Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/434

 418 HISTORY OF GREECE. land. But successful war, to use an expression substantially borrowed from the same philosopher, was necessary to their salvation : the establishment of their ascendency, and of their maximum of territory, was followed, after no very long interval, by symptoms of decline. 1 It will hereafter be seen that, at the period of the conspiracy of Kinadon (395 B. c.), the full citizens (called Homoioi, or Peers) were considerably inferior in number to the Hypomeidnes, or Spartans, who could no longer furnish their qualification, and had become disfranchised. And the loss thus sustained was very imperfectly repaired by the ad- mitted practice, sometimes resorted to by rich men, of asso- ciating with their own children the children of poorer citizens, and paying the contribution for these latter to the public tables, so as to enable them to go through the prescribed course of education and discipline, whereby they became (under the title or sobriquet of MothSkes 9 ) citizens, with a certain taint of inferiority, yet were sometimes appointed to honorable commands. Laconia, the state and territory of the Lacedaemonians, was affirmed, at the time of its greatest extension, to have compre- hended a hundred cities, 3 this after the conquest of Messenia; 1 Aristot. 'Polit. ii. 6, 22. Totyapow iau&vro no^efiovvTer, UTT^.OVTO 6t ApgavTEf, etc. Compare also vii. 13, 15. 2 Plutarch, Kleomen. c. 8; Phylarch. ap. Athense. vi. p. 271. The strangers called Tpotyiftoi, and the illegitimate sons of Spartans, whom Xenophon mentions with eulogy, as " having partaken in the honorable training of the city," must probably have been introduced in this same way, by private support from the rich (Xenoph. Hellen. v. 3, 9). The xenelasy must have then become practically much relaxed, it' not extinct. 3 Strabo, viii. p. 362 ; Steph. Byz. Altisia. Construing the word TroAetf extensively, so as to include townships small as well as considerable, this estimate is probably inferior to the truth ; since, even during the depressed times of modern Greece, a fraction of the ancient Laconia (including in that term Messenia) exhibited much more than one hundred bourgs. In reference merely to the territory called La Magne, between Calamat* in the Messenian gulf and Capo di Magna, the lower part of the peninsula of Tanarus, see a curious letter, addressed to the Due de Nevers, in 1618, (on occasion of a projected movement to liberate the Morea from the Turks, and to insure to him the sovereignty of it, as descertjant of the Palseologi,) by a confidential agent whom he despatched thither. M.Chateaurenaud,