Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/470

 464 THE REV'OLUTIOXS. BOOK IV. this oligarcliic government. A certain Cinadon, wlio did not belong to the class of Equals, was the chief of the conspirators. He would bring one whom he "wished to join in this plot to the public square, and make him count the citizens; by including the ephors and the senators, they would reach the number of about seventy. Cinadon would then say to him, "Those men are our enemies; all the others, on the contrary, who fill the square to the number of more than four thousand, aie our allies." He would add, "When you meet a Spartan in the country, see in him an enemy and a master; all other men are friends." Helots, La- conians, Neodamodes, ino/itelovEg, all were united this time, and were the accomplices of Cinadon. "For ail," says the historian, "had such a hatred for their masters that there was not a single one among them who did not declare that it would be agreeable to him to eat them raw." But the government of Sparta was ad- mirably served ; no secret could be kept from it. The ephors pretended that the entrails of the victims had revealed the plot to them. No time was left for the conspirators to act; they ■were seized and secretly put to death. The oligarchy was once more saved.' Favored by this government, the inequality contin- ued to increase. The Pcloponnesian war and the ex- pedition into Asia had caused money to flow to Sparta; but it had been distributed in a very unequal manner, and had enriched those only who were already rich. At the same time small properties disappeared. The number of proprietors, who in Aristotle's time amount- ed to a thousand, was reduced to a hundred a century after him.* The entire soil was in a few hands at a ' Xenophon, Uellenica, III. 3. * Plutarch, Agis, 5.