Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/385

 TREATMENT OF THE PERIQ.Kr. 369 putes do not belong. Nor is there anything, so far as our knowl- edge of Grecian history extends, to bear out his assertion, that the Spartans took to themselves the least dangerous post in the field, and threw undue peril upon their Perioeki. Such dastardly temper was not among the sins of Sparta ; but it is undoubtedly true that, as the number of citizens continually diminished, so the Perioeki came to constitute, in the later times, a larger and larger proportion of the Spartan force. Yet the power which Isokrates represents to have been vested in the ephors, of putting to death Perioeki without preliminary trial, we may fully believe to be i eal, and to have been exercised as often as the occasion seemed to call for it. We shall notice, presently, the way in which these magistrates dealt with the Helots, and shall see ample reason from thence to draw the conclusion that, whenever the ephors believed any man to be dangerous to the public peace, whether an inferior Spartan, a Pericekus, or a Helot, the most sum- mary mode of getting rid of him would be considered as the best. Towards Spartans of rank and consideration, they were doubtless careful and measured in their application of punish- ment, but the same necessity for circumspection did not exist with regard to the inferior classes : moreover, the feeling that the exigences of justice required a fair trial before punishment was inflicted, belongs to Athenian associations much more than to Spartan. How often any such summary executions may have taken place, we have no information. We may remark that the account which Isokrates has here given of the origin of the Laconian Perioeki is not essentially irreconcilable with that of Ephorus, 1 who recounted that Eurys- thenes and Prokles, on first conquering Laconia, had granted to the preexisting population equal rights with the Dorians, but that Agis, son of Eurysthenes, had deprived them of this equal position, and degraded them into dependent subjects of the latter. At least, the two narratives both agree in presuming that the Perioeki had once enjoyed a better position, from which they had been extruded by violence. And the policy which Isokrates ascribes to the victorious Spartan oligarchs, of driving out the demus from concentrated residence in the city to disseminated 1 Ephortis, Fragm. 18. e<l. Mane ; ap. Strabo, viii. p. 365. VOL. n. 16* 24oc.