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68 68 Dr Arnold on the revolt, the Athenians should assist the Lacedaemonians against them with all their forces : but this condition was not mutual (Thuc. V. 23). Similar revolts, and similar apprehensions of danger often occur in later times. After the battle of Leuctra, many of the Perioeci, and all the Helots revolted to the Thebans. They kept up this character to the very last, when they joined the Romans in the war which extin- guished the independence of Sparta^^. Living therefore in the midst of a united, a warlike, a tributary, and a hostile population, the Spartans were com- pelled (as Dr Arnold has remarked) to be constantly on the watch, and to maintain such an attitude as would awe their subject enemies into submission, and afford them no op- portunity for a successful attack. The rents and tributes of the inferior classes afforded them at once an immunity from taxation, and the means of devoting their whole time and attention to the maintenance of their dominion : " Exempt! (as Tacitus says of the ancient Batavians) oneribus et col- lationibus, et tantum in usum praeliorum sepositi, velut tela atque arma, bellis reservantur.*'^ In this principle we may find a solution of the difficulty stated above with respect to the double character of the Spartan constitution. In order to maintain the power of the Spartans over the subject classes, it was necessary that their government should be military; and in order that their government should be military it was necessary that it should be oligarchical. The unity and promptness of command, the regular and austere discipline, the watch and ward, the subordination and implicit obe- dience to authorities, the silence, the restraint, the monotony, the hard fare and gymnastic exercises of a camp, could not exist under the changeable and many-headed dominion, the 40 See Xen. HeH. i. 2. 18. vi. 5. 29. vii. 1. 29. vii. 2. 2. Plutarch Agesil. 32. Strabo VIII. p. 366. Compare Thuc. IV. 80. del n-d TroWd AaKe^ai^ovioL^ nrpo? T0U9 e'lXcoTa's ttJ^ (pvXaKrj'S irepi fJidXLcrTa Kadecrn-7]K€L. Plato Leg. VI. p. 777» iroWd- /ct9 eTTL^eceiKTai 'irepl Td's Mecrori^viodv arvx^ds elcodvta^ dTrocrn-dcreL^ ytyveo-daL ocra KaKd (TVji^alveL, Aristot. Pol. ii. 10. ol eiXwi-e^ dcpla-Tavn-aL iroWdKLs. The Spar- tans had power of life and death over the Helots (Aristot. ap. Plutarch. Lye. 28.), which they doubtless had not over the Perioeci : the Thessalians had not this power over their Penestge, above p. 55. n. 19. Miiller, Vol. ii. p. 48, says that Plato calls the Laconian bondage the hardest in Greece : but I cannot find anything to this effect in the passage which he refers to. Leg. vi. p. 776.