. Luxury, thus cut off
from all encouragement, gradually became extinct; and the rich were on
the same footing with other people, as they could find no means of
display, but were forced to keep their money idle at home. For this
reason such things as are useful and necessary, like couches and tables
and chairs, were made there better than anywhere else, and the Laconian
cup, we are told by Kritias, was especially valued for its use in the
field. Its colour prevented the drinker being disgusted by the look of
the dirty water which it is sometimes necessary to drink, and it was
contrived that the dirt was deposited inside the cup and stuck to the
bottom, so as to make the drink cleaner than it would otherwise have
been. These things were due to the lawgiver; for the workmen, who were
not allowed to make useless things, devoted their best workmanship to
useful ones.

X. Wishing still further to put down luxury and take away the desire for
riches, he introduced the third and the most admirable of his reforms,
that of the common dining-table. At this the people were to meet and
dine together upon a fixed allowance of food, and not to live in their
own homes, lolling on expensive couches at rich tables, fattened like
beasts in private by the hands of servants and cooks, and undermining
their health by indulgence to excess in every bodily desire, long sleep,
warm baths, and much repose, so that they required a sort of daily
nursing like sick people. This was a great advantage, but it was a
greater to render wealth valueless, and, as Theophrastus says, to
neutralise it by their common dining-table and the simplicity of their
habits. Wealth could not be used, nor enjoyed, nor indeed displayed at
all in costly apparatus, when the poor man dined at the same table with
the rich; so that the well-known saying, that "wealth is blind and lies
like a senseless log," was seen to be true in Sparta alone of all cities
under heaven. Men were not even allowed to dine previously at home, and
then come to the public table, but the others, watching him who did not
eat or drink with them, would reproach him as a sensual person, too
effeminate to eat the rough common fare.

For these reasons it is said that the rich were bitterly opposed to
Lykurgus on this question, and that they caused a tumult and attacked
him with shouts of rage. Pelted with stones from many hands, he was
forced to run out of the market-place, and take sanctuary in a temple