Plutarch, who lived in Greece about the year 100 A.D., nine hundred years after the subject of his biography, relates the forming and imposing of those laws with the utmost faith, and the most implicit innocence; which goes to prove that the Grecian idea of government, with all its knowledge, had not advanced much, at least up to the time of Plutarch.

And now for the laws.

“A second and bolder political enterprise of Lycurgus was a new division of the lands.  For he found a prodigious inequality; the city overcharged with many indigent persons, who had no land; and the wealth centred in the hands of the few.  Determined, therefore, to root out the evils of insolence, envy, avarice, and luxury, and those distempers of a state still more inveterate than fatal—­I mean poverty and riches—­he persuaded them to cancel all former divisions of land and to make new ones, in such a manner as they might be perfectly equal in their possessions and way of living.

His proposal was put in practice.

“After this he attempted to divide also the movables, in order to take away all appearance of inequality; but he soon perceived that they could not bear to have their goods taken directly from them, and therefore took another method, counterworking their avarice by a stratagem.”

Now, this seems to be the only law to which they made objection; and this proves that the love of personal “icties” has very deep roots.  Perhaps the influence of the “senate” sustained them in this, for qualifications for a senator, even in those days, must have called for men of some means, and they, when the shoe began to pinch their own feet, would not care to divide up their sugar and flour with the rank and file.  It does not appear, however, that they had any say in the matter, and, beyond the statement that they were formed for a purpose, they seem to have taken no part in the affairs of state; if they had, Lycurgus and his laws would never have been made part of history.

“First he stopped the currency of the gold and silver coin”—­thus he paralyzed industry—­“and ordered that they should make use of iron money only; then to a great quantity and weight of this he assigned but a small value....  In the next place he excluded unprofitable and superfluous arts....  Their iron coin would not pass in the rest of Greece, but was ridiculed and despised, so that the Spartans had no means of purchasing any foreign or curious wares, nor did any merchant ship unlade in their harbor.”  Even Plutarch sees nothing suicidal in all this voluntary isolating of themselves from the main arteries of commerce.