Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/379

 POPULATION OF LACOXIA. 363 public offices. These men had neither time, nor taste even, for cultivation of the land, still less for trade or handicraft : such occupations were inconsistent with the prescribed training, even if they had not been positively interdicted. They were maintained from the lands round the city, and from the large proportion of Laconia which belonged to them ; the land being tilled for them by Helots, who seem to have paid over to them a fixed propor- tion of the produce ; in some cases, at least, as much as one- half. 1 Each Spartan retained his qualification, and transmit- ted it to his children, on two conditions, first, that of sub- mitting to the prescribed discipline ; next, that of paying, each, his stipulated quota to the public mess, which was only maintained by these individual contributions. The multiplication of children in the poorer families, after acquisitions of new terri- tory ceased, continually augmented both the number and the proportion of citizens who were unable to fulfil the second of these conditions, and who therefore lost their franchise : so that there arose towards the close of the Peloponnesian war, a dis- tinction, among the Spartans themselves, unknown to the earlier times, the reduced number of fully qualified citizens being called The Equals, or Peers, the disfranchised poor, The Infe- riors. The latter, disfranchised as they were, nevertheless, did not become Perioeki : it was probably still competent to them to resume their qualification, should any favorable accident enable them to make their contributions to the public mess. The Perioekus was also a freeman and a citizen, not of Sparta, but of some one of the hundred townships of Laconia. 2 Both he end of the Pefoponnesian war (Thucyd. viii. 6, 22), but these seem rare exceptions, even as to foreign service by sea or land, while a Pcricekus, as magistrate at Sparta, was unheard of. 1 One half was paid by the enslaved Messenians (Tyrtaeus, Frag. 4, Bergk): ijfiiav nuv, oaaov tapirov upovpa ijtepei. 2 Strabo, viii. p. 362. Stephanas Byz. alludes to this total of one hundred townships in his notice of several different items among them, 'Avduva irofaf AaKuviKTj pia TUV KO.TOV ; also. v. 'A0po<5t<rtaf, 'Bolai, Avppaxtov, etc: bat he probably copied Strabo, and, therefore, cannot pass for a distinct authority. The total of one hundred townships belongs to the maximum of Spartan power, after the conquest and before the severance of MessC' nia; for Aulon, Boise, and Methone (the extreme places) are included among them.