The Good Book_ A Secular Bible - A. C. Grayling [256]
2. But finding that it would be dangerous to do it openly, he defeated their avarice by the following stratagem:
3. He commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only money made of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was worth little;
4. So that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds required a large closet, and to move it nothing less than a yoke of oxen.
5. With the diffusion of this money, a number of vices were at once banished;
6. For who would steal, or accept as a bribe, a thing which it was not easy to hide, nor a credit to have?
7. In the next place, Lycurgus outlawed all superfluous arts; but here he might have spared his pains, for they would have gone of themselves after the gold and silver, the money which remained being not so proper payment for curious work;
8. For, being of iron, it was scarcely portable, neither could they use it to buy from other Greeks, who ridiculed it.
9. So there was now no way of purchasing foreign goods and small wares;
10. Merchants sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no rhetoric master, no itinerant medicine man, no harlot monger, silversmith, engraver or jeweller, set foot in a country which had no money;
11. So that luxury, deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, died away of itself.
12. For the rich had no advantage here over the poor, as their expensive possessions were shut up at home doing nothing.
13. In this way the Spartans became excellent artists in ordinary and necessary things:
14. Beds, chairs and tables, and such staple utensils in a family, were admirably well made there;
15. Their cup, particularly, was much in demand, and eagerly bought up by soldiers, as Critias reports;
16. For its colour was such as to prevent water, drunk upon necessity and disagreeable to look at, from being noticed;
17. And its shape was such that the mud stuck to the sides, so that only the cleaner part came to the drinker’s mouth.
18. For this also, they had to thank their lawgiver, who, by relieving the artisans of the trouble of making useless things,
19. Set them to show their skill in giving beauty to things of daily use.
Chapter 5
1. The third and most masterly stroke of this great lawgiver, by which he delivered a yet more effective blow against luxury and the desire of riches,
2. Was the ordinance he made that they should all eat in common, of the same bread and meat,
3. And should not spend their lives at home, lying on costly couches at splendid tables,
4. Delivering themselves into the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, to fatten like greedy brutes,
5. And to ruin not only their minds but their bodies which, enfeebled by indulgence, would stand in need of long sleep, warm bathing, freedom from work,
6. And, in a word, as much care and attendance as if they were continually sick.
7. It was certainly an extraordinary thing to have brought about such a result,
8. But a greater yet to have taken away from wealth, as Theophrastus observes, not merely the property of being coveted, but its very nature of being wealth.
9. For the rich, being obliged to go to the same table as the poor, could not make use of their abundance, nor so much as please their vanity by looking at or displaying it.
10. The common table ordinance in particular exasperated the wealthier men.
11. They collected in a body against Lycurgus, and from ill words came to throwing stones,
12. So that at length he was forced to run out of the marketplace, and seek sanctuary to save his life.
13. He managed to outrun all except one Alcander, a young man otherwise not ill accomplished, but hasty and violent, who came up so close to him,
14. That when Lycurgus turned to see who was near, Alcander struck his face with a stick, and put out one of his eyes.
15. Lycurgus, so far from being daunted by this accident, stopped short and showed his disfigured face and eye to his countrymen;
16. They, ashamed at the sight, escorted him safely home, and delivered Alcander into his hands to be punished.