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W

e can be reasonably confident that, in the middle of the fourth

century, land at Lacedaemon was held as private property, and

one was free to give or bequeath it as one wished. That is the

system described and criticized by Aristotle in The Politics (1270a15–33)—

where he speaks of these matters in the present tense and ostentatiously side-

steps referring to Lycurgus, preferring in a generic fashion to attribute the

arrangements he describes to a nameless “lawgiver.”^1 There can, moreover,

be no doubt that private property and marked differences in wealth existed in

archaic and classical Lacedaemon. Alcman, Alcaeus, and Herodotus take this

for granted, and Thucydides and Xenophon provide confirming evidence for

the late fifth century.^2

There is, however, evidence for the existence of another, much more egal-

itarian system of land tenure in early Sparta.^3 Plutarch describes this system in

various ways. In one passage in his Life of Lycurgus (16.1), he seems to say that

Lacedaemon assigned to each newborn Spartiate boy, if he was judged healthy

by the elders of his tribe, one of the nine thousand allotments of land [klēˆros]

said earlier in the biography to have been created and distributed either by

Lycurgus alone or by Lycurgus in part and in part also by the Agiad king Poly-

dorus (8.2–4).^4 In his Life of Agis (5), however, Plutarch seems to indicate that

the klēˆros ordinarily passed intact from father to son.

Plutarch’s two accounts are to some degree at odds with one another. But

this they have in common: a conviction that early on, thanks to political ar-

rangements, every full-fledged member of the citizen body was guaranteed by

way of public provision a competence in the form of an allotment of land, the

Appendix 1. Land Tenure in Archaic Sparta