128 Appendix 1
latter phrase refers not to an “ancestral allotment” of land as such but to the
rent, if that is the proper word, paid to each Spartan citizen time out of mind
by the helots who worked land communally owned.^11 For our purposes here,
however, it matters not one whit whether the phrase refers to a klēˆros as such
or to the share of its product paid the citizen to whom it had been assigned.
What matters is that Aristotle appears to have described an arrangement for
provision, likely to have been egalitarian in character, existing alongside a sys-
tem of private property in land—an arrangement designed to provide those
without an inherited estate with a competence sufficient to allow them to per-
form their duties as full-fledged citizens.^12
We know that Plutarch read and, in his Life of Lycurgus, drew quite heavily
Aristotle’s Polıteía of the Lacedaemonians. We have excellent reason to sup-
pose that he regarded its testimony on any number of matters as dispositive,
and in his Moralia (238e–f ) there is a passage that echoes Aristotle’s discus-
sion of the archaîa moîra. Moreover, there is another passage, this one in his
Life of Agis (5.6), in which he mentions a citizen’s land [gēˆ] and his klēˆros
in such a manner as to suggest he is speaking of two different things. I find it
hard to believe that, in his Life of Lycurgus and in his Lives of Agis and
Cleomenes, he would have attributed to early Sparta a system of communal
or quasi-communal property if Aristotle in his treatise on Sparta gave such a
presumption no sanction. Moreover, as we have seen, Plutarch with the story
that he tells concerning the legislation sponsored by the ephor Epitadeus pro-
vides an explanation for the disappearance of this system of communal or
quasi-communal property.^13 This story is also apt to be derivative from Aris-
totle’s account of political development at Sparta, and it may have been told as
well in Ephorus’ discussion of the decay of the Spartan regime after the Pelo-
ponnesian War.^14
On the face of it, then, the following conclusions, advanced in this vol-
ume, would appear to be reasonable: that there was always private property at
Lacedaemon and that there was never a general redistribution of land, but that
at some point early in the archaic period—perhaps when they conquered the
Helos plain, perhaps only at the time of their reconquest of Messenia—the
Spartans began setting aside conquered land and helots sufficient to work it as
a guarantee that Lacedaemonian warriors with little or no inherited property
would in the future possess the resources requisite for serving the city.^15 There
is nothing strange in their having made such an arrangement, and it fits rather
well what we can surmise regarding practices elsewhere in Hellas in the ar-