Land Tenure in Archaic Sparta 129
chaic period.^16 Moreover, a strikingly similar system of land tenure was later
instituted in comparable circumstances in Egypt by Ptolemy I after the death
of Alexander, and over time the system of fiefs he established in the Fayum with
an eye to providing himself and his heirs with a reliable army gave way, and a
system of private ownership corresponding to the aspirations of the landhold-
ers gradually replaced it, just as appears to have happened in Lacedaemon at
the end of the Peloponnesian War.^17
Against the supposition that prior to the mid-fifth century much of the
land at Sparta was communally owned but assigned to individual warriors ex-
pected to defend the political community, we must weigh the silence of Hero-
dotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon—which would have considerable weight
if they elsewhere showed the keen interest in systems of land tenure that is
so visible in Plato, Ephorus, and Aristotle. But such an interest they do not
evidence—which means that their silence on this matter tells us a great deal
about their predilections and next to nothing about arrangements at Sparta.^18
There is, however, one other objection to the hypothesis presented here;
and, to the unsuspecting glance, it would appear to have considerable force.
The population of Spartiates at the time of the Persian Wars was eight thou-
sand or more (Hdt. 7.234). That in Aristotle’s day was under one thousand
(Pol. 1270a29–31). Aristotle explains the dearth of Spartan manpower [olıgan
thrōpía] in his own time with an eye to the system of private land tenure in
existence in his own day, and his argument is cogent (1270a11–18). As he
suggests, in an agrarian setting in which partitive inheritance is the norm,
family ambition really is apt to induce those with property to marry their
offspring to others similarly situated; and, where servile labor is plentiful,
partitive inheritance creates an incentive for married couples to limit child-
bearing. In consequence, property is likely to gradually become concentrated—
which, at Sparta, would result in a steady decline in the number of those eli-
gible to be citizens who possess a competence sufficient to support them in
their status as full-time warriors and to enable them to make the requisite
contribution to the sussıtía (1271a26–36). Were this demographic trend evi-
dent only after the Peloponnesian War, it would be explicable as a product of
the law of Epitadeus, and it would not be necessary to discuss the matter here.
But, in fact, the decline in the Spartan population may have been more dra-
matic in the fifth century than it was in the fourth.
In 480, there were, as we have just seen, roughly eight thousand Spartans;
and a year later, after losing two hundred ninety-eight men at Thermopylae