Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/420

 404 HISTORY OF GREECE. ward, lawless, and distempered community, steps the venerable missionary from Delphi, breathes into men's minds new im- pulses, and an impatience to shake off the. old social and political Adam, and persuades the rich, voluntarily abnegating their temporal advantages, to welcome with satisfaction a new system, wherein no distinction shall be recognized, except that of good or evil desert. 1 Having thus regeneratei the national mind, he parcels out the territory of Laconia into equal lots, leaving no superiority to any one. Fraternal harmony becomes the reign- ing sentiment, while the coming harvests present the gratifying spectacle of a paternal inheritance recently distributed, with the brotherhood contented, modest, and docile. Such is the picture with which " mischievous Oneirus " cheats the fancy of the pa- triotic Agis, whispering the treacherous message that the gods have promised him success in a similar attempt, and thus seduc- ing him into that fatal revolutionary course, which is destined to bring himself, his wife, and his aged mother, to the dungeon and the hangman's rope. 2 That the golden dream just described was dreamed by some Spartan patriots is certain, because it stands recorded in Plu- tarch; that it was not dreamed by the authors of centuries preceding Agis, I have already endeavored to show ; that the earnest feelings, of sickness of the present and yearning for a better future under the colors of a restored past, which filled the soul of this king and his brother-reformers, combined with the levelling tendency between rich and poor which really was inhe- rent in the Lykurgean discipline, were amply sufficient to beget such a dream, and to procure for it a place among the great deeds of the old lawgiver, so much venerated and so little known, this too I hold to be unquestionable. Had there been any evi- dence that Lykurgus had interfered with private property, to the limited extent which Dr. Thirlwall and other able critics imag- ine, that he had resumed certain lands unjustly taken by the