o
nine thousand; these he distributed among the Spartans, as he did the
others to the country citizens. A lot was so much as to yield, one
year with another, about seventy bushels of grain for the master of the
family, and twelve for his wife, with a suitable proportion of oil and
wine. And this he thought sufficient to keep their bodies in good health
and strength; superfluities they were better without. It is reported,
that, as he returned from a journey shortly after the division of the
lands, in harvest time, the ground being newly reaped, seeing the stacks
all standing equal and alike, he smiled, and said to those about him,
"Methinks all Laconia looks like one family estate just divided among a
number of brothers."

Not contented with this, he resolved to make a division of their
movables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality
left amongst them; but finding that it would be very dangerous to go
about it openly, he took another course, and defeated their avarice
by the following stratagem: he commanded that all gold and silver coin
should be called in, and that only a sort of money made of iron should
be current, a great weight and quantity of which was worth but very
little; so that to lay up a hundred or two dollars there was required
a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of
oxen. With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were
banished from Lacedaemon; for who would rob another of such a coin? Who
would unjustly detain or take by force, or accept as a bribe, a thing
which it was not easy to hide, nor a credit to have, nor indeed of any
use to cut in pieces? For when it was just red-hot, they quenched it in
vinegar, and by that means spoilt it, and made it almost incapable of
being worked.

In the next place, he declared an outlawry of all needless and
superfluous arts; but here he might almost have spared his proclamation;
for they of themselves would have gone with the gold and silver, the
money which remained being not so proper payment for curious work; for,
being of iron, it was scarcely portable, neither, if they should take
the pains to export it, would it pass amongst the other Greeks, who
ridiculed it so there was now no more means of purchasing foreign goods
and small wares; merchants sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no
rhetoric-master, no itinerant fortune-teller, or gold or silversmith,
engraver, or jeweler, set foot in a coun