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For the latter suffered the opposing party to live with them and share in all the privileges of the state, excepting the offices and the honors, whereas the intelligent class among the Spartans held that such men were foolish in thinking that they could live in the same city with those against whom they had committed the greatest wrongs and yet govern the state in security; they themselves did nothing of the sort, but instead set up amongst their own class the only kind of equality and democracyThose who enjoyed citizenship in Sparta are called by Aristotle (Aristot. Pol. 8.7) ὅμοιοι, “equals.” Cf. Isoc. 7.61. which is possible if men are to be at all times in complete accord, while reducing the mass of the people to the condition of Perioeci,In historical times the population of Laconia, the valley of the Eurotas river, was made up of the Spartans, who lived in the city of Lacedaemon (Sparta seems to have been a later name); the Helots, serfs bound to the soil, who worked the estates owned by the Spartans, paying a high rental, sometimes half the crop; and the Perioeci, free-holders of land, who were scattered in villages throughout theEurotas Valley—“the land of a hundred towns,” possessing apparently their own local governments, but under the general control and supervision of the Spartan state. These, like the Helots, were probably made up mainly of earlier inhabitants conquered by the Spartans. See Gilbert, Greek Constitutional Antiquities pp. 30 ff. Isocrates’ picture of the driving out of the Perioeci from participation in the Spartan state as the result of a bitter factional fight seems to rest on a very doubtful tradition. See Grote’s extended discussion of this passage, vol. 2, pp. 367 ff. subjecting their spirits to a bondage no less abject than that endured by slaves.
