Paıdeía 31
will pay honor to silver and gold.” The consequence was a clandestine Spartan
disobedience of the law against the possession of gold and silver so wide-
spread and pervasive that there was “not in all of Hellas as much gold and
silver as is held privately in Lacedaemon; through many generations, it has
been entering that place from every part of Greece and often from the barbar-
ians as well, but to no other place does it ever depart. As in the fable of Aesop,
what the fox said to the lion is true: the tracks left by the money going into
Lacedaemon are clear, but nowhere can anyone see traces of it going back
out.” To this result, the custom of treating a man’s home as a realm truly pri-
vate made a profound contribution. The Athenian philosopher speaks of the
“magazines for storage and domestic treasuries” of the Spartiates, and he men-
tions the “walls surrounding their houses” which are “exactly like private nests
where they can make great expenditures on women and on whomever else
they might wish”—and the evidence bears out his claim that these houses were
stocked with valuables.^79
Aristotle shared Plato’s judgment of what the latter, with an eye to its ob-
session with glory and honor, termed the timocratic regime. He took note of
the sumptuary laws limiting the expense and specifying the character of fu-
nerals, and he was aware of the regulations governing the comportment of the
women and denying them the right to let their hair grow long, to wear jewelry
in public, and to otherwise adorn themselves. But he thought these and the
other similar nómoı grossly inadequate, and he contended that the Spartan
legislator had, in fact, mixed “the love of honor” with “the love of money” and
had thereby formed “private individuals covetous of wealth.” Like the Halicar-
nassian Dionysius, the peripatetic philosopher attributed this, in part, to the
absence of laws regulating the household. In particular, like Plato, he faulted
Spartan institutions for their failure to bring under control “the women, who
live intemperately in every kind of licence and luxury,” observing that “the
necessary consequence is that riches are held in honor, especially when the
citizens fall under the rule of their women, as tends to happen among peoples
devoted to soldiering and war.... The arrangements regarding the women not
only introduce an air of unseemliness into the regime; they tend to foster av-
arice as well.”^80
The Spartans may have been grudging when it came to making conces-
sions to the private needs of mankind, but the concessions which they were
forced to make nonetheless had an extraordinarily important effect. In fos-
tering public-spiritedness, the Lacedaemonians went further than any other