For this custom of allowing the labourers to share in the harvest-feast is traced to Numa.  Some say that this is in remembrance of the equality which existed in the time of Saturn, when there was neither master nor slave, but all were kinsmen and had equal rights.

II.  Both evidently encouraged the spirit of independence and self-control among their people, while of other virtues, Lykurgus loved bravery, and Numa loved justice best; unless indeed we should say that, from the very different temper and habits of the two states, they required to be treated in a different manner.  It was not from cowardice, but because he scorned to do an injustice, that Numa did not make war; while Lykurgus made his countrymen warlike, not in order that they might do wrong, but that they might not be wronged.  Each found that the existing system required very important alterations to check its excesses and supply its defects.  Numa’s reforms were all in favour of the people, whom he classified into a mixed and motley multitude of goldsmiths and musicians and cobblers; while the constitution introduced by Lykurgus was severely aristocratic, driving all handicrafts into the hands of slaves and foreigners, and confining the citizens to the use of the spear and shield, as men whose trade was war alone, and who knew nothing but how to obey their leaders and to conquer their enemies.  In Sparta a free man was not permitted to make money in business, in order that he might be truly free.

Each thing connected with the business of making money, like that of preparing food for dinner, was left in the hands of slaves and helots.  Numa made no regulations of this kind, but, while he put an end to military plundering, raised no objection to other methods of making money, nor did he try to reduce inequalities of fortune, but allowed wealth to increase unchecked, and disregarded the influx of poor men into the city and the increase of poverty there, whereas he ought at the very outset, like Lykurgus, while men’s fortunes were still tolerably equal, to have raised some barrier against the encroachments of wealth, and to have restrained the terrible evils which take their rise and origin in it.  As for the division of the land among the citizens, in my opinion, Lykurgus cannot be blamed for doing it, nor yet can Numa for not doing it.  The equality thus produced was the very foundation and corner-stone of the Lacedaemonian constitution, while Numa had no motive for disturbing the Roman lands, which had only been recently distributed among the citizens, or to alter the arrangements made by Romulus, which we may suppose were still in force throughout the country.