126 Appendix 1
helots to work it, and a guaranteed income.^5 With this general claim, Isocra-
tes (11.18) appears to be in agreement, and the same can be said for Polybius
(6.45, 48.3)—who, in passages in which he is clearly drawing on the diligent
and well-informed fourth-century historian Ephorus, asserts that no Spartan
was allowed to own more in the way of landed property than any other and
that every Spartan was guaranteed a share in what he calls the polıtıkē` chō ́ra.
It does not make sense to suppose that Plutarch blindly copied one ac-
count of the land-tenure system from one source and another from another
source. He was not a mere copyist slavishly following one earlier writer, then
another. When he wrote on a subject, he ordinarily read a great variety of
sources; he compared them with a critical eye, considering their relative plau-
sibility; and he either chose among them on grounds he specified or left it to
the reader to do the choosing.^6 In this case, it seems likely that his selection of
language in the first of these passages was misleading—that, in this passage,
what Plutarch meant to convey was that the elders of the tribe authorized the
assignment of an allotment to the boy and that in the other passages he de-
scribed the manner in which this system ordinarily operated: the transfer of
the klēˆros from the father to his son. When the citizen in possession of a klēˆros
had no son, possession could presumably be reassigned to the second or third
son of a citizen who was blessed with an abundance of male offspring. Accord-
ing to Plutarch (Mor. 238e), only those who completed the agōgē ́ could make
good on this claim, and anyone of citizen birth who successfully did so had
the right to an allotment.^7
Such an arrangement was proposed by the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s
Laws (5.745b–e, 11.923c–924a); and, like other institutions suggested by Pla-
to’s chief interlocutor, it may well be a variation on a Spartan original. One
might, of course, argue that the Stranger’s failure to make explicit reference to
Lacedaemon in the pertinent passages proves that no such arrangement ever
existed at Sparta,^8 and it is true that the Athenian Stranger sometimes ac-
knowledges to his Spartan and Cretan companions the source of his inspira-
tion. But he does not always do so, especially when his debt would have been
obvious to well-informed contemporaries;^9 and we must remember that The
Laws is a dialogue, not a treatise, and that its author was not a pedant eager to
establish his bona fides by footnoting his sources, but a great artist intent on
achieving in his description of the conversation a measure of dramatic verisi-
militude. Plutarch (Agis 5) tells us that, in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian
War, a Spartan ephor named Epitadeus quarreled with his son and, in order to