Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/419

 STATEMENT OF PLU f ARCH. 40 3 gas, we step into a boundless field of possibility, in which there is nothing to determine us to one point more than to another. The surmise started by Dr. Thirlwall, of lands unjustly taken from the conquered Achaeans by wealthy Spartan proprietors, is altogether gratuitous ; and granting it to be correct, we have still to explain how it happened that this correction of a partial injustice came to be transformed into the comprehensive and systematic measure which Plutarch describes ; and to explain, farther, from whence it arose that none of the authors earlier than Plutarch take any notice of Lykurgus as an agrarian equalizer. These two difficul- ties will still remain, even if we overlook the gratuitous nature of Dr. Thirlwall's supposition, or of any other supposition which can be proposed respecting the real Lykurgean measure which Plutarch is affirmed to have misrepresented. It appears to me that these difficulties are best obviated by adopting a different canon of historical interpretation. We can- not accept as real the Lykurgean land division described in the life of the lawgiver; but treating this account as a fiction, two modes of proceeding are open to us. We may either consider the fiction, as it now stands, to be the exaggeration and distortion of some small fact, and then try to guess, without any assistance, what the small fact was. Or we may regard it as fiction from first to last, the expression of some large idea and sentiment so powerful in its action on men's minds at a given time, as to induce them to make a place for it among the realities of the past. Now the latter supposition, applied to the times of Agis the Third, best meets the case before us. The eighth chapter of the life of Lykurgus by Plutarch, in recounting the partition of land, describes the dream of king Agis, whose mind is full of two sentiments, grief and shame for the actual condition of his country, together with reverence for its past glories, as well as for the lawgiver from whose institutions those glories had eman- ated. Absorbed with this double feeling, the reveries of Agis go back to the old ante-Lykurgean Sparta, as it stood more than five centuries before. He sees, in the spirit, the same mischiefs End disorders as those which afflict his waking eye, gross in- equalities of property, with a few insolent and luxurious rich, a crowd of mutinous and suffering poor, and nothing but fierce antipathy reigning between the two. Into the midst of this fro-