46 Polıteía
and not in time. One Athenian wag summed up the situation nicely: in public,
he observed, the Lacedaemonians were clearly the better men; in private, how-
ever, the Athenians surpassed them.^30
The Spartiates resembled their houses.^31 They were austere without, but
not so within. These were men torn between their public responsibilities and
their private inclinations. They openly pursued honor and fame. But in secret,
as we have seen, they coveted wealth. Plato’s description merits repetition:
under the cover of darkness, like savages, the Spartans paid honor to silver and
gold. It should not be surprising that these men were susceptible to bribes, and
bribes were precisely what the two kings were in a position to bestow. Through
their exercise of oversight with regard to adoptions and through their tutelage
over unbetrothed heiresses, Sparta’s dyarchs were able in the most important
of ways to help their friends and deny their enemies aid.
The royal power to shower with property those who were cooperative and
to punish those who were not was undoubtedly of great import in the archaic
period and in the fifth century. Thereafter, it may even have increased—at
least for a time. By the mid-fourth century, however, when Aristotle penned
The Politics, the two kings had apparently been deprived of the right to dispose
of unbetrothed heiresses.^32 Precisely when the girl’s father was given the right
to appoint a tutor to handle this task remains unclear. But it is reasonable to
suspect that this reform followed in the wake of the general liberalization of
property law at Sparta that took place shortly after the Peloponnesian War. It
was at this time, we are told, that Epitadeus—who was apparently unfriendly
to his own son—managed to secure the passage of legislation granting the
holder of a klēˆros the right to leave that piece of property to whomever he
pleased or even give it away. The consequences were startling. The law at Lace-
daemon specified that no Spartiate who failed to make the required contribu-
tion to his sussıtíon could retain his rights as a citizen; and as time passed,
property came to be concentrated in the hands of the few—many of them
women. To explain this development, Aristotle alluded to the greed of the
Spartan notables, to the size of the dowries that came to be given under the
new dispensation, and to the great “multitude of heiresses,” observing that, in
his own time, in and after the middle of the fourth century, “nearly two-fifths
of the entire country” was “owned by women.”
Corruption evidently contributed much to the concentration of property,
but the wars of the fourth century were presumably important as well. The