simply permissive and nothing more, should have overthrown it. We are not told by Plutarch what was the law of succession prior to Epitadeus. If the whole estate went by law to one son in the family, what became of the other sons, to whom industrious acquisition in any shape was repulsive as well as interdicted? If, on the other hand, the estate was divided between the sons equally (as it was by the law of succession at Athens), how can we defend the maintenance of an unchanged aggregate number of parcels?