Polıteía 45
port foodstuffs and to patrol and efficiently police their vast domain. With
military necessity in mind, the dyarchs may also have superintended the ex-
tensive network of cart roads constructed within the Peloponnesus by their
allies. For these were designed on the same model as the roads in Laconia and
Messenia and for a similar purpose; and on all of these roads, both those
within the territory controlled by Lacedaemon and those laid out in other
parts by their allies, where the ground was rough, there were deep grooves
carved in the stone to accommodate wheeled vehicles, all of them built on
precisely the same gauge.^27
Lacedaemon’s kings were also responsible for legalizing the adoption of
children and for securing husbands for heiresses left unbetrothed by their fa-
thers.^28 The last two functions were of untold importance: because the Sparti-
ates were barred from commerce and the possession of coinage, the only legal
way open to them for the amassing of a fortune was to inherit privately owned
land or to marry its owner. The rights of the kings in matters of adoption and
with regard to heiresses provided them with substantial patronage. To grasp
fully the political leverage which this gave the two basıleîs, one need only re-
flect once again on the contradictory nature of the man produced by the Ly-
curgan regime.
On one occasion, the historian Macaulay paused to consider the licen-
tiousness that prevailed in the arts in England in the wake of the restoration
of Charles II. “In justice to the writers of whom we have spoken thus severely,”
he remarked, it must be acknowledged
that they were, to a great extent, the creatures of their age. And if it be
asked why that age encouraged immorality which no other age would have
tolerated, we have no hesitation in answering that this great depravation
of the national taste was the effect of the prevalence of Puritanism under
the Commonwealth. To punish public outrages on morals and religion is
unquestionably within the competence of rulers. But when a government,
not content with requiring decency, requires sanctity, it oversteps the
bounds which mark its proper functions. And it may be laid down as a
universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will
perform less.... And so a government which, not content with repressing
scandalous excesses, demands from its subjects fervent and austere piety,
will soon discover that, while attempting to render an impossible service
to the cause of virtue, it has in truth only promoted vice.^29Something of the sort could be said of ancient Sparta. But there the dividing
line between excessive discipline and reactive license was marked out in space