760 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



the first contained more than a score of different orders ; the second 

 some half-dozen beyond those constituted by military grades ; the 

 third nearly a dozen ; and the fourth a still greater number. Though 

 within the ruling classes the castes were not so rigorously defined as to 

 prevent change of function in successive generations, yet Herodotus 

 and Diodorus state that industrial occupations descended from father 

 to son ; " every particular trade, and manufacture was carried on by its 

 own craftsmen, and none changed from one trade to another." How 

 elaborate was the regimentation may be judged from the detailed ac- 

 count of the staff of officers and workers engaged in one of their vast 

 quarries : the numbers and kinds of functionaries paralleling those of 

 an army. To support this highly-developed regulative organization, 

 civil, military, and sacerdotal an organization which held exclusive 

 possession of the land the lower classes labored. " Overseers were 

 set over the wretched people, who were urged to hard work more by 

 the punishment of the stick than words of warning." And whether 

 or not official oversight included domiciliary visits, it at any rate went 

 to the extent of taking note of each family. *' Every man was re- 

 quired under pain of death to give an account to the magistrate of 

 how he earned his livelihood." 



Take now another ancient society, Avhich, contrasted in sundry 

 respects, shows us, along with habitual militancy, the assumption of 

 structural traits allied in their fundamental characters to those thus 

 far observed. I refer to Sjoarta. That warfare did not among the 

 Spartans evolve a simple despotic head, while in part due to causes 

 which, as before shown, favor the development of comj^ound political 

 heads, was largely due to the accident of their double kingship : the 

 presence of two divinely-descended chiefs prevented the concentration 

 of power. But though from this cause there continued an imperfectly 

 centralized government, the relation of this government to members 

 of the community was substantially like that of militant governments 

 in general. Notwithstanding the serfdom, and in towns the slavery 

 of the Helots, and notwithstanding the political subordination of the 

 Perioiki, they all, in common with the Spartans proper, were under 

 obligation to military service : the working function of the first, and 

 the trading function, so far as it existed, which was carried on by the 

 second, were subordinate to the militant function with which the third 

 was exclusively occupied. And the civil divisions thus marked reap- 

 peared in the military divisions : " At the battle of Plataea every S2:)ar- 

 tan hoplite had seven Helots, and every Perioeki hoplite one Helot to 

 attend him." The extent to which, by the daily military discipline, 

 prescribed military mess, and fixed contributions of food, the individual 

 life of the Spartan was subordinated to the public demands from seven 

 years upward, needs mention only to show the rigidity of the restraints 

 which here, as elsewhere, the militant type imposes restraints which 

 were further shown in the prescribed age for marriage, the prevention 



