Land Tenure in Archaic Sparta 127
be able to take vengeance on the young man, secured the passage of a law
allowing each Spartan to give or bequeath his klēˆros to anyone he chose.^10 If
this actually happened, it would explain why the description of land tenure at
Sparta in Aristotle’s Politics differs so markedly from that provided by Plutarch
in his Lycurgus, and it might also explain the silence of the Athenian Stranger.
If the institution he took as his model was one abandoned by Sparta some
decades before and if that decision was then and remained thereafter contro-
versial (as would surely have been the case), proposing its adoption might, in
the circumstances, be somewhat socially awkward. Expressly indicating that
he was embracing a set of practices recently jettisoned by Lacedaemon might
be regarded as a frontal assault on the fatherland of one of his companions.
As any careful reader of the dialogue will notice, in his criticism of Sparta, the
Athenian Stranger walks a fine line, and Megillus, his Spartan companion, oc-
casionally displays irritation.
One might, of course, object that the depiction of Lacedaemon as an eco-
nomically egalitarian polity in Isocrates, Polybius, and Plutarch is at odds with
the reality depicted in Alcman, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. There
can be no doubt that Polybius’ brief account is one-sided and incomplete, and
the story told by Plutarch in the Lycurgus is, at least with regard to the legend-
ary Lycurgus, overly schematic and in this particular misleading. But I also
think that the two visions of Lacedaemon conveyed in these two sets of sources
can be reconciled.
Aristotle is known to have composed a work on Lacedaemon along the
lines of his Polıteía of the Athenians. As I have suggested in the prologue to this
volume, he displays in his Politics a keen interest in the political, social, and
economic dimensions of the Spartan regime and way of life, and it stands to
reason that in his monograph on Lacedaemon he would have addressed the
political, social, and economic development of early Lacedaemon in the man-
ner in which he addressed Athens’ evolution in these regards in his Polıteía of
the Athenians. Moreover, as I also pointed out, the excerpts that survive con-
firm this presumption. If the land tenure system at Sparta had a history, as it
undoubtedly did, we can be confident that Aristotle described it in detail.
This matters a great deal, for, thanks to his epitomator Heracleides Lem-
bos (373.12 [Dilts]), we know two things—that, in this lost work, Aristotle
observed that at Lacedaemon it was considered shameful to sell one’s land
[gēˆ], and that he also reported that it was forbidden to sell one’s archaîa moîra
(F611.12 [Rose]=Tits. 143.1.2.12 [Gigon]). There are those who argue that the