number of twenty-eight, that, the two kings
being reckoned amongst them, they might be thirty in all. So eagerly set
was he upon this establishment, that he took the trouble to obtain an
oracle about it from Delphi; and the Rhetra (or sacred ordinance) runs
thus: "After that you have built a temple to Jupiter Hellanius, and
to Minerva Hellania, and after that you have phyle'd the people into
phyles, and obe'd them into obes, you shall establish a council of
thirty elders, the leaders included, and shall, from time to time,
assemble the people betwixt Babyca and Cnacion, there propound and put
to the vote. The commons have the final voice and decision." By phyles
and obes are meant the divisions of the people; by the leaders, the two
kings; Aristotle says Cnacion is a river, and Babyca a bridge. Betwixt
this Babyca and Cnacion, their assemblies were held, for they had no
council-house or building to meet in. Lycurgus was of opinion that
ornaments were so far from advantaging them in their councils, that they
were rather an hindrance, by diverting their attention from the business
before them to statues and pictures, and roofs curiously fretted, the
usual embellishments of such places amongst the other Greeks. The people
then being thus assembled in the open air, it was not allowed to any one
of their order to give his advice, but only either to ratify or reject
what should be propounded to them by the king or senate.

After the creation of the thirty senators, his next task, and, indeed,
the most hazardous he ever undertook, was the making of a new division
of their lands. For there was an extreme inequality amongst them, and
their state was overloaded with a multitude of indigent and necessitous
persons, while its whole wealth had centred upon a very few. To the end,
therefore, that he might expel from the state arrogance and envy,
luxury and crime, and those yet more inveterate diseases of want and
superfluity, he obtained of them to renounce their properties, and to
consent to a new division of the land, and that they should live all
together on an equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence,
and the disgrace of evil, and credit of worthy acts, their one measure
of difference between man and man.

Upon their consent to these proposals, proceeding at once to put them
into execution, he divided the country of Laconia in general into thirty
thousand equal shares, and the part attached to the city of Sparta int