who were made hard and common by excessive practice of gymnastic and the want of all other education,—­nor yet like that of Athenian women, who, at least among the upper classes, retired into a sort of oriental seclusion,—­but something better than either.  They were to be the perfect mothers of perfect children, yet not wholly taken up with the duties of motherhood, which were to be made easy to them as far as possible (compare Republic), but able to share in the perils of war and to be the companions of their husbands.  Here, more than anywhere else, the spirit of the Laws reverts to the Republic.  In speaking of them as the companions of their husbands we must remember that it is an Athenian and not a Spartan way of life which they are invited to share, a life of gaiety and brightness, not of austerity and abstinence, which often by a reaction degenerated into licence and grossness.

In Plato’s age the subject of slavery greatly interested the minds of thoughtful men; and how best to manage this ‘troublesome piece of goods’ exercised his own mind a good deal.  He admits that they have often been found better than brethren or sons in the hour of danger, and are capable of rendering important public services by informing against offenders—­for this they are to be rewarded; and the master who puts a slave to death for the sake of concealing some crime which he has committed, is held guilty of murder.  But they are not always treated with equal consideration.  The punishments inflicted on them bear no proportion to their crimes.  They are to be addressed only in the language of command.  Their masters are not to jest with them, lest they should increase the hardship of their lot.  Some privileges were granted to them by Athenian law of which there is no mention in Plato; they were allowed to purchase their freedom from their master, and if they despaired of being liberated by him they could demand to be sold, on the chance of falling into better hands.  But there is no suggestion in the Laws that a slave who tried to escape should be branded with the words—­kateche me, pheugo, or that evidence should be extracted from him by torture, that the whole household was to be executed if the master was murdered and the perpetrator remained undetected:  all these were provisions of Athenian law.  Plato is more consistent than either the Athenians or the Spartans; for at Sparta too the Helots were treated in a manner almost unintelligible to us.  On the one hand, they had arms put into their hands, and served in the army, not only, as at Plataea, in attendance on their masters, but, after they had been manumitted, as a separate body of troops called Neodamodes:  on the other hand, they were the victims of one of the greatest crimes recorded in Greek history (Thucyd.).  The two great philosophers of Hellas sought to extricate themselves from this cruel condition of human life, but acquiesced in the necessity of it.  A noble and pathetic sentiment of Plato, suggested by the