the practice of it into Sparta: where setting the merchants, artificers, and labourers every one a part
by themselves, he did establish a noble Commonwealth." He made an equal division of lands
among all the citizens of Sparta, in order to "banish out of the city all insolvency, envy,
covetousness, and deliciousness, and also all riches and poverty." He forbade gold and silver
money, allowing only iron coinage, of so little value that "to lay up thereof the value of ten minas,
it would have occupied a whole cellar in a house." By this means he banished "all superfluous and
unprofitable sciences," since there was not enough money to pay their practitioners; and by the
same law he made all external commerce impossible. Rhetoricians, panders, and jewellers, not
liking the iron money, avoided Sparta. He next ordained that all the citizens should eat together,
and all should have the same food.
Lycurgus, like other reformers, thought the education of children "the chiefest and greatest matter,
that a reformer of laws should establish"; and like all who aim chiefly at military power, he was
anxious to keep up the birth rate. The "plays, sports, and dances the maids did naked before young
men, were provocations to draw and allure the young men to marry: not as persuaded by
geometrical reasons, as saith Plato, but brought to it by liking, and of very love." The habit of
treating a marriage, for the first few years, as if it were a clandestine affair, "continued in both
parties a still burning love, and a new desire of the one to the other"--such, at least, is the opinion
of Plutarch. He goes on to explain that a man was not thought ill of if, being old and having a
young wife, he allowed a younger man to have children by her. "It was lawful also for an honest
man that loved another man's wife... to intreat her husband to suffer him to lie with her, and that
he might also plough in that lusty ground, and cast abroad the seed of well-favoured children."
There was to be no foolish jealousy, for "Lycurgus did not like that children should be private to
any men, but that they should be common to the common weal: by which reason he would also,
that such as should become citizens should not be begotten of every man, but of the most honest
men only." He goes on to explain that this is the principle that farmers apply to their live-stock.
When a child was born, the father brought him before the elders of his family to be examined: if
he was healthy, he was given back to the father to be reared; if not, he was thrown into a deep pit
of water.