usiness, in order
that he might be truly free.

Each thing connected with the business of making money, like that of
preparing food for dinner, was left in the hands of slaves and helots.
Numa made no regulations of this kind, but, while he put an end to
military plundering, raised no objection to other methods of making
money, nor did he try to reduce inequalities of fortune, but allowed
wealth to increase unchecked, and disregarded the influx of poor men
into the city and the increase of poverty there, whereas he ought at the
very outset, like Lykurgus, while men's fortunes were still tolerably
equal, to have raised some barrier against the encroachments of wealth,
and to have restrained the terrible evils which take their rise and
origin in it. As for the division of the land among the citizens, in my
opinion, Lykurgus cannot be blamed for doing it, nor yet can Numa for
not doing it. The equality thus produced was the very foundation and
corner-stone of the Lacedaemonian constitution, while Numa had no motive
for disturbing the Roman lands, which had only been recently distributed
among the citizens, or to alter the arrangements made by Romulus, which
we may suppose were still in force throughout the country.

III. With regard to a community of wives and children, each took a wise
and statesman-like course to prevent jealousy, although the means
employed by each were different. A Roman who possessed a sufficient
family of his own might be prevailed upon by a friend who had no
children to transfer his wife to him, being fully empowered to give her
away, by divorce, for this purpose; but a Lacedaemonian was accustomed
to lend his wife for intercourse with a friend, while she remained
living in his house, and without the marriage being thereby dissolved.
Many, we are told, even invited those who, they thought, would beget
fine and noble children, to converse with their wives. The distinction
between the two customs seems to be this: the Spartans affected an
unconcern and insensibility about a matter which excites most men to
violent rage and jealousy; the Romans modestly veiled it by a legal
contract which seems to admit how hard it is for a man to give up his
wife to another. Moreover Numa's regulations about young girls were of a
much more feminine and orderly nature, while those of Lykurgus were so
highflown and unbecoming to women, as to have been the subject of notice
by the poets, who call them _Phainomerides_, t